Sue Powell, Gloucestershire Socialist Party
A decade ago, Work Capability Assessments (WCAs) and a raft of other measures caused such despair among disabled people that a House of Commons committee investigated claims of an increased suicide rate. It was found to be true but nothing changed.
WCAs are brutal, arduous, harrowing and often flawed – a big proportion are subject to appeal, a high number of those successful. One Socialist Party member was assessed by someone who confessed she had never heard of her neurological condition before.
‘Overhauling’ the benefits system meant 70,000 claimants transferred to Employment and Support Allowance were underpaid between 2011 and 2014. 5,000 people whose benefits were cut in error died before receiving what they were owed. Shockingly, University of York researchers found 57,550 more deaths than normally expected in 2010-14 could be linked to cuts in public health and social care.
In 2019 nearly 7 million people living in poverty were either disabled or in a household with a disabled person. This had risen to 8.7 million by 2023. The share of welfare spending devoted to disability benefits has increased for a number of reasons: the increased state pension age, effects of the pandemic, long Covid, long waiting lists for NHS care and the crisis in mental health and lack of support.
We gained an idea of what this means at a recent Socialist Party campaign stall. One woman with impaired mobility told us she had forced herself to get out of her first-floor two-room emergency accommodation that she shares with her husband and two sons – young disabled adults. They’d been made homeless because their landlord (a church) had registered personal need, where residents must have been officially recognised and receiving government support for their disabilities. She was terrified for her sons. Although stairs were hard for her, she had to get out because her mental health was suffering.
30 minutes later, a regular buyer of the Socialist told us of her neighbours’ struggles accessing social care for their disabled son.
If it was bad before, these new cuts will make it worse. They will be announced with the customary hypocrisy about helping people, twinned with accusations of skiving and faking. The Resolution Foundation suggest the proposed cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) will lead to between 800,000 and 1.2 million disabled people losing £4,200 – £6,300 a year by 2029-30. Labour wants to save £5 billion in benefits yet nearly £23 billion worth of social security and social tariffs goes unclaimed – partly because people don’t know their entitlements, but also due to the tiresome hurdles and humiliation attached to making a claim.
A United Nations report in 2024 criticised the UK benefits system as a “pervasive framework and rhetoric that devalues disabled people’s lives,” which “tells disabled people that they’re undeserving citizens” and makes “people feel like criminals”. A government that bails out water companies, finances RAF missions over Gaza, wants to increase military spending while forcing the poorest further into poverty are the real criminals.
