In November 2002 The Government published a Green Paper — 'Pathways to Work’ - outlining radical proposals for reform of the sickness route to benefits. The proposals contained within that Green Paper—slightly amended—are now being ‘piloted’ in a growing number of areas throughout the country. In addition to the original pilot areas (Rhondda Cynon Taf, Renfrewshire, Derbyshire, Essex, Somerset, East Lancashire and Gateshead & South Tyneside) Pathways to work will be introduced in:

What it means is that many people with mental health problems claiming for the first time will face a whole series of ‘work focused’ interviews conducted by the DWP in the early stages of their claim for sickness-route benefits. The government particularly focuses on those with diagnoses of ‘depression, anxiety and other neuroses’. If people do not attend the interviews, then their benefit may be reduced.

And it’s not ONLY new claimants who will be affected. In the ‘old’ Pathways areas listed above, the pilots are being expanded to also include people who first claimed during the last three years.

So, what are you likely to face and when, if you’re aged between 18 and 59 and you claim a sickness route benefit in a Pathways pilot area?

Well, at some point after you have been claiming for eight weeks, you will be called in for a ‘work-focused’ interview.

If you do not feel able to attend, you (or someone else acting on your behalf) can ask for the interview to be ‘deferred’ (i.e. postponed to a later date) or ‘waived’ (i.e. abandoned), but there will be no automatic exemption at this stage.

Claimants are also expected to attend a further 5 work focused interviews at monthly intervals during the early part of their claim. The ‘reasoning’ behind this is that statistically, people who have been on the sick for a certain length of time are more likely to stay on the sick indefinitely, so emphasis is being put on trying to get people back into the workplace early on.

People who are exempted from the Personal Capability Assessment within the ‘sickness’ route to benefits won’t have to attend these additional interviews, but everyone else will be expected to. (See section on Sickness Route to Benefits – exemptions’ to see if this might apply.

Even if you are exempted from these additional interviews, you will still be expected to come in for the occasional follow-up interview at certain ‘trigger points’ - for example just after you have ‘passed’ the Personal Capability Assessment, starting or stopping part time work, or when you stop claiming as a ‘carer’ but still have entitlement to Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance or Income Support through the sickness route.

If none of these applies, you will still be expected to come in for interview at least once every three years. Again, if for some reason you feel you could not attend, you, or someone acting on your behalf, can ask for a ‘deferral’ or a ‘waiver’, as above.

Because these schemes are only being piloted at the moment, it is difficult to gauge the effect this is going to have, or know how much understanding and awareness will be evident when requests for deferral or waiver on mental health grounds are made.

Again, as under Jobcentre Plus, you will be expected to ‘participate’ in discussions—i.e. show willing to respond to questions about past employment, education/ training/ skills etc—but you will also be asked to help draw up an individual ‘action plan’, identifying steps which you can take to improve your chances of getting back to work. This action plan will then be looked at again during future interviews.

If you don’t turn up, or if you turn up but they decide you didn’t ‘participate’ in the interview process then they can reduce your benefit through sanctions. They define the figure as 20% of the adult personal allowance within Income Support—but if you get Income Support, they must not leave you with less than 10p of it a week!

If you get Income Support on top of Incapacity Benefit, or Income Support on top of Severe Disablement Allowance, then they will take any deduction from the Income Support first and then the other benefit.

Again as the system is so new, it’s difficult to know how quickly or often these sanctions will be used, but in theory they can start cutting your money from the very first time you fail to turn up or fail to ‘participate’. If this happens to you at any stage during the claim you can appeal against the decision—get advice!

It’s not all stick—there are some carrots attached to being covered by a Pathways pilot, including routes to training and support not available to others and an ‘Advisor Discretionary Fund’ which can be used for one-off payments to help people return to work. Feedback suggests that different Personal Advisers use this fund to a much greater or lesser extent… e.g. some have used it to pay for new clothes or even to pay for driving lessons, whereas others are reported to hardly use it at all… If you think you might benefit, ask!!!

The most measurable carrot though is the ‘Return to Work Credit’ which is a payment of £40 a week for up to a year for those who start work and earn less than £15000 p.a.

Another option open to claimants in Pathways pilots is voluntary participation in ‘Condition Management Programmes’ (although you could be forgiven for asking ‘how voluntary is voluntary?’ when at the end of the day the system has the ultimate power to sanction )…

These programmes—run in partnership with the NHS— will not aim to ‘treat’ your medical condition but to help you learn to live (and presumably work) with it. We’d be very interested to learn more about the content of the mental health programme, given that in an evaluation study published in December 2004, one Personal Adviser was recorded as having been put off using the CMPs… She had thought that they were there to help people learn to manage their health problems as a step along the road to re-entering work, but records her concerns that ‘the first sessions were based around job goals which she felt would frighten her customers off, particularly those who lacked confidence’.