Lucy Earle, 31, is a social media executive for a museum.<\/p>\n
She has various disabilities and conditions, including agonising pain in her feet that means she needs to use a wheelchair.<\/p>\n
It took six months for her claim to be looked at by Access to Work, and then she was assigned a wheelchair that wasn’t suitable and left her upper body in pain.<\/p>\n
“The last few weeks, I haven’t been into work because I can’t manage the pain of either using the wheelchair that isn’t built for me, or being on my feet and not going very far.”<\/p>\n
She credits the Access to Work scheme with helping her stay in employment, but feels they are refusing reasonable requests.<\/p>\n
“They’re saying that the benefits are being cut so we can push more people into work, but then also Access to Work is having all these problems.”<\/p>\n
Steve Darling MP, the Lib Dem Work and Pensions spokesperson, says that while the principles behind Access to Work are excellent, “individuals and businesses are often covering significant sums from their own savings while waiting for payments from Access to Work, which risks pushing people into debt, or businesses even closing down. This is unacceptable.”<\/p>\n
Minister for Social Security and Disability, Sir Stephen Timms, said in February that Access to Work, established in 1994, “was not in a good shape at the moment.” <\/p>\n
Spending on the programme increased by 41% in 2023\/24 to \u00a3257.8m. <\/p>\n
“What we will need to do\u2026is make some fairly significant reforms to Access to Work, look at whether employers can do more. There is quite a big issue here and the current style of Access to Work is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term,” he said. <\/p>\n
“We have to come up with something better and more effective, given the current very high level of demand.”<\/p>\n
In a statement, the Department for Work and Pensions said: “Last month we introduced a new streamlined claims process to ensure outstanding payments are made swiftly to businesses.<\/p>\n
“We also continue to work with employers to explore how the Access to Work Plus claims process could be made easier for their employees and so people with high in-work support needs can thrive in employment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lucy Earle, 31, is a social media executive for a museum. She has various disabilities and conditions, including…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145600,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[64,63,99,180],"class_list":{"0":"post-145599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-jobs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}