Quote:
Originally Posted by Bibio
its saved the public billions in taxpayers money.
the assessment also involves a small physical but in your wife's case i would hazard a guess the assessor must have deemed it not necessary. the questions are a sort of "test" to see if your lying on what you put down on the form as most people go to their local CAB office or get a friend to fill it in so come interview time they cant remember what they had filled in on the form. the face to face is also to stop people using doppelgänger's as such.
its got a lot of "chancers" off the claim for which the public dont have to pay them.
i recently got awarded PIP due to my health. so i would say your wife has nothing to worry about.
think of it this way, by doing what the government have done it has created jobs (clerical staff for the whole process) for those that want to work and made it harder for those that dont. the money the public have saved goes to the workers/companies doing the assessments so technically there is no saving but each member of staff or company still has to pay "tax" so the government get a portion of it all back and round and round it goes keeping people employed.
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Before PIP etc. My wife, a nurse was on sick leave due to an auto immune liver disease, when she discovered she had breast cancer requiring mastectomy, chemo and radio therapy. As a consequence her NHS sickness entitlement was exhausted and she had to claim sickness benefit. At the same time due to the effects of the chemo she claimed some other benefit (I cannot remember what). What I do remember the forms were horrific, the same questions asked in half a dozen different ways. She was then invited to attend an assessment at the local DSS office and the next day got a second letter to say no need, and her application had been approved. So I obviously filled the form in correctly.
But what then came as a shock, was a requirement to attend the local job centre (6 miles away) for a fortnightly back to work interview, told a failure to attend will result in not receiving her sick pay. I went with her.
The lady she met with could not have been nicer, she suffered from MS and was wheelchair bound. She had been a high flying HR exec somewhere and had to give up the stress once she had become ill.
She understood, my wife had a job, but was too ill to work and that we were caught up in the system that was trying to get people off sick and into work. she explained that for years to get jobless figures down the system had been encouraging the long term unemployed to get greater benefits by claiming sickness instead.
Twice though we got phone calls don't bother coming for your interview as she is herself taking sick leave.
As I said, nice lady. when my wife felt ready to go back, she was told. But you cannot go yet. You need a new coat and shoes and issued shop vouchers and you get a transition allowance of £100/month for 6 months to help you back into work.
I think the job centre used her to pass on the message that even with MS, she wanted to work and reasonable employers should make allowances for staff with health problems. Unlike the NHS who put them through the disciplinary procedure for being ill.
My overriding memory of those days, one interview was midway though a cycle of chemo and my wife had to run from the interview to the stinking toilets to vomit, worse on the way home she fouled herself. Too ill to work is not ill enough to miss a job centre interview!