A disabled Socialist Party member
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has published a list of ‘emerging recommendations’ for reforming the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) disability benefit. It is now putting those recommendations to a set of top-down consultation events.
Some of those recommendations are of great concern. But what’s even more striking is what’s missing – what we’re not supposed to discuss, because it has already been decided.
Pre-determined outcome
The government is quite frank about how the PIP assessment will become “the single gateway for all health-related and disability benefits” by merging into the Universal Credit Work Capability Assessment.
Conflating fitness to work with the cost of disability, in and out of work, is entirely inappropriate. It is a huge change that the review will not permit us to debate.
It also means that the Timms Review is actually a review of the entire welfare system by stealth. Many changes hinge on the conclusion of the review, such as replacing incapacity benefits with time-limited insurance.
Ministers, including Timms, have been frank that they still intend to remove some benefits entirely from disabled people under the age of 22.
The government is preparing its case with the Milburn Review into youth unemployment and the Fonagy review into supposed ‘overdiagnosis’ of disability, both to report soon.
The role of the hated private sector in disability assessments is presented as an accomplished fact.
Disability poverty
PIP, as it currently exists, is an inadequate contribution to the real cost of disability. Out of necessity, it is also used by many disabled people, not to meet the cost of disability, but the cost of living.
Disabled people are disproportionately in severe poverty. Disabled workers face a growing disability pay gap of £2.35 an hour – with non-disabled workers earning 17.2% more.
And disabled people who can’t work, if they are new claimants, are £2,400 worse off per year as a result of last year’s Universal Credit cuts. The new proposals risk cuts to the already insufficient elements of PIP that address disability poverty.
Reject ‘cost-categories’
The Timms Review is pointing towards moving away from cash awards based on functional impairments, such as ability to wash, or walk 20 metres. Instead, it is looking at ‘cost categories’.
Such an overly bureaucratic model will require disabled people to account for every penny and beg the DWP to approve each item of spending.
The review also proposes reducing awards in place of offering aids, clothes, bedding, and services directly.
What services? Healthcare and social services have been gutted. Will they be funded, or is the review expecting disabled people to replace cut services out of our own awards – in effect, a new completely regressive tax?
Fight for needs-based funding
There has been a consistent trend, since the introduction of PIP under the 2010-15 Cameron-Clegg coalition government, and continuing public sector austerity, to move away from assessed needs.
Disguised by rhetoric of independence, choice and control, disabled people are instead given ‘personal budgets.’ If our needs are not capable of being properly met out of those personal budgets, then those needs are left unmet.
This is backwards. Disabled people should have choice, control and independence, including personal budgets as one aspect of meeting our needs.
The goal must be to meet those needs, including through well-funded public services – not for the government to pick and choose a ‘contribution towards the cost’ at a level the Treasury dictates.
Prepare to defeat Timms
These cuts would already be in place if not for the thunderous protests of disabled people last year.
We urgently need a “coalition of the willing” to mobilise in emergency defence of disabled people and carers, who are once again under siege and fighting to win.
