There seems to be some confusion in Westminster about why Britain suddenly has more disabled people. You’d think the mass-disabling global pandemic we all lived through about five minutes ago might provide a clue.
Politicians stare gravely at graphs. Newspapers discover another alarming “surge”. Diagnosis rates are discussed with suspicion and Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is once again under review.
The reality is that Britain went through a mass disabling event.
Better diagnosis
Meanwhile, clinical research and greater awareness have allowed healthcare professionals to recognise conditions previously overlooked, including autism, ADHD and fluctuating or invisible illnesses.
So perhaps this terrible mystery doesn’t require Hercule Poirot after all. Yet Westminster increasingly seems preoccupied not with why Britain has become sicker, but with how many of those people should receive financial support.
When reform becomes rhetoric
The government’s Timms Review concluded in its interim report that PIP is “not fit for purpose”.
There are plenty of disabled people who will agree. Assessments can be dehumanising, decisions inconsistent and fluctuating conditions poorly understood. Reforming that hostility would wholly be welcomed.
Armchair critics making arbitrary decisions
But there is an enormous difference between reforming how PIP treats disabled people and deciding too many disabled people receive PIP.
That distinction matters because Westminster does not conduct these conversations in a vacuum. For years, political rhetoric has trained the public to look suspiciously at rising disability expenditure.
Why are claims increasing?
Why are diagnoses increasing?
How much does PIP cost?
Eventually somebody was going to realise there were votes available in supplying a very simple answer that Disabled people are the problem. Enter Reform UK.
The media helped set the stage
Westminster hasn’t created this atmosphere alone. Parts of the media have spent years turning social security for disabled people into daytime entertainment.
The Jeremy Vine show on Channel 5 has repeatedly used disability and social security for provocative debates. Discussing the rise in people too ill to work after Covid, Vine even suggested there was “something fishy going on”.
Something fishy? After a mass disabling pandemic? Come on now.
The irony peaked this week when Vine stepped down from hosting the Carers UK Awards following a backlash from carers and disabled people over his programme’s coverage.
Spend years asking whether too many people are sick, diagnosed or receiving social security and suspicion becomes the starting point. You create fertile ground for a political party willing to turn that suspicion into policy.
Reform’s scapegoat
And so, Reform’s “Making Welfare Work” proposals go considerably further than reviewing PIP.
The party proposes replacing existing working-age disability support with a new “Health Security Allowance” and “Disability Support Accounts”, as part of plans it says would cut annual social security expenditure by £50 billion.
Its document talks about protecting people with severe disabilities while removing unconditional cash support from what it calls “mild cases”.
Orwellian language
And there it is. One of Britain’s oldest political traditions. The deserving disabled person and the undeserving disabled person. The properly disabled over here. The suspicious ones over there.
This is how making disabled people poorer becomes politically saleable. You don’t say: “We’re taking money away from disabled people.” You say: “We’ll protect the most severely disabled.” Which sounds lovely until somebody asks the obvious question: Who decides how disabled is disabled enough?
Think before you write
Someone can walk and still be profoundly disabled. Someone can work and need PIP. Someone can look perfectly healthy while experiencing seizures, debilitating pain or cognitive dysfunction. Someone can manage something on Monday and be unable to do it on Tuesday.
Disability is complicated. Political slogans aren’t. Reform did not create the suspicion surrounding disabled people. It is capitalising on rhetoric Westminster and the media has spent years helping to normalise.
Words have consequences
You cannot repeatedly tell the public there is something alarming about the number of disabled people receiving social security and then clutch your pearls when somebody turns that anxiety into a political weapon.
You cannot keep pouring petrol around the room and act surprised when Reform arrives carrying matches.
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And then there’s the timing
Reform’s timing is interesting too. Nigel Farage fought the Clacton by-election on 13 August. Reform unveiled its £50 billion social-security package immediately afterwards.
Why does that matter? Well, around 15.3% of working-age adults in Clacton receive PIP – almost twice the England and Wales average.
A considerable number of Farage’s voters therefore receive the very social security his party was about to propose radically restricting. Perhaps waiting until after polling day was entirely coincidental but was certainly convenient.
Blame another minority group
The formula is familiar. Find an enormous number, attach it to a minority, make people angry about it, then promise to save everyone else money by getting tough with them. But Reform didn’t invent suspicion of disabled people. It simply capitalised on it.
