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Compensation for Disability

The Social and Economic Objectives of Disability Benefits*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Helen Bolderson
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Abstract

Difficulties encountered in the transfer of money to a minority group in society are explored. Should benefits for disabled people seek to mitigate earnings loss, functional incapacity or damage? Should they take the form of contingency benefits, merited payment, or compensatory and reparatory ‘gifts’? What are the reasons for the different approaches adopted in the War Pensions, Industrial Injuries, and Invalidity Benefit schemes?

An historical account of the development of these schemes shows that payments related to attributed characteristics or ‘condition’ avoid the pitfalls of undue stress on status, performance and achievement inherent in alternative, and apparently more integrative, benefits. Payments related to condition accentuate ‘difference’ but if they represent a collective liability for society's vicariously caused diswelfares, they need not be experienced as stigmatizing. It may therefore be possible to conceive of a compensatory / reparatory payment for all disabled people, as of right, independent of insurance status, average life earnings, current wage, and other measured achievements. To avoid ‘physiological and psychological means testing’ the basic payment would be assessed on a disabled person's assumed ‘loss of faculty’ but, in the interest of equity, individual measurements of functional limitation may be necessary for additional cash benefits and services.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , July 1974 , pp. 193 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

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28 The number of Special Hardship Allowances in payment at 30 September 1970 was 143,000 compared with 17,000 on 31 December 1949, an eight-fold increase. In the same period the number of Disability Pensions in payment rose from 39,000 to 205,000, a five-fold increase. The relatively slower rise in the number of Disability Pensions is partly accounted for by an increase in the number of gratuities awarded. In 1970, 41 per cent of Allowances in payment had been awarded in conjunction with gratuities, compared with 17 per cent in 1951. The number of Allowances in payment at any one time are also affected by the age and sex composition of the recipients of Industrial Disablement Benefit and by the duration of the Pensions paid. National insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, 1946. Report by the Government Actuary on First and Second Quinquennial Reviews, 1955 and 1960, H.C. 22 and H.C. 300, London: HMSO. Department of Health and Social Security Annual Report, 1971, Cmd. 5019, London: HMSO, Table 97.

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