Barnabas Crist Bal

Incapacity Benefit Barnabas Crist Bal

Publisher Marketing: Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Incapacity Benefit (IB) is a United Kingdom state benefit that is paid to those below the State Pension age who cannot work because of illness or disability and have made National Insurance contributions. It is administered by Jobcentre Plus (an executive agency of the Department for Work and Pensions). As of May 2011 there were 2.6m people of working age in Britain claiming incapacity benefit, approximately 8.5% of the total adult workforce in the United Kingdom, at an annual cost to the tax payer of 12.5 billion. Incapacity Benefit was originally introduced to replace Invalidity Benefit and Sickness Benefit in 1995 and was in its turn replaced by Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) in 2008. Some individuals who were already receiving Incapacity Benefit before the introduction of ESA have continued to do so provided they have remained eligible. They have been subject to a periodic "personal capability assessment" to establish that they remained incapable of work. When ESA was introduced the intention was to transfer some of the Incapacity Benefit claimants to ESA on a rolling basis between 2010 and 2014 using the ESA "Work Capability Assessment" (WCA).