The spring budget has been announced and a new round of cuts to social security for disabled people is in the pipeline dubbed ‘austerity 2.0’. So let’s delve into what happened the first time around.
Austerity was a political choice
Austerity first came to our shores through David Cameron‘s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010. The then chancellor, George Osborne, announced on 9 September 2010 a new fiscal policy. It was one that disabled people would bear the brunt of, and that would end up killing thousands of vulnerable people, triggering an intervention by the United Nations.
Calum‘s list
When social security cuts were first implemented, it saw the removal/reduction of income from hundreds of thousands of people. As a result, many disabled people started killing themselves. Disabled people, their loved ones and disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) asked their MPs – begged their MPs – for intervention, and were largely unheard. They asked for the government to track the effect austerity was having on disabled people’s lives and how many people were dying because of it. The government refused. This is when Calum‘s list was born. Disabled people and their loved ones came together to count their dead. You can view the list here alongside the stories that led to the deaths.
No way out
Austerity continued with every change of prime minister. No matter who was steering the ship disabled people were still being thrown overboard. I have some personal experience with this on a forced sabbatical from university. Because they were unable to meet my needs as a disabled person, I was put in a situation that I simply could not get out of. I was given around £30 a week to live on, to cover all expenses. There was a particular point during this time in my life that I remember vividly. I was suffering from kidney failure at the time and I had no money for a bus to get to my doctor’s appointment, so I walked the hour there and the hour back. Several times along the way I stopped to throw up, and once I collapsed. I was late to my appointment and I didn’t even get to see a doctor. So, it was all for nothing. As I lay on a grass verge on the side of a motorway, I questioned how do I go on?
Judgement day
This was the reality for many people like me. We were being persecuted and taken to court by the government for money that we are legally owed. Even cancer patients weren’t safe from this cruel policy. Imagine having a round of chemotherapy and having to pull yourself together enough to go and sit in front of a judge to prove you are ill and not able to work. The reality is that 82% of tribunals of disabled people were overturned. It actually costs the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) more to implement this policy than to just pay disabled people what they are legally owed.
Hate crime
Disability hate crime also rose dramatically and people were openly hostile to a disabled person taking up space in public. “Scrounger” still echoes in my mind every single day. Can you imagine, just trying to live your life, but having the fear that somebody could do something vindictive and discriminatory towards you at any point? Every day you live life on the edge and there are very few safe spaces to climb down from that edge.
Cause and effect
Anybody who hoped that the savage austerity of the 2010–2015 Tory/Lib Dem coalition would end after the 2015 general election, was in for a shock. George Osborne remained as Chancellor, but the Tories didn’t have the Lib Dems to restrain them now. The result was a four-year benefit freeze from 2016 to 2020. As predicted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, it drove another 400,000 people into poverty. The current projections state that 250,000 people will be forced into poverty. 50,000 of them are children. That first benefit freeze was indicative of an attitude that pervaded the entire UK government, particularly the DWP. It generated a mindset at all levels within the DWP that it was dealing with the undeserving poor, and they needed to be taught a lesson.
Fit for work
In 2017, just one year after the start of the benefit freeze, Stephen Smith, who suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and osteoarthritis, had his Employment Support Allowance (ESA) payments stopped. A work capability assessment (WCA) found 64-year-old Stephen “fit for work”. Photographs emerged of an emaciated Stephen in hospital after pneumonia left him unable to walk. He died two years later. There is a direct link between the Chancellor of the Exchquer talking about people “sleeping off a life on benefits” at the Conservative Party Conference, and the death of people such as Stephen Smith.
The following year in April 2018 another claimant, Jamie Oliver, submitted his Personal Independence Payment (PIP) forms. He tried twice to gain the money he needed but was denied. In August 2019 a date was set for an appeal hearing in September. However Jamie, who was suffering from terminal cancer, had died on April 9 2019. Jamie’s brother Dave Smith offered to bring his ashes along for them to decide whether he was fit for work or not. As you can see, things were not improving.
Stronger together
Resilient as we always are, disabled people banded together and brought about several disabled people‘s organisations (DPOs) in order to fight back against the horrors and the persecution that the government was placing upon them due to ‘welfare reform’ – aka cuts. The Spartacus Network, led by Sue Marsh, produced a Beyond the Barriers report for parliament showing the impact the reforms were having on disabled people’s lives. Linked below are DPOs that are still active since the first round of cuts.
I also point you to the Disability News Service who do an incredible job of keeping the public informed.
Within a couple of weeks of the Labour government’s first spring budget, a new grassroots campaign called ‘Crips Against Cuts’ was launched and has garnered lots of support online, with their movement growing daily.
NHS pressures
Now I hope the government has the NHS prepared for these proposed cuts. Because stress makes many health conditions worse. During the first round of austerity the NHS saw a significant increase in disabled people needing access to services because they were becoming more sick due to stress and anxiety that exacerbated their conditions.
