Conservatives promised to protect the ‘most vulnerable’. How’s that going?
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Version 0 of 1. The Conservatives like to talk about protecting “the vulnerable”. From the early days of the coalition onwards, the reassurance that no matter how bad things got, the people who truly needed help would be shielded from the cuts has been the linchpin in everything George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith have done. “It is our purpose to protect the most vulnerable – it has been from the beginning and will continue to be so,” as Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, put it recently. I wonder how well the government thinks that’s going. Related: Benefits cap hits single parents with children under five, figures show Take emergency hardship payments for the people having their benefits sanctioned – a system that, as was reported last week, is now removing the benefits of one in six jobseekers each year and is under scrutiny from the UK statistics watchdog. I warned in March about the irony of the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) “protection” strategy: how the people who most need help after being sanctioned are locked out of the hardship fund because the application process is too difficult for them to understand. Anyone classed as “vulnerable” is generally eligible to claim hardship support immediately, but others – in reality, the vast majority of people lumped into jobseeker’s allowance – are not allowed until the 15th day of being sanctioned. This distinction is quite an insight into DWP thinking: the belief that there is any living person who can be left without money for food for two weeks and not be vulnerable to starving. But it becomes particularly scary when – as uncovered by Natalie Leal at Welfare Weekly – we now know what it takes to make the grade for emergency help in the DWP’s vulnerability classification. Sanctioned jobseekers with mental health problems are deemed eligible for immediate hardship payments only if they have an accompanying physical health problem. In practice, that means people with depression or schizophrenia can have their benefits stopped out of nowhere and, according to the DWP’s classification system, do not deserve the emergency support saved for the vulnerable. It is difficult to say what it takes to “deserve” help nowadays. It seems that being in poverty or raising a young child alone is not enough either. Nearly half of the families affected by the government’s new benefits cap are lone parents, caring for at least one child under five, new official figures have shown. The cap – a neutral term for a cut of thousands from a family’s income – is billed as an incentive for people to find work but will disproportionately penalise the parents who, because of having a pre-school child, will find that the most difficult. (In fact, single parents claiming income support aren’t currently required by the government to find a job until their youngest child turns five.) Talk of the 'most vulnerable' has never been about protecting these people, but a way to excuse policies that hurt them It is the same can’t-win position that means that from 2017, many disabled and chronically ill people newly judged by the government’s own assessment as unable to work will be put on the same rate as a jobseeker – despite, by definition of being awarded the benefit, being too ill or disabled to work. If someone with severe mental health problems, a person too ill or disabled to work, or a single parent looking after their toddler on a low income are not the “vulnerable” citizens the government wants to protect, it raises the question: who exactly is? The notion of the “most vulnerable” has never been a genuine attempt to protect the members of society who are struggling but a way to excuse the policies that hurt them. This is the reason the v-word has long been favoured by Duncan Smith and co. It is a pivotal part of the austerity agenda – creating the comforting illusion that a safety net still exists while casting doubt over the need for one. A government that steers its cuts around taking care of the so-called “vulnerable” successfully creates a binary of social security. In other words here are people who really need help and there are others – essentially anyone who is not in the most desperate of states – who can legitimately have their support withdrawn. At its worst, each reference to vulnerability prolongs the idea the vast social and economic inequality we see is inevitable; that there is a fixed rung of society, consisting of people who are hungry, degraded or scared. In fact there is no such thing as the “most vulnerable”. There are simply people who are more vulnerable to dire political choices. |