[Peter_]

Originally Posted by 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.

No those organisations you mention do help the right people and offer a fantastic service, I think you misconstrued my meaning.

Any genuine person who has a disability gets put through the wringer because they are claiming what is genuinely theirs and these civil servants want to give as little as possible away to them, the is to much red tape which even now affects my brother and others like him who's circumstances will never ever alter but still have to go through the same process year after year.

My gripe is with these unemployment type centres that help people who have never done a tap of work and never ever intend to lift a finger if they can help it in their lifetime basically fiddle the system by wording their claims in the right way and telling them what to say in order to freeload off the system.