Burying Bad news at the end of the week

Late on Friday night, the news was finally released on the plan for Personal Independence Payments.

£ 5 billion is to be wiped from the Personal Independence Payments fund, and the application for the benefit is proposed to be made even harder.

Those of us who are weathered and jaded recollect the burying of bad news in government announcements where the outcry can be buried under Monday morning headlines. In this case, the timing of the announcement simply adds to the cruelty you and your party have decided to inflict on disabled people.

The Impact of Benefit Cuts Personally

Benefit reform is not new, and to give some context on how we got here. Your predecessors, back in 1997, also a newly elected government, aptly called New Labour, removed large swathes of disabled people from the then Disability Living Allowance.  I know this because while my peers enjoyed zooming about in their first cars and finding their first jobs, I sat in an office going through a DLA tribunal.

The judges argued between themselves about the distance to the high street to ascertain my ability to walk. The DWP representative shrugged his shoulders when asked about the case against me, as if to say, “I don’t even know why I’m here.”  The panel decided to re-award me three years because “they might be a cure in that time to make you taller”…

Well… I’m still 4ft 4”, and like the rest of the disability community in the U.K., I have gone on to endure the Tory/Lib Dem-backed austerity of the 2010s.

Again, I was impacted by this policy change and the slashing of the benefits bill. The government then reduced people’s eligibility for the enhanced mobility rate from 50m to 20m. I went from an indefinite high rate mobility element on DLA to the standard rate on PIP. I was in the process of having a new Motability car adapted when the brown envelope with the assessment letter fell on the doormat. The half-finished, adapted car had to be returned.

“What am I going to do?” I cried in anguish as an operative from Motability congratulated me on buying my current adapted vehicle. My husband needed to go into debt for it so that I could maintain my independence. The assessment process broke me and left me not wishing to be here anymore; I could not face the fight to challenge the decision.

The U.K. Government Found ‘In Grave and Systemic Violations of Disabled People’s Rights’

My example of how cuts impacted me personally is not the worst of the effects of the draconian measures that the Tories brought in. A United Nations Humans Rights Commission in 2016 found, during the Tory regime, in ‘grave and systemic violations of disabled people’s rights’.

Disabled people, at the hands of the DWP, died. The previous government were not so inclined to share how many disabled people were killed due to the system.

Just last year, the UNHRC found there had been “No significant progress has been made” in the UK to improve disabled people’s rights” in 2024. A significant moment that the BBC Six o’Clock News on that day deemed insignificant to report on.

Before they left office, the Tories discussed reforming the PIP benefit. One suggestion was to replace it with a voucher scheme, among others, as part of the ‘Modernising support for independent living: the health and disability green paper’.

Our responses seemed to have been for nought, for here we are again in 2025, bearing the brunt of austerity cuts. For who and for what?

Economic Growth on the Backs Of Disabled People in this County – again

£1 billion of the savings will be used to create job coach jobs to help disabled people back into work.

Once again, disabled people’s backs are being used to fuel economic growth. Just like the massive contracts and bonuses doled out to disability assessment contractors and assessors in the 2010s.  That’s not including the amount the DWP has spent on fighting appeal claims, which runs into millions. Over £ 50 million, to be precise. Goodness, the number of disabled people that sort of money would help.

Your DWP Minister, Liz Kendall, states she wants to get more people back into work. Pray tell, how can this happen if someone doesn’t have the money or access to the resources in the first place, like PIP enables us to now? Access to Work waiting times that bear the cost of workplace adaptations to enable work for disabled people are a joke.

Witnessing a lifetime’s worth of benefit cuts and support

What we are seeing is a long-term, sustained attack and harm towards disabled people in the UK that is over 25 years old. For context, that’s for most of my adult life.

Today’s cuts will bring further unbearable pain and stress to people already doing their best to make ends meet. Yes, the world has changed recently. We are a sicker nation for austerity, COVID, and services that have either been privatised or disappeared altogether.

I’d appeal to your better nature, Sir Keir. Yet, after witnessing the war on disabled people, I firmly believe that the Labour Party has no genuine desire to help nor engage with the disability community beyond the superficial. Your party’s actions are outright hostile to the disability community and look to further the distress and harm inflicted by the Conservatives.

We are tired of being vilified, tired of fighting for support, and downright furious for being blamed and shouldering other peoples’ mismanagement of the state.

Over 10 million disabled people will remember this the next time they go to the ballot box… if it’s accessible in the first place. What a wasted vote.

Yours,

Exhausted benefit claimaint

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Further reading:

• Book: The War on Disabled People – Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe – Ellen Clifford (Author)
• Book: The Department – How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence – John Pring (Author)
• Website: Disability News Service
• Website: UN calls for ‘corrective measures’ to Tory disability benefit reforms, just as Labour prepares cuts of its own
• Website: UN Rapporteurs Question UK Government Over Benefits Deaths and Austerity – Press Release
• Website: Inclusion London – UNCRDP Report 2024 – UN Committee slams government failure to address disability rights violations