Sickness crackdown
Employers need to crackdown on sickness claims and disabled people need to be forced to improve their job chances if the Government is to achieve its target of reducing incapacity benefit a survey has warned.
Ministers want to reduce the number of people receiving incapacity benefits by 1m by 2010 but the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which studied sickness and disability policies in the UK, Australia, Spain and Luxemburg, said tough measures were needed to get benefit dependants back to work.
Sickness, Disability and Work: Breaking the Barriers (Vol 2) questioned why governments, in the four countries questioned, spend twice as much on benefits to people claiming illness and disability as they do on unemployment benefits when average health was improving.The OECD welcomed work and pensions secretary Peter Hain’s announcement last month to introduce tough tests on disability claimants and compulsory interviews to devise training programmes to make benefit dependants more employable, but warned benefit systems needed wider reform.
It also encouraged employers, physicians and public authorities to take more responsibility for monitoring absences due to illness because medium-term claims of illness too often turn into long-term disability claims.
It said: "Employers should monitor repeated and long term sickness absences and inform Jobcentre Plus about such cases. Failure to do so should have a direct impact on the cost the employer has to carry."
