As anyone who has had the misfortune of dealing with civil service bureaucracy will know, it can be a complicated endeavour. There is the jargon, the minutes that bleed into hours spent on hold on the phone and, of course, the endless form-filling.
But mastering this red tape – particularly in relation to Britain’s bloated benefits system – can apparently also present extraordinarily lucrative business opportunities.
Just ask Charlie Anderson, a YouTube blogger who says her chronic arthritis and fatigue has rendered her unable to work.
Thanks to her lengthy experience with the welfare system, she is extremely proficient at filling out forms used to claim the Personal Independence Payment [PIP] allowance disability benefit.
So adept has she become in applying for this taxpayer-funded help that she has taken to explaining the ‘tricks of the trade’ to any prospective benefits claimant – for a hefty fee, of course.
For £750, Ms Anderson will provide a three-hour online consultation in which she will discuss the best way to fill out a PIP claim form. If she can work her magic, the pricey up-front outlay will quickly be repaid by the taxpayer.
She also offers a premium service to people whose initial PIP claim was turned down. Her £950 fee includes a four-hour, one-to-one video call during which Ms Anderson will talk them through their ‘mandatory reconsideration’ – civil service-speak for a free appeal.
All from the comfort of her shed-turned-office at the bottom of her garden in Bucknall, Staffordshire.
Whitney Ainscough, a Range Rover-driving 31-year-old mother, boasts 750,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. She says her lifestyle is funded by benefits, claiming in one video posted in May that she receives £1,151.90 a week
Charlie Anderson, a YouTube blogger who says her chronic arthritis and fatigue has rendered her unable to work, charges disability benefit applicants large fees for help explaining the ‘tricks of the trade’
A list of services offered on Ms Anderson’s website, which includes help with PIP claim and review forms
Remarkably, Ms Anderson – whose YouTube tutorials and emotional diatribes against the state of Britain’s benefits system have attracted almost four million views – claims that she has a ‘100 per cent success rate at winning PIP’ and has ‘helped over 150 people receive their PIP claims’.
A video with more than 200,000 views starts with a bouncy, ‘Hi, my name is Charlie and I’m really good at PIP’. She then describes the ‘trickery’ used by the Government’s assessors. If asked whether you can go to the shops or hospital unaided, don’t say yes, she warns, or you won’t be awarded benefits.
Despite the fact that her tutorials have attracted criticism from various quarters, business is apparently booming – with Ms Anderson even seemingly ‘employing’ two people to assist her in administering her customer base.
The 46-year-old is far from the only online influencer – or ‘sickfluencer’ – exploiting a lucrative market in helping claimants navigate the welfare system’s complexities.
Take Whitney Ainscough, who boasts 750,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram. The Range Rover-driving 31-year-old mother from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, says her lifestyle is funded by benefits, claiming in one video posted in May that she receives £1,151.90 a week.
‘Why would I get a job?’ she said. ‘I get your monthly wage in a week. Why would I go out and get a job? I’m living my f***ing best life.’
In another video from earlier this year she advised her followers to withdraw their PIP money in cash so nobody would be able to track what it was being spent on.
It is this sort of abuse of the system that the Government sought to address with its £5billion cuts to the ballooning welfare budget announced earlier this year.
Sir Keir Starmer was forced to abandon his welfare reform plans to avoid a humiliating Commons defeat by his own MPs
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall (pictured) said there would be no further concessions, insisting Labour would not ‘duck the big challenges facing this country’
But the reality is that benefits reform has now been kicked into the long grass pending a review by welfare minister Sir Stephen Timms (pictured) next year
But ministers were this week forced into a humiliating climbdown following a rebellion by Labour MPs. Now there will be no reform of PIP rules until the Government has had time to consider a review of current procedures.
One anonymous Labour MP said the series of U-turns on the bill had turned it into ‘a total clusterf**k of Godzilla proportions’.
Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said: ‘This farcical climbdown is the most humiliating moment of Labour’s first year in office.’
