The Cost of IDS – 100 ways Iain Duncan-Smith’s Department have made life worse for the sick, poor & disabled, by Éoin Clarke
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Money Wastage
- Despite all the rhetoric about cutting welfare spending, it has actually increased by £24 billion this parliament (evidence & evidence)
- Iain Duncan Smith’s Departmental Spend on Private Consultants has jumped 59% in just 1 year (evidence)
- Iain Duncan Smith’s Departmental Spend on temporary staff has jumped 91% in just 1 year (evidence)
- £150million+ of taxpayers’ money has already been spent on court fees related to successful appeals against unfair WCA assessments (evidence)
- The DWP have written off £140million in overpaid Housing Benefit paid in error since October 2010 (evidence)
- £241m of taxpayers’ money is set to be wasted in IT overspend, including £34m write offs, for Iain Duncan-Smith’s Universal Credit says the National Audit Office (evidence)
- DWP Audited Accounts show that at least £90 million of IT spend on Universal Credit will have to be written off, a near trebling in the 3 months after the mentioned NAO report (above) (evidence)
- Iain Duncan Smith’s Department handed a £60million contract to a firm to carry out the Work Programme without putting the proper checks in place to detect fraud or irregularity says the NAO (evidence)
- Despite all of the tough talk on clamping down on benefit fraud it has remained the same over the last three years (2010-11) (2011-12) (2012-13)
Targeting the Disabled
10. 3 judges found that the government’s Work capability Assessment discriminated against the mentally ill (evidence)
11. 475,000 Disabled People have been made to work unpaid on the Tory Work Programme (evidence)
12. The number of disabled & sick people to suffer an ESA sanction has jumped by a third since 2009-10 (evidence)
13. 38% of those who appeal ESA sanctions have won their cases & have been found to be wrongly punished (evidence & evidence)
14. Iain Duncan Smith withdrew funding for Remploy Factories that resulted in 34 of them closing (evidence)
15. 20,000 Medical Assessments, a year, of the sick & disabled for benefit eligibility are carried out in unprofessional circumstances (evidence)
16. Since 2008 (so including the last years of New Labour), new benefit claimants have suffered, on average, 24 days of delays before receiving the Work Capability Assessment (evidence)
Continued...
www.greenbenchesuk.com/2014/01/the-cost-of-ids-100-ways-iain-duncan.html