This government is about to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands – possibly even millions – of disabled people, and hardly anyone is fighting to stop it, because they believe the government when they say, “the most vulnerable will be protected.” It is simply not true.
Most of the disabled people who are going to lose so much of their income (or even all their income) are not fighting the reforms because they have been sold as “weeding out the fakers.” People haven’t read the proposals to learn that, actually, that is not the case. The Welfare Reform Bill has nothing to do with reducing the fraud rate and is all about taking money from those who need it.
The one statistic that really sums up the brutality of the bill for me is this: They are cutting Disability Living Allowance (DLA) by 20% despite the fact that only 0.5% of claims are fraudulent. One in five of the 3.2 million recipients of DLA will be losing that benefit, even though only one in every two hundred is a fraud. That’s not about taking the money away from people who don’t need it, and there’s no protecting of the vulnerable here. In fact, it’s making people like me even more vulnerable? At the moment I can manage to do things like shopping by myself, all thanks to the support that DLA allows. Once I lose that money I have no idea how I will manage such simple functions. I will become vulnerable because I have lost that support.
DLA isn’t the only benefit that is going to be taken from people who genuinely need it. Despite what you may read in the papers, DLA is not an out-of-work benefit; it is paid to cover the extra costs of being disabled. If you need to use a wheelchair or you need someone to help you get out of bed in the morning, those needs stay with you even if you find employment so the benefit to fund that assistance stays with you as well. The income-replacement benefit for those too ill to work is Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). The contributions-based element of ESA will be limited to an arbitrary one year under the bill. This means that if you develop a condition such as cancer and you have a partner that earns more than £7,500pa, you will lose your income after 12 months. Could the two of you really get by on so little? Especially when one of you has such a costly condition?
It gets worse: The Lords have already voted to cut benefits for disabled children in half under the bill, despite the fact that 4 in 10 disabled children already live in poverty. The government and the opposition are both constantly repeating that we need to be more responsible; that we need to deal with both the “scroungers” at the top ruining the economy and the “benefit scroungers” at the bottom. Yeah, those damn disabled kids gambling with money that wasn’t theirs, causing a financial crisis, getting bailed out by the tax payers and then paying themselves millions in bonuses. Oh, no, wait…
Time is running out to stop this devastating bill. Until now the anti-cuts movement has chosen to fight to save libraries and trees rather than disabled people. I know that people like me aren’t as cool as books and forests but, please, we desperately need your help. There have already been at least 5 suicides associated with loss of benefits/not being awarded benefits in the last 18 months. These cases were admin screw-ups and overzealous assessors; the list of suicides is going to explode when people who had previously been entitled to benefits lose their eligibility.
The bill is not complete yet. It is at the report stage in the House of Lords. It has got to finish the report stage and have one more Lords reading before all hope is lost and the bill receives Royal Assent. We need action and we need it urgently. Occupiers have done amazing work in the last few months at getting issues of corporate greed discussed by the mainstream. You set up campsites in the middle of the City of London which was ingenious! If us disabled activists had found a magic formula for getting the public to pay attention to the harm welfare reform is going to cause, the bill wouldn’t be as close to finalisation as it is. We need your help and your “out-of-the-box” thinking to get the bill stopped. Pat from CarerWatch created a petition on the Number 10 website to get the bill paused for reflection (much like the pause in the NHS bill, but in its 2 months online it’s only garnered 10,476 signatures and it needs 100,000. Please not only sign it but beg everyone you know to do the same.
Signing the petition isn’t enough to get the bill canned entirely, of course. We need concrete action and we need it desperately. Please, for the sake of all disabled people out there, both those who are currently disabled and those will become so in the future, don’t let the welfare state be dismantled. Please summon up your ingenuity and your fresh ideas to help protect people like me, people who depend on the welfare state to survive.
You can find more information about welfare reform at http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com or by following @wheresbenefit on Twitter.
Key Facts About The Welfare Reform Bill
DLA Facts
Fraud rate – 0.5 percent
Cost of fraud – £60 million
Official error – 0.8%
Cost of official error – £90 million
ESA Facts
Fraud rate – 0.3 percent
Cost of Fraud – £20 million
Official error – 1.2 percent
Cost of official error – £70 million
Atos Facts
Cost = £100 million per year.
An estimated £50 million per year for appeals.
Unclaimed Benefits
For the six income-related benefits for which estimates are available there was between £6,930 million and £12,700 million left unclaimed in 2008-09; this compared to £38,110 million that was claimed and represents take-up by expenditure of between about 75% and 85%.
By Lisa Egan