the Guardian stated that the Heriot-Watt team’s review of recent poverty research found little mention of destitution before 2012 – just as austerity cuts began to come into effect.16 It’s no coincidence that the only exception prior to 2012 was in relation to asylum seekers: people with restricted entitlement to social security. Through the age of austerity, disabled people were experiencing the type of abandonment typically saved for a group legally excluded from it. Under the regime of ‘all in together’ and ‘difficult decisions’, politicians were ushering in a wave of austerity measures against the very people Britain’s ‘safety net’ was said to protect.
Overall, the 2010 coalition set in motion £28 billion worth of cuts to disabled people’s income,17 including the introduction of the bedroom tax, cuts to council tax support, the roll-out of the out-of-work sickness benefit ESA, and the tightening of benefit sanction rules. Analysis by the House of Commons Library for Frank Field MP in 2018 found that spending on welfare benefits for the UK’s poorest families will have shrunk by nearly a quarter after a decade of austerity, with some of the most striking cuts hitting disability benefits.18 To its architects, these changes marked the most ambitious reform of the welfare state for more than sixty years. To its disabled targets, an all-out assault on their lives. As Susan and Bessie can testify, these were not cuts that came singularly, but were experienced as multiple changes at once. When, say, the bedroom tax came in, the odds were it would be hitting people already falling short on rent because they’ve lost their council tax support. In politics, they call it ‘cumulative impact’; in human terms, it’s like being struck over and over again.
Ministers have consistently refused to conduct a full analysis of the changes, instead releasing an evaluation of each policy in isolation. This was the case even after the War on Welfare (WOW) petition – organized by a group of disabled volunteers – gained a debate in the House of Parliament in 2014 to challenge the government. As Claudia Wood from the think tank Demos put it, failing to analyse the cumulative impact of multiple disability cuts at best gives an incomplete picture.19 At worst, it provides the illusion that these are cuts that are being fairly and evenly spread.
In its place, Demos and disability charity Scope tracked the damage of the cuts on disabled people in 2013, modelling a series of cumulative impact assessments across fifteen disability benefit ‘reforms’. It found that by 2017–18, 3.7 million disabled people would experience a reduction in income.20 Hundreds of thousands of them would be subject to up to six cuts simultaneously, or, as the researchers put it, the changes would hit ‘the same group of disabled people over and over again’.21 In cash terms, that translates as a Parkinson’s patient or paraplegic having their income cut by thousands of pounds a year. The Centre for Welfare Reform calculated that, by 2018,22 disabled people would on average be losing over £4,400 per person per annum. For severely disabled people, that goes up to almost £9,000. For many, this loss is even greater: by 2018, around 200,000 will have lost between £15,000 and £18,000 in income through a combination of cuts.
Over the following years, this is set to further take its toll. While the implementation of the first wave of disability cuts is completed, latest measures – ushered in by a succession of Conservative-led governments – will roll out. As of 2017, new recipients of one category of ESA have seen the benefit shrink by almost a third – down to seventy-three pounds a week – with half a million people who are too disabled or sick to work set to lose over £1,500 a year each.23 Universal Credit – the all-in-one benefit system scheduled to be rolled out to eight million households by 2023 – is due to make 450,000 disabled people financially worse off,24 with some losing as much as £4,000 a year from the changes. At the same time, wider austerity measures, from ongoing benefit freezes to the gutting of local council services – relied on heavily by disabled people – will add to the burden.
The EHRC calculate that by 2022, the combined tax, social security and public spending policies carried out since 2010 will put a particular burden on disabled people. Families with a disabled adult as well as a disabled child will shoulder annual cash losses of just over £6,500 as a result of tax and benefit changes (or about 14 per cent of their net income).25 Grimly, the study found that households of people with the most serious disabilities actually stand to lose the most.
This is palpably the ultimate death knell of the welfare state. Since its inception in late 1940s post-war Britain, the welfare state has produced some great strides for disabled people. Under the increasing growth of the state, the late 1940s to the mid-1960s marked a fundamental shift from the squalor of the workhouses – in which the destitute disabled were abandoned – to the belief that disabled people’s living standards were increasingly a responsibility of the government. This also marked progress in cultural understandings of disability, as disabled people – throughout history said to be cursed, insane or simply lazy – began to be seen, at least in part, as members of society. The return of disabled servicemen motivated the first major state protection for disabled people; the 1944 Disability Employment Act promised sheltered employment and employment quotas for disabled people, while the National Insurance Act (1945) provided unemployment and sick pay for the long-term disabled.
Yet by the 1990s, while race and sex discrimination had long become illegal, disabled people in Britain were still the only group not to have basic rights enshrined in law. There was still no guaranteed access to work, transport or education.
Gains that did occur during this period were not handed down by a benevolent government but were the result of long-term lobbying and grass-roots activists. As I was at school in the summer of 1992, disabled activists with wheelchairs and placards filled the streets, descended en masse to the television headquarters of Telethon ’92 – ITV’s then annual twenty-eight-hour fundraiser. The protesters were not simply challenging what they saw to be the programme’s damaging depiction of disabled people – pitiable and tragic – but a country that, however well intentioned, was willing to grant charity handouts to disabled people, but not equality.
Regular protests followed: from wheelchair users kettled by police outside Westminster, to disabled people handcuffing themselves to buses. By the mid-1990s, disabled campaigners had successfully pushed for the Disability Discrimination Act – for the first time in Britain the law provided disabled citizens with access to the workplace, and with it a wage (employers were required to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to work and premises). It also saw the launch of the landmark benefit Disability Living Allowance, a benefit introduced to help disabled people pay for the extra costs of mobility and care needs (from taxis to hospital appointments) that had previously pushed us into poverty. It embodied the principle of a universal safety net: no matter how rich or poor, in work or out, every disabled person was eligible to apply for help from the state.
It was fitting, then, that in a period that launched an unprecedented assault on disabled people’s living standards, one of the first major policies of the austerity era was the abolition of DLA. In April 2013, the coalition government began the roll-out of a replacement benefit, Personal Independence Payment (PIP) – in practice launching the mass, mandatory retesting of around 3 million disabled people. The premise was simple: rather than a crucial safety net for millions of disabled citizens, this flagship benefit was being widely and brazenly exploited by swathes of scroungers.
At a time in which Benefit Street–style documentaries filled television screens and ‘benefit fraudsters’ emblazoned tabloid front pages, tellingly, the introduction of PIP came with the promise of tougher ‘points-based’ criteria and an end to the so-called ‘soft touch’ of DLA. As then work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, put it to the Telegraph in 2012, losing a limb should not automatically entitle people ‘to a payout’.26 That DLA was actually one of the most effectively targeted benefits with an estimated fraud rate of just 0.5 per cent was somehow irrelevant.27
Barely a year into its introduction, Parliament’s public spending watchdog was calling the government’s handling of PIP ‘nothing
