[Angua]

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

Sadly i cannot afford to hire a professional sound engineer and alll his equipment for a day and i have to get permission from atos to do that which they are unlikely to give. If i did get their permission i would arrive to be told i had to wait till an assessor was available and that seems to take quite a while once they find out they will be recorded. As you said secretly recording is no good as it cannot be officially used. I am already consigned to having to appeal because someone saying that the dwp dm's do not base it just on atos i have seen enough to know that the decision atos gives will be the end decision.

I am fortunate that all the doctors and nurses connected with me have already stated they would be happy to attend any hearing i may have so thats something. Growing hostility to claimants almost gaurantees these days that the longest and hardest way is the one claimants will have to travel.

They are supposed to provide the recording stuff should you request it. However, the point of recording surreptitiously is to have a personal record of what was said so that when the report comes back you can see where they have misrepresented what you said. Even though you cannot prove it, at least you will know where they are marking incorrectly for your appeal should you need to.

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

this list makes depressing reading.

http://nds.coi.gov.uk/content/detail...08&SubjectId=2

In my own personal opinion the current flaws with welfare are.

1 - age discrimination thresholds, which is the single room rate on LHA/HB, cold weather payments, as well as age addition on IB.
2 - huge amounts of child benefit of which child tax credit is the main culprit, these are what hit the media headlines.

That page has a detailed list of welfare changes, not everything is listed but a lot of it is.

What stands out is.

Single childless people have been targeted (even tho they the currently most vulnerable group) by raising the single room rate age discrimination to 35. The savings of it listed is tiny. In addition working tax credit is frozen not even increasing with inflation.
Child tax credit will actually be increased above inflation. With all the media attention drawn to benefits they are increasing the most generous benefit.
Cold weather payments getting an increase which is of course a age limited benefit.
Extending help to those with mortgages.

So they have targeted help to those with children, pensioners and homeowners. All looks politically motivated to me, doing what wins votes, or rather stems the losses of votes.

eg. they have a cut listed worth 385million which is apparently unaffordable but the child tax credit increase will cost half a billion per year. Which is what I meant earlier when I said the word unaffordable is misused.

There seems to be a mindset if someone is single, childless, ill they are the ones to live in poverty.

Also look how pitiful the savings are for the 26k cap, which shows how few actually will be affected for what the media made look like was widespread.

As for Child Tax Credits - yes they may be going up, but the level at which you lose them has been considerably reduced.