National Peanut Butter Day No Picnic for Kids with Peanut Allergies - (Disabled World News)
National Peanut Butter Day is No Picnic for Kids with Peanut Allergies, But Educating Our Kids About Food Allergies Can Be - With over six million children in the US now facing peanut and other food allergies, food allergy education in schools is a must. Author Sue Ganz-Schmitt strives to help with the release of her children's book The Princess and the Peanut.
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:27:39 - Nationwide news

Personalisation 'wrongly used to devalue social workers' - (Adult services news From Community Care)
Adult social work is being 'devalued' by cuts and mistaken ideas about personalisation, The College of Social Work warned today as it launched a campaign to champion adults' professionals.
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:01:00 - Nationwide news

The welfare reform bill will incentivise people: to turn on David Cameron | Polly Toynbee - (Society: Disability | guardian.co.uk)

David Cameron's cuts have barely got going yet. That's the frightening truth about austerity

While Tory and Lib Dem MPs were contemptuously rejecting all seven Lords amendments to the welfare reform bill on Wednesday, I was at a credit union in London's East End, listening to low earners and unemployed people struggling to save small sums to avoid loan sharks. Admirable, but little protection from a tidal wave of cuts heading their way. For people like them, this year's rolling housing benefit cuts will take £17 a week.

That same morning the Institute for Fiscal Studies delivered its verdict: double-dip recession and a miserable 0.3% growth rate. Worry about shut libraries? Then this should make your hair stand on end: only 6% of public service cuts have happened yet. Another 94% are still to come, with cascades more public servants sacked. In benefits, 88% of cuts are still to come. But Tory and Lib Dem MPs voted through an £18bn benefit cut for the "squeezed" bottom half with few qualms, taking £1,400 from disabled children and £94 a week from the sick who don't die or recover within a year.

The IFS says these cuts are "almost without historical or international precedent". "How deliverable these will prove remains to be seen," it adds. The answer is blindingly obvious. Cuts of these dimensions are impossible. Austerity will not be politically tolerable in a rich country in peacetime where boardrooms pay themselves 49% rises. The Attlee government was toppled by peacetime austerity that voters no longer trusted. The government reassures itself that the country is muddling along, coping with cuts, getting by. But the frightening truth is that it's hardly begun.

The IFS chart showing the sunny uplands of 2016-17, with a 0.4% current spending surplus, is hard to credit. It's a dereliction for forecasters to ignore the political reality. A miraculous growth spurt might save the day: but how, when George Osborne's hyper-austerity smothers all oxygen in the economy? What of a 2015 election, plumb in the middle of this seven-year run of cuts? The irony is that the best hope of hitting that surplus and restoring more growth is that many of these cuts never happen. Cameron will bend or snap or both.

The NHS tops No 10's risk register, but a close second should be the benefit cuts now being railroaded through by claiming "financial privilege" to avoid another bruising Lords encounter with angry bishops and former Tory cabinet ministers. Cameron's government by opinion poll tells him he's on terra firma: the public thinks £26,000 is more than enough benefits for any family. But the public is fickle: starting last month, 670,000 households lose an average of £13 on housing benefit occupancy rules. In council tax benefit, because pensioners are exempt, the rest of low earners will pay an extra £330 a year. In April tax credit cuts take £305 from 2 million households, while the bottom half are already £427 a year worse off in spending power, says the Resolution Foundation. With long-term unemployment set to rise even higher than already predicted, this bill touches millions more voters than Cameron expects. It may not touch his leafy heartlands, best protected from council cuts, but elections are won among middling folk: wait for the great cuts tsunami to hit them.

