Professor Paul Gregg, an economic and social policy expert at the University of Bath, told a TUC seminar on the government’s cuts and reforms that disabled people were “very much getting the sharp end of the stick”.

Professor Gregg also dismissed government claims that welfare spending had spiralled out of control, and said that – prior to the recession – it had been growing at its slowest rate since the Second World War.

Professor Gregg, who conducted a review of personalised support and conditionality in the welfare system for the Department for Work and Pensions in 2009, helped design employment and support allowance (ESA) – the replacement for incapacity benefit – but has since been highly critical of the work capability assessment, the test used to determine eligibility for ESA.

He said he believed the coalition’s reforms were “entirely driven by cuts”, rather than by the intention to help people into work.

He said there should be no compulsion for disabled people to take or look for work and that instead they needed to be “supported, brought along”, while efforts to encourage them back into work should be “an entirely voluntary process”.

He told the seminar that the government’s welfare reforms were “making it substantially harder to build that positive agenda for trying to help people back to work”.

Professor Gregg also said it was “completely unacceptable” that the government was making no effort to track the progress of disabled people who had been found “fit for work” through the WCA, but would have been on incapacity benefit under the old system.

Disabled activist and blogger Kaliya Franklin, one of the authors of this month’s Responsible Reform report on how the government responded to its disability living allowance consultation, said disabled people were seeing a “perfect storm that threatens to undo all the progress of the last 40 years”.

She pointed to cuts to social care support at the same time as the reforms and cuts to benefits, increased disability hate crime and continuing calls for legalised euthanasia, while efforts to push disabled people into full-time employment were becoming “more and more punitive”.

She said: “If we continue down that road, although it sounds like hyperbole, we can expect to see many more deaths linked to these cuts because disabled and sick people will simply say they have no alternative and feel that life is simply not worth living.”

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

The survey, carried out for the Commons health select committee as part of its review of public spending in health and social care, found budgets for community support fell by nearly 10 per cent this year, compared with 2010-11.

At the same time, charges for users of care services were set to rise in 2011-12 from 13 per cent to 13.5 per cent of the total social care budget.

Across the 67 councils that responded to the survey, social care budgets fell by an average of 1.1 per cent between 2010/11 and 2011/12.

The report concludes that – despite “government assurances” – local authorities are “having to raise eligibility criteria in order to maintain social care services to those in greatest need”.

It adds: “The overall picture of social care is of a service that is continuing to function by restricting eligibility, by making greater savings on other local authority functions and by forcing down the price it pays to contractors for services.”

It concludes that total spending on social care fell by at least 1.5 per cent in 2011-12, although a survey by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services suggested spending on adult social care had fallen by 6.8 per cent.

The committee said it hoped that the government’s response to the Dilnot commission’s proposals on the funding of long-term care and support, due this spring, would “set out how a sustainably funded system will continue into the future”.

But the report adds: “The challenge for local authorities and the government is to continue to provide a meaningful service until a new system is in place.”

Responding to the committee’s report, Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley said councils received enough government funding to “maintain the current levels of access and eligibility”, but “need to work smarter with their health professional colleagues to bring integrated services closer to people’s homes in the community”.

He added: “They need to look at how investing in innovative technology and ways of working, like telehealth and reablement, can give patients better results closer to home and free up more money for frontline services.”

He said the government would set out its plans for reforming adult social care in the spring.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Channel 4, which broadcast Gervais’s stand-up show Science last October, has refused to apologise despite the comedian repeatedly describing the singer Susan Boyle as looking like “a mong”, a highly offensive term for people with Down’s syndrome.

In his routine, Gervais said: “…I don’t think she’d be where she was today if it wasn’t for the fact that she looked like such a fucking mong.”

He went on to say that there was “no better word to describe Susan Boyle” – who herself has a learning difficulty – but claimed the word was no longer used to describe someone with Down’s syndrome.

Channel 4 claimed the use of the word was justified in the context of a stand-up routine, and that Gervais’s humour “was rooted in the explanation of how language evolves”, while he had not intended to cause offence, and any “offence inherent in a joke of this nature was reduced by the programme’s late night scheduling”.