Diagnosis doesn’t create disability
There is one fairly substantial problem with the growing suspicion around diagnosis. Diagnosis does not create disability it merely recognises it.
An autistic person diagnosed at 35 was autistic at 34. A woman whose ADHD was missed throughout childhood didn’t acquire it in an assessment room.
For decades we failed to recognise conditions in people who didn’t resemble the textbook stereotype. Better recognition means more diagnoses; it doesn’t mean those conditions suddenly appeared.
And diagnosis can also help people understand and manage their conditions, actually improving outcomes.
PIP isn’t unemployment social security
This conversation would be considerably less irritating if everyone remembered what PIP actually does. You can work and receive PIP.
PIP exists because disability is notoriously expensive. Especially during a cost of living crisis. Heating, electricity, equipment, accessible transport, mobility aids, assistance, specialist clothing and taxis when public transport isn’t accessible.
Whack-a-Mole
Removing PIP does not remove those costs. It removes the money disabled people use to pay them. Remove accessible transport that allows somebody to work? Congratulations. You’ve saved some PIP and potentially lost their income tax.
Remove support keeping someone independent? Excellent. Social care can pick up the bill. Allow someone’s health to deteriorate? Never mind. The NHS famously has loads of spare capacity. The spreadsheet marked “PIP” may look magnificent. Just don’t open any of the other spreadsheets.
The £274 billion elephant in the room
Then there is the Purple Pound. The spending power of disabled people and their households is estimated at around £274 billion a year.
Disabled people work, pay tax, run businesses and spend money throughout the economy. Yet whenever Westminster discusses disability economics, we mysteriously transform from workers, consumers, business owners and taxpayers into one enormous DWP expenditure figure.
Our social security is counted. Our economic contribution vanishes. It’s an impressive magic trick. Disabled people aren’t outside the economy. We are the economy.
We’ve seen this film before
Disabled people have good reason to become nervous when politicians promise reforms will only target those who don’t really need support.
We remember austerity and the “strivers and skivers” rhetoric, reassessments, shrinking social care and assurances that the most vulnerable would be protected.
We remember people becoming poorer and sicker. And we remember people dying.
We’ve seen this film. The ending was shit.
An inhumane system
In 2016, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities concluded that UK policies had led to “grave or systematic violations” of disabled people’s rights.
When it examined Britain again in 2024, it found insufficient progress and evidence of regression.
So forgive disabled people if promises that this time only the right people will lose support fail to produce wild enthusiasm.
Poverty is not physiotherapy
If Westminster genuinely wants more disabled people working, let’s discuss inaccessible workplaces and transport, employers refusing reasonable adjustments, inflexible work, inadequate social care, NHS waiting lists and discrimination. Let’s discuss how societal reform is what’s needed.
These problems require investment, enforcement and employers changing their behaviour but it is considerably easier to stare suspiciously at a disabled person.
And so we return to the wonderfully simple theory that if someone is made poor enough, perhaps their body will start behaving itself.
Unfortunately poverty is not physiotherapy. A reassessment cannot cure Long Covid. Removing PIP doesn’t make the bus accessible. A work coach cannot negotiate with multiple sclerosis. And you cannot bully an autoimmune condition into submission.
Stand with us, not against us
Social security isn’t charity. It’s the promise that illness, disability, accident or sheer terrible luck will not automatically mean destitution.
There aren’t taxpayers over here and disabled people over there. Millions of disabled people are taxpayers. And every healthy person is one accident, infection or diagnosis away from discovering exactly what the system looks like from the other side.
Millionaire politicians, funded by billionaire nihilists
When politicians promise billions in painless savings by targeting disabled people, remember that the savings aren’t painless to the people they’re taken from.
Britain went through austerity. Then it went through a pandemic that disabled more people.
Now its growing disabled population is being treated as evidence that something has gone wrong with social security rather than evidence that something has gone wrong with the health of Britain.
We are better than this
If we learned anything from austerity, it should be that disabled people cannot once again become acceptable casualties of making the numbers add up.
This time, stand beside us before the cuts happen. Not afterwards, when the inquiries begin.
Thank you to Ray Casey for contributing to this article.
