Tory MP attacks Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms as “unethical, unworkable nonsense”

Dr Sarah Wollaston, chair of the Health Select Committee and Conservative MP for Totnes, has openly lambasted Iain Duncan Smith’s plans to make it so that mental health patients will be denied benefits unless they go to treatment.

Existing rules say that the people who suffer from mental health difficulties cannot be forced to go to treatment in order to gain access to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).  The plans that would overturn this current rule – meaning people would have to further prove that they have an illness to get ESA – could effect up to 260,000 people.

The Daily Mirror reported that Dr Wollaston MP has delivered a scathing and public cut-down to the Work and Pensions Secretary’s plans, when she posted on Twitter: “Presumably this complete tosh planted by someone who has no understanding of consent to treatment…this unethical, unworkable kite flying comes from someone with no brain.”

Health Minister and Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb, echoed Dr Wollaston MP’s criticism of the plan, saying “The idea that you frogmarch someone into therapy with the threat of a loss of benefits simply won’t work. You actually need someone to go into therapy willingly.”

Iain Duncan Smith is yet to respond to his fellow Tory MP and since it’s said he might be on the way out in Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle tomorrow, perhaps he won’t need to. Let’s hope that if he does lose his cabinet position that whoever replaces him (to  borrow Dr Wollaston MP’s words) has a brain, so they can sort out this mess…