[joglynne]

Mol I think you are being very unfair if you are saying that organizations such as DialUK are there to help people milk the system and also, by making out that they are there to help scroungers, you risk putting off people who are genuinely in need of help from using their services.

The two relatives they came out to help for me had both had benefits refused mainly because my relatives, like a lot of people, had been to proud to put down in black and white, for all to see, just how much their disabilities effected their lives and it needs people such as the volunteers at DialUK to negotiate the mine field that the current claim forms produce.

The procedures for claiming disability benefits are atrocious. Succeeding Governments have added layer upon layer of red tape in an attempt to avoid just starting again from scratch and developing a system that could be used on a multi-agency platform.

No one enjoys hearing reports of people who have been getting any form of benefit that they are not entitled to but trying to stop that happening has, to some degree, also been the cause of a lot of the red tape that claimants have to get through to-day.

Having worked with staff trying to deal with disability claims I can tell you that they were not happy about some of the decisions they had to make and would much rather have based their awards on a medical opinion rather than just on badly designed forms.