October 2009 – Canterbury cut in benefit help for elderly disabled
The following text was written as a letter to the Kentish Gazette, in response to a news item about a cut in Canterbury CC funding for the benefits advice service provided by Age Concern for elderly claimants and their carers.

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I am a carer and recently benefited from a visit from Judy Ayris, an adviser from Age Concern. She came to help me with a claim for Attendance Allowance (AA) for my elderly father.

Many years ago I too was an adviser making such visits and helping with benefit issues. However even with this background and many years in advice work, it is difficult to deal with oneself. The AA claim form is 30 pages long and goes into all kinds of tricky issues. You can therefore imagine that I was shocked to open the paper and find that this provision is to be cut and the resources spread more thinly.

Councillor Gilbey, the leader of the council, is reported as saying that elderly people would not be at a disadvantage and the new system will benefit a larger section of the community. I assume that as leader of the council Cllr Gilbey cannot be ignorant of the issues at stake and therefore he is careless of the effect.

Your article says the funding being removed to put into a post with a broader remit is “nearly £20000″. That will pay for less than 1 full-time properly trained welfare rights worker including employers’ National Insurance contributions etc. It is simply fatuous to suggest that if you spread that amount of money over a much larger client base than before that the original group will not lose out. There will be no slack to take up.

As I know from experience, an adviser working with a particular group will have the opportunity to specialise in the issues and benefits pertinent to them. For example, someone working with elderly disabled people and their carers will be able to learn the detail of the benefits available to them, how to deal with the claim forms, what kinds of evidence are relevant, what the implications of one benefit will be on another and so on. Younger people will have very different issues and different benefits. It is, for example, much more likely there will be questions of childcare, availability for work, money for dependents and so on.

It is quite simply fatuous to suggest that a generalist who covers all the bases can have the same depth of knowledge and can deliver the same level of service. Any one worker can deal with no more than hundreds of individual cases in a year at best, especially bearing in mind the need for time for training and study. Unless that person keeps up with changes there is a danger of potential claimant losing out through wrong advice. It also takes time to get around to see people who may not be able to travel to get advice.

The population is ageing, so there will be increasing need for the kind of work the Age Concern workers have been doing. Meanwhile due to the recession the numbers needing advice about benefits for people of working age will also increase sharply. To claim that spreading the
same limited resources more thinly will ‘ensure all residents receive the benefits they are entitled to’ is unsustainable.

I hope that Cllr Gilbey (one of my ward councillors) and his colleagues will reconsider this mean-spirited cut in service which will worst affect some of the poorest and most vulnerable elderly
people.

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I also sent the text by e-mail to Councillor Gilbey. I, like the Kentish Gazette, received a reply from him, to all intents and purposes reiterating the position I had attacked as incredible. The core paragraph was the following:

“The need to cater for our working-age residents and their families is a real, pressing one which needs to be addressed. The budget, however, is finite. The challenge we have is to make sure we provide an equal level of service to all who contact us for help, regardless of their age and circumstances. It will also enable us to plan proactive awareness campaigns throughout the year aimed at different groups of people.” [My emphasis - PH]

He assured me that he understood my concerns. You won’t be surprised to learn that I was not impressed.