Phase 1 (October 2005) - Cumbria; Glasgow; Lanarkshire
West; Tees Valley.
Phase 2 (April 2006) - Barnsley, Rotherham and
Doncaster; Sunderland; County Durham; Lanarkshire and East Dumbarton;
Liverpool and the Wirral; Manchester and Salford; Swansea and West
Wales.
Phase 3 (October 2006) - Eastern Valleys; Greater
Mersey; Staffordshire.
What it means is that many people with mental health
problems claiming for the first time will face a whole series of ‘work
focused’ interviews conducted by the DWP in the early stages of their claim
for sickness-route benefits. The government particularly focuses on those
with diagnoses of ‘depression, anxiety and other neuroses’. If people do
not attend the interviews, then their benefit may be reduced.
And it’s not ONLY new claimants who will be affected. In
the ‘old’ Pathways areas listed above, the pilots are being expanded to also
include people who first claimed during the last three years.
Surviving as a Sickness Route Claimant in Pathways Pilot
Areas:
So, what are you likely to face and when, if you’re aged
between 18 and 59 and you claim a sickness route benefit in a Pathways pilot
area?
Well, at some point after you have been claiming for eight
weeks, you will be called in for a ‘work-focused’ interview.
If you do not feel able to attend, you (or someone else
acting on your behalf) can ask for the interview to be ‘deferred’ (i.e.
postponed to a later date) or ‘waived’ (i.e. abandoned), but there will be
no automatic exemption at this stage.
Claimants are also expected to attend a further 5 work
focused interviews at monthly intervals during the early part of their
claim. The ‘reasoning’ behind this is that statistically, people who have
been on the sick for a certain length of time are more likely to stay on the
sick indefinitely, so emphasis is being put on trying to get people back
into the workplace early on.
People who are exempted from the Personal Capability
Assessment within the ‘sickness’ route to benefits won’t have to attend
these additional
interviews, but everyone else will be expected to. (See section on Sickness
Route to Benefits – exemptions’ to see if this might apply.
Even if you are exempted from these additional
interviews, you will still be expected to come in for the occasional
follow-up interview at certain ‘trigger points’ - for example just after you
have ‘passed’ the Personal Capability Assessment, starting or stopping part
time work, or when you stop claiming as a ‘carer’ but still have entitlement
to Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance or Income Support
through the sickness route.
If none of these applies, you will still be expected to
come in for interview at least once every three years. Again, if for some
reason you feel you could not attend, you, or someone acting on your behalf,
can ask for a ‘deferral’ or a ‘waiver’, as above.
Because these schemes are only being piloted at the
moment, it is difficult to gauge the effect this is going to have, or know
how much understanding and awareness will be evident when requests for
deferral or waiver on mental health grounds are made.
Again, as under Jobcentre Plus, you will be expected to
‘participate’ in discussions—i.e. show willing to respond to questions about
past employment, education/ training/ skills etc—but you will also be asked
to help draw up an individual ‘action plan’, identifying steps which you can
take to improve your chances of getting back to work. This action plan will
then be looked at again during future interviews.
If you don’t turn up, or if you turn up but they decide
you didn’t ‘participate’ in the interview process then they can
reduce your benefit through sanctions. They define the figure as 20% of the
adult personal allowance within Income Support—but if you get Income
Support, they must not leave you with less than 10p of it a week!
If you get Income Support on top of Incapacity Benefit, or
Income Support on top of Severe Disablement Allowance, then they will take
any deduction from the Income Support first and then the other benefit.
Again as the system is so new, it’s difficult to know how
quickly or often these sanctions will be used, but in theory they can
start cutting your money from the very first time you fail to turn up or
fail to ‘participate’. If this happens to you at any stage during the claim
you can appeal against the decision—get advice!
Additional ‘help’
It’s not all stick—there are some carrots attached to
being covered by a Pathways pilot, including routes to training and support
not available to others and an ‘Advisor Discretionary Fund’ which can be
used for one-off payments to help people return to work. Feedback suggests
that different Personal Advisers use this fund to a much greater or lesser
extent… e.g. some have used it to pay for new clothes or even to pay for
driving lessons, whereas others are reported to hardly use it at all… If you
think you might benefit, ask!!!
The most measurable carrot though is the ‘Return to Work
Credit’ which is a payment of £40 a week for up to a year for those who
start work and earn less than £15000 p.a.
Condition Management Programmes
Another option open to claimants in Pathways pilots is
voluntary participation in ‘Condition Management Programmes’ (although you
could be forgiven for asking ‘how voluntary is voluntary?’ when at the end
of the day the system has the ultimate power to sanction )…
These programmes—run in partnership with the NHS— will not
aim to ‘treat’ your medical condition but to help you learn to live (and
presumably work) with it. We’d be very interested to learn more about the
content of the mental health programme, given that in an evaluation study
published in December 2004, one Personal Adviser was recorded as having been
put off using the CMPs… She had thought that they were there to help people
learn to manage their health problems as a step along the road to
re-entering work, but records her concerns that ‘the first sessions were
based around job goals which she felt would frighten her customers off,
particularly those who lacked confidence’.
Your Feedback Please…
To date, the number of claimants affected by Pathways to
Work has been relatively small, but with the expansion of the pilots, more
and more people will now find themselves coming into contact with this new
system. We are particularly interested to hear how people with mental health
problems and advisers/ support workers working with people with mental
health problems find the process. Our thanks, as always, in advance...
