Martin Lewis issues message to people worried about DWP PIP benefit change proposalsThe Martin Lewis Podcast
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00:00 Nothing has happened. Nothing has happened. This is an early stage consultation green paper.
00:09 These things do not happen quickly. This is a general election year so there's a question
00:14 whether it will happen at all. So for those who were worried about this, and I've had people who
00:19 tell me they've had to increase their medication on the back of it, people who tell me they haven't
00:23 been sleeping on the back of these announcements, I know it's easy for me to say and I know it's
00:28 hard to do, but for the moment my advice if you're worried about it is forget it. This is in the
00:34 political sphere and too often that political spittle travels across and hits people in the
00:40 face. We've had it on student finance for years where the language used in political debate
00:44 actually puts people from non-traditional university backgrounds off going to university
00:49 because it's deliberately being used to ramp up the invective and to ramp up the political distaste
00:54 in the system and that's fine within a political discourse but when it hits into the way that
00:59 people behave practically that's when it becomes a problem and I think the debate this week,
01:04 while it was meant to be constrained within a political sphere in an election year,
01:09 has had a practical impact on some people's mental health and it is very difficult to know
01:15 how to separate the two. So I'm not saying blame that we can't have political discussion,
01:19 that isn't the point I'm making, but I felt that in my position the best thing was to say
01:24 to those people who are panicked about it nothing has happened.