DLA To Be Changed - Hello, Little Lady

I’ve stayed clear of this for some time now as it’s a subject that makes me severely depressed. The universal benefit Disability Living Allowance is to be renamed to Personal Independent Payments. All claimants are to be reassessed except those with a terminal illness. This is the point where I hang my head and cry.

Why?

Here we go again, is all I can think. More strangers deciding on what I am or not capable of doing, more strangers making judgements on how I try to go about my life who usually know little, and usually knowing nothing about my particular form of dwarfism (I usually get asked what it is!)

There’s no magic pill that is going to make me taller and quite frankly I find the undercurrents that this is something I should wish for, as quite an insult. Would this be asked of of a person who is not white? Or for someone of a particular faith?

Better stop myself before I get into a complete rant. All I know is that in receiving DLA it help to redress the imbalances that I face on a day to day basis. That it enables me to access work and to remove it, would mean that I would be unable to in the sense that this government seems to deem the notion of work as. This goes against the logic of what this government is trying to achieve by getting people into work.

I also worry what this means in terms of gaining access to the Motability scheme in the future. There seems to be scant answers from the coalition so far. Though we all should accept changes to benefits to some degree, I hope the government will realise that this is one particular group of society that feels change the most and find it hardest to adapt to, no matter how much we try to. Especially when we’ve worked a lifetime to put the systems in place to enable us to function to some degree of ‘normality’.

Anyhow, I’ve read the executive summary of the proposals and will be reviewing the main body at a later date.

I strongly urge you to do the same and get involved.

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