Whilst disabled people are trying to manage their health with an ever-dwindling NHS, they are also simultaneously being asked to prove just how sick they are. The forms for PIP are 50 pages long and you have one month to return it. Fifty pages of describing everything you cannot do. What do you think this does to a person’s mind when they are literally just trying to survive? What do you think it does to their families who are often providing unpaid care?
They also serve who work unpaid
The unpaid carers who are working every hour of every day, who then have to complete a tome to prove to the government that their loved one is incapacitated. All it takes is a letter from the person‘s doctors to let the DWP know that this person cannot work, but the DWP are well known for ignoring these letters, to the point where they will hide them, often stating that they have been ‘lost in transit’.
Heartless bureaucracy
So how do disabled people solve the problem of claim forms going missing? Pay extra, of course, in the form of recorded delivery, to ensure that there’s proof that the forms have been sent. That is of course if you receive the forms promptly, which doesn’t always occur. This gives you less time to complete them, so then you have to phone the DWP helpline to ask for an extension. When you ring them, you will wait on hold from anywhere between two and six hours with a 30-second excerpt from the same piece of music played on repeat. You will never want to hear Vivaldi’s Four Seasons again!
There goes that song again
The DWP actually did drop this from the hold music in 2020 and replaced it with 20 minutes of eight unnamed tracks. While slightly better, between each track it makes a click so you get prepared for somebody to answer your call. This doesn’t happen, of course. The music starts again, over and over and over and over, for up to six hours and potentially beyond. This is psychological torture even the CIA wouldn’t implement.
Waiting
Once your forms are in you then have to have a gruelling face-to-face assessment going over everything in your application. This takes at least an hour. Many assessment centres aren’t actually accessible to disabled people, so you turn up, can’t access your appointment and are put down as a no-show, which means you have to start the process all over again. By now it will have taken you months to get to this point. If you do manage to go through the assessment you can currently face up to a 34-week wait for an answer.
Was it all worth it?
This whole process – which has driven many disabled people to suicide, has increased their impairments and put immense pressure on loved ones – is all because of the supposed fraud rate. In 2023–2024, the fraud rate for PIP was 0.1%, a decrease from 0.2% in the previous financial year. The majority of this was down to clerical error.
Job seekers
Another apparent bright idea from the government is to give more money to job seekers on universal credit and reduce the amount given to disabled people who are unable to work. I’d highly recommend reading this article on what it’s actually like to seek work as a disabled person.
Once you get through the door you can often find that ‘disability friendly’ workplaces are far from it. For example, it took a friend of mine two years to obtain a chair suitable for their desk. This was two years of completely unnecessary agony which impacted their work performance. I believe, alongside many in the disabled community, the onus should be on employers to make workplaces suitable. Not only that, but the attitude surrounding the way in which we work needs to change. A 9–5 work week won’t cut it. Disabled people often have no control over when they are able to have a sufficient output during a 9–5 day. But, they can produce work on their own terms within their own time limits. The attitude around this absolutely must change.
Reality check
So, what happens when a government makes changes to social security? A recent report by the BBC discovered that teenagers who are moved from Disability Living Allowance (PIP replaced this for adults) to PIP once they turn 16, found that one third are denied this crucial social security measure. Yet the Labour government still wants to target PIP specifically.
Now, let’s go back. What happened when austerity hit those moving from Incapacity Benefit/Severe Disablement Allowance to Employment Support Allowance? From December 2011 to February 2014, 81,140 people died waiting for money they are legally owed. They died worrying about bills.
This is not a thing of the past. The Trussell Trust published statistics recently that found almost one in five people receiving universal credit and disability benefits used a food bank within the last month, and 77% have gone without essentials in the past six months.
You’re such an inspiration
The irony of this situation is that disabled people are seen as inspirational on one side of the coin, but on the flipside we are a burden to society and when we die in our thousands there is a distinct lack of outcry. What you likely don’t know is that the majority of disabled people are in work. It’s truly bewildering that this Labour government would look at targeting a tool such as PIP, that helps support working disabled people. It is cruel and unnecessary considering that there is actually an apparent alternative.
Redistribution of wealth
Dale Vince, a Labour Party donor and multimillionaire has called for a wealth tax. He is part of the campaign group ‘Patriotic Millionaires UK’. He states a 2% tax on accumulated wealth over £10 million would affect just 20,000 people as opposed to the proposed cuts which will affect hundreds of thousands of working and non-working disabled people. It is the difference between forcing somebody onto the bread line and potentially to their death or one less holiday a year for a multimillionaire. I know which I would choose. It begs the question: what are the true motives behind Rachel Reeves and her cuts?
Thank you to Ray Casey for contributing
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