And On Welfare

Sorry, I'm drunk - and other reasons people are missing their benefits review
by BENEDICT BROGAN

Night out: An excuse for a no-show to a mandatory benefits review? One in five welfare claimants fails to show up for a mandatory review of their benefits. Among the audacious excuses given by absentees are that they were drunk or away on holiday.

Others included drink-fuelled brawls, hangovers, sick relatives, forgetfulness and a missed flight.

One claimant said he had fallen down stairs, another claimed he suffered from memory loss and some lamented "the irrelevance of work to their lives".

Research by the Department for Work and Pensions suggests that the Government is still struggling to trim the hidden army of longterm jobless.

The study coincides with scathing criticisms of Labour's record on incapacity benefit.

David Freud, an investment banker appointed to help reform the system, described the disabilitytests used to decide who gets some of the £12billion paid out each year as "ludicrous".

Incapacity benefit is worth up to £81.35 a week and has been criticised as a disguised way of cutting dole queues.

Embarrassingly for Gordon Brown, Mr Freud said barely a third of the 2.64million incapacity claimants are genuine. T

hat would suggest 1.9million are well enough to go back to work.

The official study found that 21 per cent of claimants failed to attend a new and compulsory "work focused interview" designed to put them on the road to a job.

Recent figures show that more than 250,000 claimants have been ordered to attend mandatory interviews since July, suggesting that at least 50,000 have ignored the call-up.

A further 25 per cent attended just one meeting before giving up.

Only 14 per cent - one in seven - made it through the full series of six interviews demanded by Government.

The Prime Minister has promised to axe the state benefits of those who refuse to take a job or volunteer for training.

He is under pressure from Tory leader David Cameron who last month announced an ambitious "tough love" plan.

Modelled on a U.S. initiative, this would see benefits for persistent shirkers stopped after two years.

The Government's research into benefits interviews uncovered a persistent reluctance to take threats of benefit sanctions seriously.

Other claimants failed even to realise their handouts were at risk.

The research paper states: "Although the majority of customers knew that the meeting . . . was compulsory, less than half of respondents who attended were aware that their benefits could be reduced if they did not attend them."

Philip Hammond, Tory work and pensions spokesman, said: "We've had seven separate announcements last summer about how Mr Brown is being radical and tough in trying to get people back to work - but this report shows that his approach just isn't working.

"Clearly many benefit recipients are just not taking what the Government is doing seriously. We need a radical, 'tough love' approach to welfare and not the timid tinkering we have at the moment."

Last month figures showed that more than half a million under-35s are living on state handouts because they say they are too sick to work. They outnumbered those actually looking for a job.

Mr Brown has boasted that ten years of Labour's "new deal" welfareto-work methods have helped 1.8million benefit claimants into work.

But he is struggling to tackle the so-called "sicknote culture" of those who opt out of work with little medical reason.

Reforms introduced by Mr Brown include renaming incapacity benefit as employment support allowance and introducing a medical test to weed out less disabled claimants.

However the tests are expected to move only 20,000 a year off disability benefits and will apply to new claimants only.