Ofcom ruled that although “several aspects of this content had the potential to cause considerable offence”, it “was justified by the context of this provocative comedy routine challenging the evolution of words” in a late-night broadcast.

But Michael White, drummer with the band Heavy Load, who has Down’s syndrome, said it was “a disgraceful word to use”.

He said: “It makes me upset, seeing other people not happy. If they can’t say something nice about disabled people they should go away. I don’t want to know them, go home.”

White, who said he was called a “mong” himself when he was younger, criticised Ofcom for ruling in Channel 4’s favour. He also said Channel 4 should have apologised over the incident.

Last year, his band produced their own version of the Ting Tings hit That’s Not My Name, with a video featuring disabled stars Mat Fraser and Pete Bennett, to protest at disablist hate language, including the use of words such as “mong” and “mental”.

The song is included on their latest album, Wham, which also features Walk Like Vinnie Jones, a song mocking the actor’s use of the word “retard” on Celebrity Big Brother.

Anne Novis, a leading disabled hate crime campaigner and a member of the Ministry of Justice’s hate crime advisory group, said she believed broadcasters that continued to allow the use of “abusive language and jokes to belittle disabled people” could be breaching their legal duties under the Equality Act.

She said: “The words we use to describe people can be hurtful, abusive and encourage others to view disabled people negatively.

“This then can lead to harassment and hostility as people feel justified in their attitudes by the way some media and broadcasters portray us.”

It is just the latest in a series of incidents in which Channel 4 has been criticised by disabled activists over the use of disablist language in its publicity material and by its presenters and stars.

The criticisms of Channel 4 are particularly sensitive as it will be the host broadcaster for the London 2012 Paralympics later this year.

A Channel 4 spokesman refused to apologise for allowing Gervais’s comments to be screened.

He said the channel had decided that to cut the comments out of the programme would have amounted to “censoring a stand-up performance”.

He added: “The editorial judgement we made was that that particular routine appeared in the context of a routine about the use of language. That is why we thought it was editorially justified to keep it in.”

An OFCOM spokesman said: “We do look at it on a case-by-case basis. If it were to happen again and the circumstances were different, it is not to say we wouldn’t make a different decision.”

On the same day as the Gervais ruling, Ofcom also cleared ITV of breaching the code after presenter Eamonn Holmes called one of his guests on This Morning “retarded”.

Ofcom said that although the word was capable of causing offence, it had been used unscripted in a live broadcast and Holmes had apologised on-air shortly afterwards, so it considered the case to be “resolved”.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Last week, disabled artists and performers warned that many disabled people would be put off by a call from London 2012 for 5,000 volunteers with “huge amounts of energy”.

The 2012 organising committee LOCOG has defended the call and says volunteers will need “an expectation of what is required of them so they do not drop out when they realise it is going to be quite demanding”.

Now CoolTan Arts, the London-based arts charity which is run by and for adults with mental distress, has raised new concerns about LOCOG’s volunteer call.

LOCOG wrote to CoolTan saying that it was urgently seeking more volunteers to take part in the two Paralympic ceremonies, but suggested they would have to pay for their own travel and food.

Michelle Baharier, CoolTan’s chief executive, said the itinerary proposed for volunteers by LOCOG was also totally inappropriate.

She said: “They want them to turn up for rehearsals about four days a week. They are not willing to pay people’s fares, they are not willing to give people refreshments.

“Their demands outstrip what everybody running a volunteer project would normally expect.

“There are a lot of people who would love to be part of the ceremony. They would like it to be more accessible, but they would like it to be on their terms.”

Baharier said she was disappointed that disabled people did not seem to be in control of the artistic and cultural celebrations around the Paralympics.

Following repeated requests from Disability News Service over the last eight days for information about travel and support for their volunteers, LOCOG finally pledged that it would ask “all auditionees (and subsequently cast members) to indicate what support might be required so that we can help facilitate their involvement”.

A LOCOG spokesman added: “We want to make sure applicants who are deaf or disabled are provided with the necessary support during each stage of the process.”

