Sorry, you can’t have £8k car benef it, but here’s £65k for taxis
BENEFITS chiefs cancelled funding for a disabled woman’s mobility car in a bid to save £8,000 – then offered to spend eight times as much on ferrying her around in taxis.
Jan Davis, 58, was told last month that she no longer qualified for the benefits she had been using to pay for the lease on a car under the Motability scheme.
But just weeks later, bureaucrats from the same Government department told the multiple sclerosis sufferer that she qualified for financial help in getting to and from work – in the form of almost £500 worth of taxi fares every week.
Under the proposal, made by officials at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), taxpayers would have footed the bill for £65,000 worth of taxi journeys over a three-year period – £19,000 more a year than the cost of the car. Mrs Davis, who lives in Ayr with her husband Graeme, has since spent £7,200 of her own money on buying the car outright after being told that an appeal against the decision to cancel her Personal Independence Payment (PIP) could take up to ten weeks.
As well as costing more than eight times as much as the lease on the mobility car, Mrs Davis says the taxi trips would have left her struggling to work around her condition if she had accepted them.
She said: ‘The taxi to work doesn’t allow me to use flexitime at work. If I had to use a taxi to and from work it would have to be set times, which doesn’t allow me to manage my condition.
‘At the moment I can go into work a bit earlier and leave a bit later.
‘I would feel too guilty about taxpayers’ money being used in such a manner.’
Mrs Davis’s multiple sclerosis means that she is dogged by excruciating pain and mobility problems. But despite this, she was told by the DWP that she did not need her car to live an independent life and that her PIP was being cancelled.
Keen to keep her job at the HM Revenue & Customs office in East Kilbride, Mrs Davis turned to the DWP’s Access to Work scheme for help.
To her surprise, she was offered eight taxi journeys a week at £60 each under the scheme.
She added: ‘It’s crazy – it would have cost them less than £6,000 for me to keep the car and yet they are willing to pay up to £65,000 for taxis.
‘I’m doing my best to continue working but I feel as though this Government just does not care.’
Corri Wilson, the SNP’s disability spokesman and MP for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, said: ‘Not only has Mrs Davis been denied the ability to live an independent life, but the taxpayer is being short-changed more than £19,000 each year, in just this single case, for no apparent reason. There is no logic to this decision and it raises serious questions about the UK Government’s judgment.’
Mrs Davis added: ‘Most employers can’t afford to take on a disabled person because they wonder if the person’s condition means they can’t be there on time or if they can do all the work – and the DWP is not helping disabled people change that perception. I feel as if I was forced into buying the car.’
A DWP spokesman said: ‘PIP is a benefit designed to help with the additional daily living costs someone may face due to their disability, while Access to Work is a grant to help disabled people with the adjustments they may need to get into or stay in work.
‘They are different benefits with different functions and have different assessment criteria.’
Earlier this year, it emerged that funding for 48,500 Motability cars had been cancelled across the UK as the Disability Living Allowance was replaced by the PIP.
These changes to the welfare system saw stricter criteria imposed on those applying for an allowance to fund a mobility car.
‘I would feel guilty about money used’ ‘No logic to this decision’