If bad news is good news for Labour, then it's been a good week. Ed Miliband's challenge to the Hester bank bonus sprang from his well-prepared critique of irresponsible capitalism. Ed Balls drew support from the IFS, finding that a £10bn growth stimulus might indeed be available, supporting his own remedies – an emergency VAT cut, a cut in employers' national insurance, and ready-to-go building projects to stir moribund demand. IFS charts obligingly showed what a small fraction of the debt problem was caused by Labour overspending in the good years, the rest caused by the crash. David Miliband's irritating attack on old Labour, inevitably trumpeted on the Telegraph, looked curiously out of the loop and irrelevant to what's happening on the frontline. It rallies the rusty muskets of old Blairites and distracts from the firefight with the real enemy – a government barely begun on its path of destruction. If only he would roll up his sleeves and take a frontline shadow cabinet post – any job is open to him – or do something else altogether. His Commission on Youth Unemployment will next week show how well he can take on the government.

The London Community Credit Union has 12,000 Hackney and Tower Hamlets members, low-earning thrifty savers who are about to be hit hard. Among them was Fenella, who paid off huge rent arrears and now saves £5 a week. She was with her aunt, in bad trouble after borrowing £1,000 in an emergency but now owing the Provident £1,700. A man in his 30s joined the credit union just in time, after he saw friends falling into the snakepit of pay-day loan debt. Most members live on the edge. Ed Miliband's speech on Friday on "one-nation banking" needs to include those shunned by conventional banks: credit unions still cover only 1%.

Staff here dread the welfare reform bill, waiting for debts, arrears, evictions and pitiful hardship to wash up on their doorstep. Yet Lord Freud declared: "The government remains committed to eradicating child poverty." The effect of £1,400 cuts for disabled children was "negligible". The aim of cuts is to "incentivise" people out of "dependency". Presumably the way kicking away crutches incentivises the lame to walk.

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Treatment for Veterans with Obstructive Sleep Apnea - (Disabled World News)
United States military veterans now have the option to use Provent Sleep Apnea Therapy, a small, non-invasive nasal device for the treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:49:21 - Nationwide news

Improving access to social care for adults with autism - (Adult services news From Community Care)
New support from the Social Care Institute for Excellence
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:24:00 - Nationwide news

Connecting iPad iPhone or iPod to TV or Projector - (Disabled World News)
Information on cables you can use to connect your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to your Television set or projector
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:27:17 - Nationwide news

become a member of disability rights uk - (Disability Alliance Newsfeed)
Disability Rights UK’s vision is of a society where everyone with lived experience of disability or health conditions can participate equally as full citizens.By being part of Disability Rights UK you will be helping realise this vision. Membership is open to organisations and individuals.
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:25:00 - Nationwide news

Govt rejects lords amendments - ignores consequences of cuts - (Disability Alliance Newsfeed)
The Government’s removal of protections for some disabled people from the Welfare Reform Bill ignores the hundreds of thousands of disabled people directly affected, the hundreds of charities who have highlighted the potential devastating impact for disabled people and their families, the House of Lords who proposed additional protections and the Joint Committee on Human Rights who suggested the Bill will cause destitution.
Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:05:00 - Nationwide news

Ouch! Talk Show 82: Ruby Wax finds her people - (Ouch! Disability Talk Show)
Comedian Ruby Wax pops by to talk about her new social networking site for people with mental health problems. Kevin Mulhern pulls apart the latest on welfare reform and Meet Jody Cundy, top GB Paralympic cyclist. Liz Carr and Rob Crossan present.

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The work capability assessment should help, not hound people back into work | Tom Greatrex - (Society: Disability | guardian.co.uk)

Failure to address the flaws of the Atos assessment has hurt the needy, and undermined the principle of helping people work

In the 21 months since I was elected an MP, one issue is consistently raised by constituents: employment and support allowance (ESA) and the work capability assessment (WCA) that underpins eligibility for it.

The principle of assessing those claiming sickness benefit is one with which I agree. As do, surprisingly, many of the people who have contacted me about problems with WCA. However, the application of this principle has been a disaster.