He said that all those cast in the opening and closing ceremonies would be given Transport for London “Oyster” travel cards that would allow them to travel to and from the rehearsal venues for no charge, as long as they lived within zones one to six, which cover all of Greater London.

He added: “For all our rehearsals we supply water (other beverages to be confirmed). For our long all-day rehearsals we will supply meal packs.”

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Even though government guidance encourages councils to provide an independent advice and information service for users of direct payments, Hampshire County Council has stopped funding the service that had been provided by Southampton Centre for Independent Living (SCIL).

From the beginning of this month, users of direct payments in Hampshire who need support to manage their direct payments or personal budgets have had to ask social services for extra funding, and then use that money to buy the support themselves.

The funding stopped only three weeks ago, but SCIL is already receiving calls from disabled people in Hampshire who are being given incomplete or incorrect advice by their care managers.

Problems they could face include disciplinary, redundancy and other legal issues with their PAs. Direct payments experts say such advice can prevent disabled people being taken to employment tribunals by their PAs.

SCIL had to make 10 employees – about half of its staff – redundant when Hampshire withdrew funding, although it still provides a similar service in Southampton.

But SCIL fears that other local authorities could follow Hampshire’s example.

Robert Droy, SCIL’s independent living team manager, said: “What it means is that we are no longer funded to help people to live independently and that is everything the government keep saying they want.

“It just feels kind of contradictory. If anything, more people are going to need help in the future, not less.

“We just worry that other local authorities will look at it and think, ‘Hampshire have got away with it. Maybe we can get away with it.’”

Hampshire has pledged to provide funding to disabled people for advice and support if and when they need it, but Droy said: “You don’t necessarily want to spend a month getting funding to get the help you need to sort it out.”

He said he believed Hampshire’s move was a cost-cutting measure.

A Hampshire County Council spokeswoman said they had decided to “re-evaluate” the way they delivered services as a result of the move towards greater personalisation of care and support.

She denied the move was a cost-cutting measure, and said: “Existing contracts for direct payments support finished at the end of last year and [were] replaced with a system which allows the individual to choose what support they need from the organisation which best suits them.

“The aim of this change is to provide a fair and consistent service which will reflect the level of need required, providing people with greater choice, control and flexibility over which provider they purchase their direct payments support service from.”

But she admitted SCIL had passed on concerns about inaccurate advice being given by care managers, which she said the council would “investigate fully”.

A Department of Health spokeswoman said: “It is for councils to provide information, advice and support services to enable people to make informed choices about the type of services they wish to receive.

“Adult social care is a locally delivered system, and local authorities are accountable to their local populations for the decisions they make.

“While some may be cutting services, others are working innovatively to provide high quality services at lower cost.”

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) this week reveal that the proportion of new claimants who have completed an assessment and are placed in the support group – for those not expected to carry out any work-related activity – had risen from 11 per cent in late 2008 to 22 per cent by the middle of 2011.

The proportion placed in the “work-related activity group” – for those disabled people with limited capability for work – fell from 25 to 21 per cent by mid-2011.

And the percentage of claimants found “fit for work” using the work capability assessment (WCA) dropped from 65 to 57 per cent.

The DWP report on the figures says the rise in the number of disabled people placed in the support group could be partly due to improvements to the WCA introduced in the wake of Professor Malcolm Harrington’s first annual review of the test.

The figures provide yet more evidence of the unfairness of the original WCA that was introduced in 2008 by the Labour government to test eligibility for employment and support allowance (ESA), the replacement for incapacity benefit.

Disabled campaigners believe the WCA is still inflexible, unfair and inaccurate, despite the changes aimed at improving the test.

Conservative employment minister Chris Grayling welcomed the new figures, and said: “We are seeing an increase in the number of severely disabled people being given long-term unconditional support, which shows that our reforms to the work capability assessment are starting to work.”

The figures were released as disabled activists prepared to carry out a “daring and disruptive” act of civil disobedience in central London in protest at the government’s welfare reform bill, which includes brutal cuts to spending on ESA.

The action is set to be the first since an activist from the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN) told Disability News Service in November that the government should expect an imminent return to the kind of high-profile, non-violent protests last seen in the 1990s.

