unable to afford a taxi to hospital. In 2018, the Work and Pensions Select Committee released a report chronicling what it called the ‘untenable human costs’ of the system, highlighting assessments plagued by basic errors, disrespect and ignorance of health problems.29
One submission made to the committee spoke of how a person with Down syndrome was asked by an assessor how they ‘caught’ it. Others with frequent suicidal thoughts described being quizzed over why they hadn’t yet killed themselves. Another disabled woman recalled how her assessor reported that she walked a dog daily, when she can barely walk and does not own a dog. The consequence is the widespread removal of disability support: official government figures show that by December 2017 nearly half of disabled people put through these reassessments ended up having their support either cut or stopped entirely.30
This is not a horrible accident, but rather the architects’ intention. Before testing for PIP began, ministers estimated that 500,000 fewer sick and disabled working-age people would receive benefits due to the abolition of DLA31 – about a fifth of the total number receiving the benefit. It was ‘welfare’ reform carved out of a mounting suspicion of disabled people: after all, only if large numbers of disabled people were falsely claiming benefits could a government promise to reduce payments before anyone had even been reassessed.
That poverty is an individual moral failing has been relentlessly argued by those in power for nearly forty years. In this view the working class’s personal characteristics – say, a lack of ambition or effort – rather than an unequal society rigged in favour of the privileged is the root of inequality. It is a narrative that, by extension, neatly permits the state to wash its hands of a duty to assist those struggling under disadvantage.
Thatcher’s infamous ‘no such thing as society’ remark in 1987 was preceded by a line that is a summation of this individualism: ‘I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.’ Over twenty-five years later, as austerity measures got under way, this language began to sharpen in the twenty-first century. When then work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith announced stricter conditions for unemployed jobseekers in 2013, he did it with the promise that it was an end to a ‘something-for-nothing culture’.32
Even as anti-welfare attitudes festered over decades, disabled people have been traditionally exempt from such criticisms of ‘dependency’. While, say, the figure of the workingclass jobseeker or single mother was said to ‘deserve’ contempt, disabled people – culturally seen as pitiable and passive – were widely viewed as the ‘good’ recipients of state help. This hierarchy of desert is, of course, unhelpful and ultimately unsustainable: not only does it suggest that non-disabled people in poverty are deserving of any misery they endure; it also relies on disabled people conforming to certain prejudices – that we are needy, weak, grateful – in order to be exempt. Damningly, as the post-2010 austerity era kicked in, even this faulty division didn’t last. Disabled people and their social security not only became fair game in the vilification of benefit claimants – they became the prime target. Newspapers and television shows hunted examples of the disabled ‘milking the state’. Politicians talked openly of the ‘bloated disability benefits bill’.
Against a backdrop of disenfranchisement, squeezed wages and a growing anti-‘welfare’ culture, Britain witnessed the emergence of ‘the underserving sick’: where not only is social and economic disadvantage a sign of personal failure, but also being disabled or ill. It was a double hit of individualism: not only could the fact that a person needed social security to stay afloat be blamed on their apparent lack of effort, but, as such, it also legitimized the belief that it’s a cost that the state shouldn’t have to pay. In this climate, disabled people were not equal human beings – or even pitiable and needy – but an underclass, lazy and deceitful. It combined a class hatred and revulsion of disability to uniquely scapegoat the disabled poor.
It was scapegoating that came with consequences. Two years into the coalition government in 2012, a group of disability charities reported a surge in hate crimes against disabled people, with public resentment over supposed mass abuse of the disability benefits system and negative media and government rhetoric said to be a key factor.33 Charities including Scope, Mencap and the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) reported that they were now regularly contacted by people who had been taunted on the street about supposedly faking their disability, with others saying the climate is so hostile they avoid going out. ‘When we go out, we get dirty looks in our wheelchairs. They’re thinking, “You can stand. You’re playing the system”,’ Susan tells me, years later. ‘It’s not just the media saying it. It’s people in the street.’
The clever thing about lighting a culture of suspicion is that the state can simultaneously cut support for a marginalized group while claiming it’s helping those who are ‘truly’ in need. From 2010 onwards, Conservative-led governments repeatedly argued that even while disability benefits were being cut, the ‘truly disabled’ would be protected. This was deceptive on two levels. It falsely suggested that the most severely disabled people would keep their social security. And it created the mythical idea that not every disabled person currently gaining support actually needed it. This policy created a hierarchy of disabled people: it was no longer enough to simply be disabled, you had to prove you were ‘disabled enough’.
As I began to meet disabled people impacted by the cuts from 2012, I noticed that more and more disabled people I spoke to wanted to reassure me that they understood that the welfare bill was out of control but that they needed their benefits – that they knew others were faking but that people like them deserved help. It isn’t hard to see why. As the first row of cuts began, the then disability minister Esther McVey bragged to the Mail on Sunday in 2013 that she was going after the ‘bogus’ disabled.34 Four years later, Theresa May’s then policy chief George Freeman was telling BBC 5 Live that disability benefits should go to the ‘really disabled’.35
While disadvantage is held up as a moral failing, in reality its structural causes are never more blatant than with disabled people’s poverty. As Susan and Bessie have found, the barriers to a decent income are frequent and brutal: be it a deficit in an adequate safety net of social security, being too ill to work, or a labour market that discriminates and excludes workers who need adaptations to enable them to earn a wage. But when it comes to a disabled person staying afloat, the issue isn’t simply how little goes in but how much has to go out.
The existence of the ‘poverty premium’ is now well established: that in fact it actually costs more to be poor. For example, having to pay a higher tariff on a pre-pay heating meter instead of a cheaper direct debit. Much less is said about the ‘disability poverty premium’ – the reality that, while being more likely to be on a low income, on a day-today basis, disabled people are faced with extortionate outgoings. Research by Scope in 2018 found that life costs on average £570 more a month in Britain if you’re disabled:36 anything from buying specialist food to paying for taxis because public transport isn’t accessible. For one in five, it’s over £1,000 extra per month. In a climate in which disabled people’s income has been gutted, it means that the most basic human needs, like being warm and dry, are widely becoming too expensive to meet.
Take something as vital as heating. When someone like Susan has to get out of her wheelchair and huddle up in bed with her dog just to keep warm, she is in many ways living in a catch-22. She needs the heating more because she’s disabled – Scope has worked out that some disabled households spend more than twice as much on energy each year than the average family37 – but in a society that is overseeing a new era of disability poverty, her disability means that her income is so low that she’s less able to afford it.
When there isn’t enough money coming in for a human being to live on, there tend to be two options: going without what you need – Susan’s heating and
