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Out of Sight - Race inequality in the benefits system"Out of Sight" is a report about inequality. It examines how ethnic minority claimants who are either disabled or caring for a disabled person experience the benefits system. Its focus is on non-English speaking claimants - especially Asian women - and the ways the benefits system disadvantages them because of their ethnicity, language and literacy skills, social isolation, cultural attributes and gender. Out of Sight identifies many serious deficiencies in the current system. They concern:
The DWP has no strategy for making the benefits system user-friendly. It continues to run a system whose rules, procedures and paperwork are of daunting complexity, even to claimants with good English skills.
The DWP has no strategy for actively marketing benefits entitlement to potential claimants. Though it knows there is huge ignorance about entitlement, it continues to expect potential claimants to be proactive in seeking benefits. In particular, the DWP lacks any programme for targeting benefits information to hard-to-reach claimants, such as disabled and carer ethnic minority women.
The DWP's support arrangements for disabled and carer ethnic minority claimants (translation, interpreting, helplines, home visiting, outreach etc), are patchy in extent, of variable quality and poorly publicised.
The DWP relies on small surveys to gather claimant data. It lacks any reliable statistics about ethnic minority disabled and carer benefits take-up. This means it cannot test the adequacy of its provision for ethnic minority claimants, nor make planned and strategic improvements.
The DWP assumes it can rely indefinitely on an under-funded, under-resourced and vastly over-stretched voluntary sector, to provide the practical help benefits claimants need to process their applications.
The DWP shows little awareness of the special problems of the struggling ethnic minority voluntary sector, which provides the advisers of choice for many ethnic minority claimants. It has no strategy for assisting ethnic minority advice organisations so they can help their client group more effectively.
Key recommendations to the DWP include:
In a multicultural and gender-divided society, the DWP needs a wide range of methods for communicating benefits information, especially to hard-to-reach claimants such as non- English speaking ethnic minority women.
To overcome widespread ignorance about benefits entitlement and encourage benefits take-up, the DWP needs to run regular high profile promotions via mainstream and ethnic minority media. HM Revenue and Customs's tax return and tax credit campaigns provide a good model here.
The DWP should send benefits information to all homes at least once a year, through dedicated benefits promotion delivery, or by piggy backing onto other direct mail like council tax demands. In areas with large ethnic minority populations, direct mailings should include translated information summaries.
Disability and carer information should be included in school education, and in core professional training for key information providers such as social care, education and health professionals.
For ethnic minority communities where women are particularly isolated, the DWP needs double-pronged marketing strategies - directly targeting women's social networks, and informing women indirectly by telling men about their female relatives' possible entitlements.
Many disabled people and carers have multiple entitlements but only claim for a single benefit. The DWP should amend its systems to ensure that all benefits applications automatically trigger notifications to claimants about any other potential entitlements.
The DWP should ensure ethnic minority disabled and carer benefits claimants with poor English language skills always have prompt access to trained and professional own language facilities. 'Amateurs' (friends, neighbours, children etc) should never be used.
To overcome language and literacy problems among ethnic minority claimants and provide benefits information in a form suitable for use as a community resource, the DWP should work jointly with community organisations to develop story-based video and audio-tape information materials in community languages. Breaking the link between poverty and disability
The DWP should take benefits information and advice directly to venues used by disabled people and carers and include those used by ethnic minority women (e.g. day care centres, GP surgeries, community centres). It should also build outreach partnerships with the voluntary sector, the health service and social services departments, to enable voluntary organisations to set up advice clinics in community locations.
The DWP should take benefits information road shows, presentations, audience participation events etc to mainstream and ethnic minority venues. It should work with ethnic minority arts groups to develop promotional materials that are accessible to their communities.
The DWP needs to ensure that voluntary organisations providing advice and the bulk of support to disabled and carer benefits claimants, receive increased publicly funded support, in particular, voluntary organisations need core funding to help them meet staffing and training needs. Without the extra support to the voluntary sector, it is hard to see how the DWP will be able to fulfil its legal obligations to enable ethnic minority disabled and carer claimants to achieve equality of benefits access.
This might include: funding advice skills training, supporting capacity building initiatives, providing free upto- date information resources, helping with premises and IT needs and building advice partnerships. The DWP could probably produce a revolution in ethnic minority disability and carer benefits take-up, and claim success rates, by developing a strong ethnic minority voluntary sector support strategy.
The DWP should promote the use of modern interactive communication technology located in community premises, to enable disabled and carer claimants to get information and process benefits claims close to home. Such technology can also overcome local staffing limitations by providing 'face-to-face' own language advice to ethnic minority claimants via video link.
The DWP cannot know whether it is serving different communities equally until it carries out systematic ethnic monitoring of all aspects of the benefits claiming process. It should aim to issue its first ethnic monitoring data no later than mid 2006.
The DWP has never researched ethnic minority disabled people and carers' benefits experience. It urgently needs to develop a research programme examining the interaction between ethnicity, gender and the disability and carers benefits system.