The protest is due to take place on Saturday 28 January, and will include activists from DAN and Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), with support from UK Uncut, the grassroots anti-austerity direct action network.

Richard Whitehurst, of DPAC, said disabled people were being forced to “live in fear” because of the cuts.

He said: “Cuts to disabled people’s benefits and services will not save money but will ultimately cost the taxpayer far more as pushing disabled people into destitution and withdrawing care services will lead to an increased demand for NHS care.”

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

RNIB says bmibaby has failed to take action to ensure that customers who use screen-readers or cannot use a mouse can book flights on its website, despite being alerted to problems in 2010.

RNIB is acting on behalf of two bmibaby customers who say they have been unable to book online since changes were made to the website in 2010.

They claim the company is breaching the Equality Act by failing to make the site accessible to them, forcing them to use an expensive call centre instead.

One of them, Alexandra, from Loughborough, said: “I didn’t want to use the call centre as costs can mount up and I wanted the freedom to compare flights and prices before making a decision.

“I feel that it is robbing visually-impaired people of the freedom to choose how they make bookings. It makes me feel like the disabled community is not seen as a lucrative market and that we are clearly not valued as potential or returning customers.”

The other customer, Iain, who chairs a Scottish charity, said he needs to be able to search for information and book flights to attend frequent meetings in England.

He added: “It is very frustrating that the website remains inaccessible when these issues have been flagged up since 2010.”

RNIB has provided bmibaby with expert advice, recommendations and an audit report, but claims the company is “still to make any significant progress”.

The charity said it has now begun legal proceedings against bmibaby.

Hugh Huddy, RNIB’s campaigns officer for inclusive society, said: “Blind and partially-sighted customers deserve to have access to the best online prices and flight information, just as any customer of bmibaby does.

“Why should those with sight loss risk missing out on a web-only deal or be forced to ring a call centre simply because companies are failing to take accessibility standards seriously?”

A bmibaby spokeswoman said: “We commissioned a report from RNIB and received the results of the audit in November 2011 in which they detailed what we needed to do on our website.

“We are currently working through the proposals and investigating several solutions. Whilst we are going through this process we have a new local rate telephone number for blind and partially-sighted people to call to speak to our call centre to obtain our discounted website fares.

“We have also added an accessibility page to bmibaby.com in order to keep customers up to date with our progress.

“We have a project team in place to action the recommendations and we would like to thank our customers for their patience whilst these changes are being implemented.”

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

The increase in “new customers helped” through the Access to Work (AtW) scheme comes after the number of people receiving support plummeted during the coalition’s first year.

The figures show the number of new customers helped rose from 2,320 in the first quarter of 2011/12 to 2,660 in the second quarter.

Despite the modest rise, the first half of 2011-12 still saw a sharp drop in new customers helped compared with the same period in 2010-11, from about 7,700 to about 5,000.

A Department for Work and Pensions spokeswoman said: “We are pleased with the rise in figures, but would like to encourage more people to sign up to Access to Work.”

But she declined to say why the government thought the number of new AtW customers helped might have started to rise.

The figures follow a string of concerns that have been raised about the government’s commitment to the scheme – which provides funding for adaptations, equipment and ongoing support at work – since it came to power.

In August last year, Disability News Service revealed that disabled people receiving AtW were being sent “hostile” and “threatening” letters by DWP, giving them just a week to confirm they still needed their funding before it was withdrawn.

Last June, Liz Sayce, RADAR’s chief executive, published a review of employment support for the government and focused strongly on the need to expand and improve AtW.

But the government’s response to her review made several references to concerns that her AtW recommendations could put “additional pressure on funding at a time when resources are limited”.

And in 2010, the government backtracked on a high-profile pledge to allow disabled people to secure AtW funding before they applied for a job.

The coalition also quietly introduced new rules which mean employers or disabled employees themselves now have to fund equipment such as basic versions of voice-activated software, most adapted chairs, and satellite navigation devices, rather than having them funded through AtW.