The decision last year to rapidly accelerate such a flawed process – assessing up to 11,000 people a week, before fully addressing existing problems – negates any attempt by the employment minister, Chris Grayling, to absolve himself of any responsibility for what has become a debacle. This morning in the House of Commons I held a debate on the WCA. The experiences and frustrations of MPs up and down the country mirrored my own.

Professor Malcolm Harrington is conducting an ongoing review of the ESA process, and made a number of important recommendations last year. In his second review last November, he concluded that "positive progress has been made over the last 12 months" in improving the system, following the recommendations in his first report last year.

Yet this upbeat summary doesn't stack up with the experience of those who have real-life experience of ESA. Indeed, Harrington himself notes that the vast majority of respondents to his call for evidence "reported that the process had broadly stayed the same or that they had not noticed any changes". The government's response to the Harrington recommendations does not nearly go far enough.

As has been reported, Atos, the multi-billion pound French IT firm contracted by the government to carry out the WCA, are unable, or unwilling, to implement the Harrington recommendations accepted by the government. One such recommendation from the first review was for Atos officials to be physically present in benefit centres to provide an important link with the person who will ultimately decide on benefit entitlement and the company carrying out the assessments.

However, it was admitted to me by the government, in response to a parliamentary question that due to Atos "capacity pressures" this government policy has been abandoned. It is very worrying that the recommendations of an independent review accepted and adopted by government can be circumvented by a private firm. When this firm receives £100m of taxpayer funding, people have a right to expect that it carries out government policy designed to improve a chaotic system.

When a company with global operating revenue in the billions is unable to staff benefit centres in the UK, serious questions must be asked about whether it remains the right organisation to provide the assessment that is so badly needed.

Time and again, since the government claimed to have implemented the original recommendations, I have been contacted by constituents with horror stories of their treatment by the Department for Work and Pensions, or by Atos Healthcare.

One of my constituents suffers from Parkinson's disease. Anybody with even a very basic knowledge of this condition knows that it is incurable and progressive. It can be managed, but over time the sufferer's health will deteriorate. Things will not get better.

My constituent has been assessed twice by Atos for his fitness to work. Both times he was found able to return to employment. Both times that decision was overturned on appeal. It is not difficult to imagine his anger at receiving a third letter shortly after his second appeal instructing him to present himself for a third work capability assessment. This time, he was assessed as being unfit for work. However, my constituent knows that he will likely have to go through the process again in a few months time.

This case perfectly encapsulates much of what is wrong with the process. In a one-size-fits-all approach to assessing the fitness of people to work, summonses are dispatched without consideration to the history of the individual and a generic assessment is made with little or no reference to the specific needs of the person in question. Common sense appears to play no role.

The system is not working – or, to use that notorious phrase, it's not fit for purpose. There remains so much wrong with it that any small improvements are instantly negated by its frustrating inadequacies.

The government must wake up to genuine concern and anger in many quarters. Significant changes would dramatically improve the process, and ensure more correct decisions are made first-time round, saving the taxpayer money in the long run by reducing the £80m facilitating appeal tribunals that overturn four in 10 decisions. These include greater communication between the claimant's GP or consultant and the DWP, with more emphasis given to their professional opinion; the use of specialists for people with mental health conditions and with autism – rather than relying on generally trained nurses and doctors with no specific expertise in the field; and an understanding of variations between conditions, so that there is an acceptance that people can suffer from the same condition in vastly different ways, and have good days and bad days.

For a government which constantly excoriates a one-size-fits-all approach to public services, it's curious that the coalition appears to be unwilling, or unable, to tailor the WCA to the individual's needs, and thereby make the process both fairer and more efficient.

Those who can work should work, provided there are jobs available. There are many benefits in people getting back to work – for their health and wellbeing as well as economically. But the basis of the system for doing that must be to help, not hound, people. Those unable to work for health reasons should be supported. By failing to address some of the flaws before escalating the number of assessments, the government is in grave danger of undermining the principle of helping people into work, and risks failing the most needy into the bargain.

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