The Scottish government’s reforms made it simpler to apply for support, requiring only one piece of information from a professional. People can also provide supporting information from friends, carers and family.
Announcing a pilot of the new system in March 2022, then Social Security Minister Ben Macpherson said: “We are developing a system that is rooted in trust to make sure people can access the support that they are entitled to.”
We’ll take your word for it as you apply for free money.
Scotland’s new “trust”-based disability benefits system has fuelled a three-fold rise in successful claims, figures show.
Around 80,000 new applications for state support were approved in the year to April, while another 8,400 claims were granted after being reassessed.
This marks a near tripling from the 30,000 approved applications in the 12 months to February 2020.
Surprise!
Well, you could blow me down with a feather!
In England, I see the ‘child poverty’ charities are getting antsy about the possibility of Reeves scrapping the Household Support Fund in the budget.
Household Support Fund? That’s the thing where you have to pick *ONE* item that you cannot afford.
Can you not afford your gas bill? your electricity bill? your food bill?
your travel bill? NO! Any one of them I can afford, IT’S ALL OF THEM ADDED UP THAT I CAN’T AFFORD, YOU ****** MORONS!
I’d like to submit a claim based on my disability being Munchausen syndrome, just to see what happens.
I don’t mind the porridge wogs being as stupid as they wish. They can throw money around as they deem fit. But it does have to be THEIR money. They can follow Professor Murphy’s well established Laws and print it with gay abandon, certain that there are no disadvantages.
Admittedly, it will be a bit of a slow process using only the rubber stamp from a 60 year old John Bull printing set…
We’ll take your word for it as you apply for English taxpayers’ money.
FOC
Scotland: The place where Italians look to feel better about their own government.
As a government supervisor, I was personally liable for any mistakes on my underlings travel vouchers. I think it would do wonders if this were applied to welfare cases. Skin in the game and all that.
It’s a success on their terms. They wanted people to be able to apply more easily, and obviously that will increase the numbers applying. This data doesn’t tell us how many of those are fraudulent. We’ll have to wait a few years for that.
I have no problem with the welfare state. The reality is bad guys get to the top in business, and work. The motto nice guys never win is often true. So the unemployable are often the good guys, the persecuted or abused.
I say help the poor not the rich elites.
As Reagan was fond of saying: trust, but verify.
@ Cost
I do not know about where you work/have worked, but in my experience good guys are more trusted by their counter-parties and get more enthusiastic suport from their subordinates and, on average, are better at their jobs. [The latter may not be obvious except to a statistician.] Consequently they are more, rather than less, likely to get to the top in a well-run business and have done so in the ones where I have worked.
I have observed what happens when the bad guys get to the top in business which is that the business suffers.
Cost – So the unemployable are often the good guys, the persecuted or abused.
I grew up on a council estate and the working class hates the freeloading class. Too many “unemployable” people are just lazy bastards who sit around the house all day drinking and watching Sky TV.
As for the disabled claimants, it’s amazing how many of them forget they “need” crutches to walk after a few pints down the miner’s club on a Saturday night.
Re-reading my post after looking at Steve’s I notice that I missed out mentioning that the one business for which I was briefly a self-employed sub-contractor with a bad guy as boss went bust owing me money. He presumably lost more than I did.
@ Steve
In my youth the Upper Working Class despised the freeloaders “He’ll neither work nor want” was a phrase spoken in a tone of contempt.
I’ve always been middle-class: I grew up from age 6 in a middle-class enclave of seven or eight houses (the eighth was the far end of the street) in a patch of privately-rented houses about 100 metres from the nearest council estate but before that I was the only visibly middle-class child in my primary school class, so despite being middle-class I do know that.
The guys who had worked their way through an apprenticeship to get a skilled job and earned their wages through the sweat of their brow *and* applying a hard-earned skillset have less sympathy for those who can’t be bothered than rich kids have for the unfortunates whom they do not have the know-how to separate from the lazy.