For information on AtW, visit the government’s Directgov website.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

DaDaFest 2012 has been named as the winner of this year’s Lever Prize, which will also see the festival benefit from a year-long collaboration with the North West Business Leadership Team (NWBLT).

NWBLT, which judged the award, includes representatives of the region’s 30 largest companies and works to promote the north-west of England.

Previous winners of the Lever Prize have included the Manchester International Festival, the Tate Liverpool modern art gallery, and Manchester’s National Football Museum.

The prize money will be invested in this year’s DaDaFest, the 11^th, which will take place mostly in arts venues across Liverpool, from 13 July to 2 September, and will be part of the Cultural Olympiad that is being planned around the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

Ruth Gould, DaDa’s chief executive, said the chance to develop relationships with prominent businesses in the north-west was just as important as winning £10,000.

She said these business relationships might lead to help with the cost of bringing international artists to take part in this year’s festival, or the creation of a permanent artwork that could be placed “somewhere prominent”.

One of the reasons for setting up DaDaFest was that disabled and Deaf artists were not securing mainstream opportunities because of “big misunderstandings” about their abilities, she said, so it was “delightful” that the award showed DaDaFest was now seen as “one of the key cultural drivers” in the region and its artists as part of the “mainstream”.

She said it also showed that DaDa’s “commitment and passion to keep persevering and keep being political about our issues” had paid off.

This year’s festival will include collaborations with leading artists from across the world, including at least 12 European countries.

The theme will be Transactions – Fluid Bodies: Shifting Identities, looking at how disability affects our lives, including the “exchanges that occur between people and technology”, how our sense of identity is “bound up with” our bodies, and how those bodies “are not stable or unchanging through our lives”.

One of the festival’s centrepieces will be Niet Normaal (Dutch for “not normal”), an adaptation of a successful Amsterdam exhibition that asked the question: what is normal and who decides?

The DaDaFest version will include new commissions and a programme of talks and films, which aim to celebrate difference in the year of the Olympics and Paralympics.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was accused earlier this month of misleading parliament and the public about the scale of opposition to the government’s DLA reforms.

In Responsible Reform – otherwise known as the Spartacus Report – disabled activists had analysed the 523 responses to the DLA consultation that were submitted by disabled people’s organisations, disability charities and other groups.

Lord Freud, the Conservative welfare reform minister, reacted to the report by stating that these group responses only made up 10 per cent of replies to the consultation, and ignored nearly 5,000 individual responses.

In a letter to peers, Lord Freud claimed: “All consultation responses, over 5,000 individual submissions, have been thoroughly and appropriately considered in the government’s analysis and have been used to inform the design of the new benefit and supporting processes.”

But when Disability News Service (DNS) asked DWP how these 5,000 respondents replied to the questions discussed and analysed in Responsible Reform, a DWP spokesman said that “not all respondents chose to answer the specific questions asked”.

When asked how those who had answered the questions responded, the spokesman said: “We don’t have those figures, I’m afraid.”

And when asked why those figures were not available, he said: “If you look at the questions asked they were what/how type questions and were analysed thematically and not statistically.”

But several of the consultation questions asked by the government required simple yes or no answers, such as: will having two rates per component make the benefit easier to understand and administer, while ensuring appropriate levels of support?

Another yes/no question was: should the assessment of a disabled person’s ability take into account any aids and adaptations they use?

But DWP claims it failed to carry out any basic statistical analysis of these and other answers.

Sue Marsh, one of the authors of Responsible Reform, said DWP’s admission cast even further doubt on its DLA consultation.

She said: “Lord Freud was very clear that they had analysed all of these responses and if he can’t back up his claims you have to question his response.”

Marsh said she was frustrated that the government had refused to engage with any of the key issues raised by the Spartacus report.

DNS revealed last week that disabled people’s organisations were becoming increasingly angry at the government’s failure to listen to their views on issues such as DLA reform, despite its frequent references to how it is “co-producing” its reforms with disabled people.

And the disabled Labour MP Dame Anne Begg is to examine the government’s failure to respond to the Responsible Reform report in an inquiry being carried out by the work and pensions select committee, which she chairs.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com