First UK Thalidomider To Marry Must Prove She Is Not Fit For Work

A Thalidomide victim who is blind in one eye, partially deaf and can barely walk is being stripped of welfare payments – because officials say she is not ‘disabled’ enough to be out of work.

Martine White, 50, was left severely disabled after her mother took the anti-sickness drug while pregnant with her during the 1960s.

She can barely dress herself or even brush her hair, uses a wheelchair and will undergo spinal surgery later this year.

But despite her disabilities the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has written to Mrs White saying she will lose her her £110 a week Employment and Support Allowance as she cannot prove she is unfit to work.

The former care assistant from Burnley, Lancashire, has now been served with court papers and must attend a tribunal where she will have to prove her disabilities to a judge.

In a report a DWP inspector said: ‘She is not entitled to the support component on the grounds that she does not have limited capability for work related activity.’

Today Mrs White, a widow who pays the mortgage on her adapted house herself plus council tax,  said: ‘Visually you only need to take one look at me to know there is no chance I can possibly go to work.

‘If I was to get a job I would need my carer to go with me full time. I need to be aided even to go to the toilet and I don’t think a prospective employer would even employ me knowing that I had to have a carer with me.

‘I have been having a lot of accidents lately and I keep falling over because I am unstable on my feet and go dizzy quickly,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be fit or safe to work. I have to have someone to get me up in the morning and help get me dressed.’

Mrs White, who needs a wheelchair to get around, has to use a stair lift, while her carer helps her make tea and brushes her hair.

‘Because of my Thalidomide, like so many others, I have arthritis,’ she said. ‘It is because of the way I have had to manipulate my body over the years in order to try and live a normal life.’

‘What anyone else finds a normal chore has killed us because we have had to use our bodies in a different way. I’m sure the judge will take one look at me and say ‘why are you here?”

Mrs White was one of 10,000 children born with disfigurements after the thalidomide anti-sickness drug was given to pregnant women in the 1950s and 1960s.

She married her late husband Michael who was also a Thalidomide victim in 1981 – the first Thalidomide couple to be married in Britain. In 2004 she underwent surgery to remove a brain tumour and retired from her job as a result.

She now requires a carer seven days a week, needs a lift to help her up the stairs and is permanently on medication to help relieve  constant pain. Trouble with her benefits began last year after Mrs White received a letter notifying her of a changeover from incapacity benefits to Employment and Support Allowance.

Just a few weeks later, in July, she received another letter saying she was no longer entitled to benefits and she must go on a work training course. The family appealed and the decision was overturned.

But last October she was re-contacted by the DWP and told once again she should not be claiming benefits. A further appeal was rejected, although she can still continue claiming £154 a week in Disability Living Allowance.

Mrs White, who has four children and five grandchildren, added: ‘I can’t sit for a long time because it is uncomfortable. I am blind in one eye, I have an artificial hip and I am waiting for spinal surgery. I am unsteady with my balance and I am deaf in both ears and need hearing aids.

‘It is like no one has looked at these medical reports from my past – I even have a full adapted automatic car which you can only get on mobility. I have no teeth either because I have had to open things with my teeth.

‘I have also got arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis – you name it. As a Thalidomide [victim] we have to use our bodies in a different way and this has set in.’

Mrs White said she cannot sit for a long period of time so would be no good in the office and cannot hear properly so a job in telecommunications would be ‘out of the question.’

Action: Mrs White has appealed against the DWP’s decision (above is her letter from HM Courts & Tribunals Service)

Mrs White said was ‘disgusted’ by the DWP’s decision and labelled its officers ‘jobsworths.’

‘If the support is taken away from my full-time carers I would have to rely on family,’ she said. ‘I have three boys and a girl. I can’t ask the boys to help me shower – it is undignified,’ she said.

Her son Carl White, a joiner, 32, said: ‘This country has too much red tape and not enough common sense. The DWP are just idiots – I just can’t understand what they are doing. It’s an insult.’

A DWP spokesman said: ‘The old incapacity benefits system condemned too many people to a life on benefits with little hope of moving back to work. Now people who can work will be given help to find a job while those who need unconditional support will get it.

‘A decision on whether someone is well enough to work is taken after consideration of all the supporting medical evidence provided by the claimant, but everybody has the right to appeal a decision if they disagree with it.’

The Government’s crackdown on disability benefits will accelerate in April, when Disability Living Allowance will gradually be replaced by the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is being introduced in an attempt to cut the nation’s benefits bill.

To get the PIP, people must have a face-to-face assessment, rather than simply filling out a form. In the past decade, the number of people receiving DLA has soared by more than a third, from 2.4million to 3.3million.

The cost to the taxpayer is now £13billion a year. An astonishing seven out of ten claimants – 71 per cent – have been offered the benefit for life without any checks to see if they still need it, according to the Department for Work and Pensions.