fuelled by anything from low wages, the increase in the gig economy’s erratic incomes, to council tax charges. It shouldn’t be a surprise that what has hit the general population has hit those with disabilities and illness harder still: disabled people are twice as likely than non-disabled people to have unsecured debt totalling more than half of their household income, according to a Scope survey in 2013.39
This is not only a case of not having a cushion to cope with a sudden financial crisis – say a broken boiler or being made redundant – but of having an income so low that, week in week out, it won’t even cover essential bills. It’s a climate of borrowing money to survive: Scope finds that half of disabled people use credit cards or loans to pay for everyday items like food and clothes.40 As Susan in London puts it to me, ‘We’re not talking about getting a loan for a three-piece suite. New curtains. This is the bare necessities.’
For Susan, it was a broken washing machine and freezer. The freezer is her lifeline – it stores her digestive medication and she can’t eat safely without it – and the washing machine – there to regularly clean her clothes and sheets with her incontinence – is a bit of dignity. When both broke a few years back as the bedroom tax and care costs first hit, she could barely scrape together a spare fiver let alone a few hundred pounds. Instead, she turned to a doorstep loan company. In 2014, she took out two loans totalling £900. Five years later, the racked up interest rates means she’s still paying it off: weekly instalments at eighty pounds. The company wanted bigger instalments, she says, but her carer helped talked them down. ‘I couldn’t pay [them] more because of all the benefit cuts.’
This is the double-edged sword of disability debt: while being more likely to face financial crisis, disabled people are shut out of ways to escape it. Disabled people are less likely to even have a current account than the non-disabled; without a stable income, ‘good credit’ is a phantom. As Susan puts it to me, ‘Bank loans aren’t for people like us.’ Instead, people like Susan are routinely forced to turn to high-risk credit: one in ten disabled people have used doorstep loans, according to Scope research – that’s three times as many as the general population.41 In 2018, research by Citizens Advice into payday loans found that nearly half (48 per cent) of people struggling with ‘home loan debt’ have a long-term health condition or disability.42
By the time Susan manages to pay the loan back, the interest will have totalled £1,080 – more than the original loan itself. It’ll take another year to pay off the debt but Susan is desperate for another loan. She’s recently had to start using a specialist medical bed – the sides stop her from falling out at night – but she can’t use it because she can’t afford the linen to fit it. She knows that a new loan would cost her – the last doorstep leaflet that fell through her letterbox had an interest rate of 1,394 per cent – but she doesn’t have a choice. ‘You go round in circles,’ she explains. ‘Should I get another loan out? Once you get on that roundabout, you can’t get off it.’
It isn’t without its poignancy that if Susan had needed help only a few years earlier, she could have turned to the state. The ‘social fund’ – a £300-million-a-year nationally administered service of low-cost loans and grants paid through the JobCentre – used to provide an alternative to high-cost, high-risk credit. If social security is the ‘safety net’, the social fund was the mattress positioned beneath it: a last-ditch support for the poorest citizens in financial emergencies – for example, a fifty-pound loan to pay for transport for a hospital appointment or £400 for a new boiler when the old one packed in. This was tried-and-tested success for vast numbers of families: more than 2.1 million crisis loans and 216,000 care grants were paid out in 2011–12.43 For people living with disabilities or illness, it was especially vital: one-third of all claimants using the social fund were disabled.44
But as part of the ‘welfare reforms’ of 2013, the coalition government abolished community care grants and crisis loans. In its place, it devolved the responsibility to local councils: a patchwork of 152 devolved programmes in England that local authorities – already stretching to cover core services in the face of spending cuts – had no obligation to fund. At the same time, the government reduced funding for the service by £120 million annually. That this happened to come at a time of vast cuts to social security for disabled people is perhaps austerity at its cruellest: as the government brought in policies that pushed disabled people into crisis, it simultaneously pulled the emergency funds that could help them.
When Bessie in Nottingham had both of her disability benefits removed in 2017, her only income was pulled overnight. Bumped off out-of-work sickness support, she became eligible for the standard lower unemployment benefit, Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), but – with her disability benefits already stopped – she was told her JSA would take weeks to come through. This is standard practice now: as disabled people have their benefits removed, the system leaves them with literally nothing to live on.
To survive, Bessie applied to the JobCentre for one ninety-three-pound hardship loan – to be knocked off at fifteen pounds a week from her benefit for the privilege – but that ran out fast. With another week to wait for her JSA and with no money for food or gas, Bessie phoned everyone she could think of for help – the JobCentre, the council, her GP – but with the social fund closed, she was told ‘no one does crisis loans any more’. ‘You get passed between different people, getting desperate,’ she says. She’d heard from friends in other areas that councils provide hardship payments for gas and electricity in emergencies, but after ringing hers she was told that hers does not. If she lived only a couple of miles away from the borough she would cross into the city council that still does hardship payments.
It amounts to what’s little more than a ‘postcode lottery’ on need, with the transfer to local welfare provision simultaneously cutting funding and making a disabled person’s chance of surviving a crisis dependent simply on where they happen to live. By 2018, five years after the social fund closed and the service was devolved to local authorities, poverty campaigners declared local welfare schemes to be ‘on the verge of collapse’, with a quarter of English councils having reduced spending by 85 per cent or more since 2013, and nearly a further quarter closing their schemes entirely, according to research by Church Action on Poverty.45
Go to Bessie in Nottinghamshire or Exeter or Oxfordshire, for example, and there’s now no scheme at all. A minority – like Islington and Trafford and Rutland – in contrast, have ring-fenced funding, even topping up national government cash when necessary. In Scotland, the Scottish Welfare Fund replaced the social fund, enabling councils to continue to award loans and grants of almost £40 million. Huge budget pressures faced by councils mean even authorities that have protected local welfare in the past will soon embark on drastic cuts; West Sussex County Council, for example, embarked on plans for an 80 per cent reduction in its £800,000 crisis fund from 2019.46 Meanwhile, many English councils are so depleted they’re now simply transferring the remaining scraps of their budget to local food banks or credit unions. Others are merely redirecting desperate families to local poverty and disability charities; a leaflet in the place of cash. In one case, Isle of Wight council offered a sixty-two-year-old homeless woman a voucher to buy a tent.47
It’s no coincidence that as benefits were cut and emergency funds abolished, food banks are being relied on by the disabled and sick and their families. In the single biggest nationwide study on food banks to date, the University of Oxford in partnership with the Trussell Trust found in 2017 that the majority of people going to food banks are hit by disability or illness.48 A whole century or so after the workhouses and ‘cripples’ were forced to go ‘cap in hand’ to survive, over half of households referred for emergency food parcels in Britain include a disabled person. Some 75 per cent are experiencing ill health.49 I asked a manager of a London food bank if many disabled people came through the doors. ‘We’ve had people who’ve had strokes, lots and lots of people with a mental health problem, several people being treated for cancer,’ she told me. ‘The worst case was a young homeless
