Taxpayers Shelling Out £800 a Minute in Disability Benefits to People Claiming to Suffer From ‘Anxiety’
Taxpayers are shelling out £800 a minute in disability benefits to people claiming anxiety-related conditions. The Mail on Sunday has the story.
The cost of Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for the disorder has rocketed from under £100 million in 2019 to nearly £427 million last year – under rules that allow anyone, regardless of their income, to collect the payments without ever seeing a doctor.
Instead, the benefit – worth up to £194 a week – can be awarded on nothing more than a personal diary or a letter from a friend describing how anxiety affects daily life.
The payments are not means-tested and there is no requirement to stop working to receive them. A full-time company director on a six-figure salary qualifies on exactly the same basis as anyone else.
Critics say the figures are the latest proof that Britain’s benefits bill is out of control, with total PIP spending projected to rise from £26 billion a year to £38 billion within five years. …
PIP is assessed on points across 12 daily living and mobility activities …
Under current rules, a person who needs occasional prompting to socialise, takes a little longer to cook, needs reminding to wash and finds travelling stressful accumulates enough points to qualify for a payout – without a diagnosis or a doctor’s note.
Since the Covid pandemic there has been a boom in payments for psychiatric disorders, which now account for more than 40% of PIP claims.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said mental health conditions accounted for 55% of the rise in disability benefits. A thriving cottage industry of unregulated no-win, no-fee firms has grown up to coach applicants through the process, taking up to 60% of any backdated payment secured.
Unlike PPI firms – limited by law to 20% of any payout – benefit claims companies face no fee limit and answer to no regulator.
On TikTok, accounts boasting hundreds of thousands of followers coach people on exactly which words to use and how to describe symptoms for maximum effect. …
In the year to this January, 66,818 people in England and Wales listed anxiety as their primary disability condition and collected an average of £122.77 a week – running up a taxpayer bill of £426.5 million, or £811 every minute.
The total claiming PIP for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has surged from 24,697 to 91,181 in six years, while those receiving it for autism has risen from 61,641 to 210,605, at a combined £2.4 billion annual cost.
Worth reading in full.
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I assume anxiety about being relentlessly looted by the state doesn’t qualify you for anything.
Depends on the effects it has on your daily life.
That’s easy. Were skint.
🙂
I was just thinking it was worth a try…..
Under current rules, a person who needs occasional prompting to socialise, takes a little longer to cook, needs reminding to wash and finds travelling stressful accumulates enough points to qualify for a payout – without a diagnosis or a doctor’s note.
This is an extremely unfair interpretation of the actual rules. Trying to render this back to where it came from to would yield:
A person who cannot engage with other people face-to-face without support, who needs more than twice as long as one normally would to cook a simple meal, is regularly too stressed out to remember to wash and cannot travel anywhere without help would qualify.
sounds like most teenagers to me
😂
Sounds like a lot of unfocused adults to me. Possibly most of the tax payer funded sector.
I appreciate the joke. But teenagers are forced into a pretty structured life without them being responsible for anything because they’re not yet supposed to be able to handle this stuff.
The conditions the authors of the original text thought of are also rather more severe than you can probably imagine, especially physically. If you have to deal with anxiety, your body becomes an enemy which will fight you tooth and nail whenever you need to do something some subconcsious powers-who-are have classified as “really to dangrous to undertake” and this includes inflicting quite considerable pain as every muscle in the body can be made to cramp up by sending suitable ‘wrong’ motion commands to it.
For instance, I cannot use my bathtub or rather stopped trying to use it when every attempt to get in or out of it would end with a panic attack which caused my legs to tremble uncontrollably because this makes it physically impossible to get in or out of it. No idea why that occurred, it just did.
NB: I don’t get any benefits from the state and I’m not planning to ever claim any.
I presume that all of the claimants benefitting from this largesse are living in this country? How many claimed while here but now live full or part time in countries of origin? Finally, forty or fifty years ago, someone with an autism diagnosis was fully locked in to their body and could not interact with anyone other than their closest family, if that even. Today, we hear about the spectrum where someone who looks, behaves and functions like anyone else is described as being on the spectrum and qualifies for special assistance in school and a benefits package, even if it is quite limited. How is that?
Giving benefits is never career damaging but refusing might be.
What I have never understood about people getting now nearly £200 a week EXTRA for claiming mental health “disabilities” like “anxiety” and “depression” is…
WHY DO THEY NEED EXTRA MONEY FOR IT?
They get that extra money on top of unemployment benefit and umpteen other benefits, but WHAT ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO NEED IT FOR? What are they supposed to spend it on?
Video games? Alcohol? Recreational Drugs? Prostitutes? Machetes? Boxes of Chocolates? Holidays abroad?
Holidays, toy boys, the potential list is endless.
For those with serious, life restricting conditions we ought to show sympathy. For those who need (not would like) financial support ok. But if the conditions is drug induced we should not pay.
£200 quid a week is MORE THAN THE STATE PENSION !
I wonder how many of the recipients are not Brits, living outside the UK or both.
Many are Brits, in my limited experience, such as the tall, strong, healthy 30-something son of a devout, hardworking Christian preacher, who has learned from his mother that pretending to be constantly ill lets you off ever having to work for a living. He is far from being alone in his view, and Third World Ethnics have also embraced “disabilities” with similar alacrity.
That’s what the “disabilities” system was designed for: to tempt people into faking illness to get money and avoid work. This insidiously undermines and destroys their sense of morality, especially in Christians, whose faith is supposed to be based on integrity and Christian morality. Some churches are more like hospital wards, with the total focus of prayers and conversations being on ill health.