But it’s not hard to see why the Government targeted disability benefits for cuts. Around one in ten working-age adults – some four million people – are claiming either disability or incapacity benefit, up from less than three million six years ago. This means taxpayers are footing a bill of £70billion a year for such claimants – up £20billion since the pandemic.
One of the key factors behind this surge is the number of people reporting mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression as what makes them eligible for PIP.
Earlier this year, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said there was an ‘overdiagnosis’ of mental health conditions, contributing to 1,000 new PIP claimants every day. Even those suffering from conditions such as acne, alcoholism and Tourette syndrome (a neurological condition that causes involuntary, repetitive movements and sounds) are receiving welfare payments.
The Mail can reveal that last year alone, more than £2billion was paid out in benefits to claimants suffering from mixed anxiety and depressive disorders – an average of around £6,600 per claimant.
The figures compiled by the Taxpayers’ Alliance also reveal £291million was spent on almost 47,000 claimants who cited anxiety disorders as their main condition and more than £26million was paid out to help people with obesity.
The rebellion by 49 Labour MPs was by far the biggest revolt of his premiership. Pictured: The Labour rebels that voted against the bill
Another £60million went to 9,000 people claiming to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This absurd liberalisation of the system has not gone unnoticed by bloggers such as Chantelle Knight.
The Southampton-based 43-year-old has told her TikTok followers that sufferers of conditions such as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) don’t need an official medical diagnosis to get benefits but just to show how the condition affects their everyday life – advice echoed by Charlie Anderson. In another TikTok video, Ms Knight said: ‘I have a client with ADHD who is undiagnosed. And I’ve just secured him an award of high rate daily living allowance and low rate mobility [payments made on the basis of how serious the client’s perceived disability is].
‘He doesn’t have a diagnosis. And it just goes to show you can have an abundance of diagnoses and no evidence and not get an award. Equally you can have an abundance of evidence and no diagnosis and get the award.’
Last month, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that Ms Knight had breached advertising rules for ‘potentially harmful’ promotions of a saffron-based food supplement via her website neurodiverselife.co.uk and ‘irresponsibly discouraged’ people from taking medically-prescribed treatments for ADHD. Last night, her website appeared to have been closed.
It would seem that one of the main contributory factors to this trend is the fact that many PIP claimants are no longer obliged to attend a face-to-face assessment.
The switch to assessments carried out over the phone started in the pandemic when lockdowns made in-person ones impossible. Outsourcing firm Maximus, which conducts PIP assessments on behalf of the Government in the north of England and Scotland, says on its website that some assessments can even be completed solely based on the information provided in the initial form.
It then says that ‘if there is not enough information to complete the assessment, you will be invited to attend a consultation’.
‘Most consultations are carried out by telephone,’ it adds, ‘but we may invite you to a video or face-to-face consultation if needed.’
Critics say the use of telephone assessments makes it easier for claimants to exaggerate their symptoms because the assessor is not in a position to scrutinise their condition properly.
In December, former assessor Michael Houston told a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary that ‘people were encouraged to do six cases a day’ and that they received cash incentives to process more.
‘If you did any more than that, you would get £80 per case,’ he added. ‘If the claimant met the highest category [of sickness benefit] then the assessment could be curtailed early. This would allow them to fit in more cases per day.’
As the phone interviews are not recorded, leaving no way of checking if guidelines are being applied properly, the system is vulnerable to abuse. Former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who made the Dispatches documentary, recently argued that returning to face-to-face interviews is vital if the welfare budget is to be brought under control. He said: ‘Record and spot-check all claims, not just rejected ones. Publish all sickness benefit data, daily. How many applied and were approved? How many bonuses were paid? Such transparency could be transformative. A Covid-style live data dashboard would focus minds more than any ministerial edict.’
But to understand why the welfare reforms provoked such outrage, it’s worth looking at what the Government initially wanted to do.
