http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... t-leg.html
(the news is available on other news sites)

welcome to austerity
but remember 'we' are all in this together, except its them or us. ho humm ...

OK while I know the papers will be able to find instances where this change is (or seems to be ) unfair it does need a change. The numbers of people of the old allowance had to be reformed and was used by successive governments as a way of massaging down the unemployment figures

Also, without seeming to be over callous losing a leg may not stop you working full time

I don't know the ins and outs of his case at all, but I used to work with a chap who had, for all intents and purposes, no legs. Obviously you do need to be able to do a desk job.

+1

Depending on the schedule to make hospital appointments etc.

As for depression... I'm sure most people are on the scale of depression every now and then to some degree.. that's life

Perhaps IDS should lose a limb and see how he feels about the matter?



Are you saying you shouldn't be allowed to claim if you're suffering from severe depression?

Not at all, just that without any reference to the severity it's meaningless, I thought the aim of such a claim was to infer the worst assumption from the reader when there isn't any assumption to be made.
My point was just saying it doesn't mean that much

I don't think there are enough incentives for disabled people to go back to work. In France, an employer who does not employ a high enough number of disabled people has to pay a fine, as there are many jobs available for people in wheelchairs, or with back problems, or deaf.

The problem in my opinion is that the UK uses disability to hide a high proportion of unemployed people in statistics, the same way that pregnant women or young mothers are not classified as looking for jobs.

small point though : Depression is an illness. the post above is incredibly offensive in saying that most people get it at some point like it is just a whim and ruining the efforts made for years to erase the stigma and get people recognised as not "just a bit down, should get a grip".

That reminds me a few years back we sat an MD of one of the biggest IT companies in the world down in front of a PC with the screen turned away from him and got him to use assistive technology to navigate a web site.

It wasn't until afterwards we showed him it was his terribly badly designed site.
He was on the phone tearing somebodies head off inside 10 minutes of us showing him how bad his site was.

Depression is an illness and it is true a lot of people will have an episode of depression in their life. The severity of it will vary wildly for each individual and the effects on that individual will also vary wildly.
But if you allow a blanket.. you have depression you do not have to work and here is some money for not working. You will get people abusing the system either willfully or by accident. If you are unable to work due to it then fine but each case must be taken individually and assessed individually.

The inference of the article was " he has lost a leg therefore he is unable to work oh and he has depression therefore he is doubly unable to work". Without a lot more background information there is nothing much to say without taking it out of context because we do not know the real context and thus can only comment really on a general level.