Apparently Mr Timms is going to make some changes to eligibility to the Mobility scheme next year, they have not finished with us yet. If the mobility scheme was so bad why did the conservatives not address the issue when in power.
I wish that all parties would be honest about the fact that Motability doesn’t determine who is eligible for the scheme, the DWP does. Also, whether we agree with it or not, the events of the past few weeks have perhaps been an inevitable outcome of the decision (made by the last government) to classify mental health issues at the same level as physical disabilities. The great British public (and, in turn, the main political parties) seem to now want anyone in a Motability car to very obviously ‘look’ disabled, which takes the scheme back to its early years and original purpose.
If that’s what all the big parties want to achieve, they have two options as I see it. They either reverse the decision to treat mental health conditions on a par with physical disabilities (personally, I can’t see that happening as it would be subject to no end of legal challenges) or they completely re-write the criteria that triggers the higher rate mobility component of PIP etc. My money would be on the latter but, even that won’t be an easy journey. As with all these things, they are easy to say but much harder to implement.