PIP is not means-tested and does not affect other benefits or the benefits cap. It can even be claimed if you are working. It includes a daily living component and a mobility component. To be entitled to the daily living part, claimants need to explain how much difficulty they have performing everyday activities, including tasks such as cooking, washing and getting dressed or undressed.
A points system is used where, for example, requiring supervision or assistance to prepare or cook a simple meal would be awarded four points. Being completely unable to prepare and cook food would warrant eight points. Under the Government’s initial proposals, claimants would have needed to score a minimum of four points on at least one activity to be eligible for that component – rather than a range of different ones. But scrapping the change was one of the Government’s concessions to the rebels on Tuesday.
People claiming daily living payments can receive the standard weekly rate of £73.90 or an enhanced one of £110.40, depending on their level of difficulty performing the relevant tasks.
The mobility part comprises a standard rate of £29.20 per week or an enhanced rate of £77.05 per week. Those who qualify for the higher rate can also choose to exchange this for a car under the Motability scheme.
This arrangement came under fire after it emerged it accounts for one in five new cars sold in Britain and, in March, the Mail revealed that the company behind the scheme is sitting on a £4billion stockpile of reserves – including £1.3billion in cash in the bank.
So many people are now entitled to disability benefits that, in some parts of the country, an astonishing one in five people are in receipt of handouts.
In the Welsh county of Blaenau Gwent, 211 out of every 1,000 people are claiming PIP – the highest proportion in the country.
In Sunderland, the figure stands at 173 per 1,000 people and, in this PIP hotspot on Thursday afternoon, sisters Maureen and Mary Robey and their friend Olga Koch were enjoying the sunshine in the city centre. All three have been claiming PIP for a number of years.
Maureen, 71, said she was finally granted the £600-a-month benefit following a phone consultation.
‘It wasn’t as easy as it could have been to claim PIP,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting to have to answer questions over the phone. I had been told that filling out a form would be all I needed to do. But I filled out a long form and my doctor’s notes were sent over to back up my claim. I expected the money to be sent to my account quickly after.
‘They rang me and asked questions about my COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease], which I didn’t think was necessary.
In Blaenau Gwent, 211 out of every 1,000 people are claiming PIP – the highest proportion in the country. Pictured: Rhymney in Gwent
‘All three of us have been on it for years and it’s helped to make our lives easier, so this uncertainty about it being reformed has caused some concern.’
Mary, 72, said she has anxiety and depression but her PIP claim was initially rejected. ‘I turned to Age Concern for help and they filled out my forms for me,’ she said. ‘It was only after their involvement that I got the help I needed.’
Under PIP terms, new claims cannot be made after reaching state pension age. But if you already get PIP and hit pension age, your payments continue.
Former soldier John Heskett, 73, said he believed there were a number of people in the city fooling the system: ‘There are a lot of kidders out there who are claiming PIP when there’s not a thing wrong with them.
‘I know of people in this town who are claiming and they’re fitter than me. I have problems with my legs and I know I would qualify but I don’t ask for help when I don’t feel I need it.
‘Everyone should be tested properly because people are working the system.’
Back online, Charlie Anderson, as part of her £750 online tutorial, says she will analyse answers to ensure ‘what we write matches your life AND is communicated in a way that suits the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] so they can assess you.’
Ms Anderson, with more than 52,000 YouTube subscribers, then says she can send answers back so the claimant can ‘copy what we wrote straight on to your form’.
She adds: ‘By the end of the meeting, you will feel much better and you will probably have the best nap you have had in years!’
Last night, a spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions hit out at those trying to cash in on the benefits boom.
‘We condemn attempts to charge people for support with their PIP applications, and strongly encourage customers to seek additional support through free channels, such as, the gov.uk website, our dedicated helpline, and relevant charities,’ he said.
‘And we are bringing forward the biggest fraud crackdown in a generation as part of wider plans that will save £9.6billion by 2030 – protecting taxpayers’ money and investing in our public services through our Plan for Change.’
