'Disabled people are not the problem'

James Taylor is director of strategy at the disability charity Scope

It’s no overstatement to say we were horrified by the government’s latest announcements to deal with economic inactivity in this country. It feels like a full-scale assault on disabled people.

And it’s the latest in a long line of rhetoric which claims to be “helping” disabled people, but will only make life much more difficult for the UK’s 16million disabled people.

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak outlined his “moral mission” of reforming welfare to give everyone who can, the best possible chance of returning to work.

On the face of it, supporting people who want to work but don’t currently have a job is laudable. We know there are many disabled people locked out of work because of negative employer attitudes, inflexible workplaces and failures with the Access to Work scheme. But that’s not what last week’s announcement will achieve. These proposals are unlikely to work, and what’s more, they don’t add up. All they will do is push people further away from a job, and deeper into destitution.

Since Friday’s announcement, a deeply troubling report from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) has found the government’s welfare reforms are “premised on a notion that disabled people are undeserving and wilfully avoiding employment”, which has “resulted in hate speech and hostility towards disabled people”.

Scope has also launched a petition urging the government to stop demonising people who can’t work.

The current government seems to be hellbent on cutting the benefits bill, making it harder to access financial support, and waging a war against disabled people.

It is true for the government to say we currently have incredibly high levels of economic inactivity. And people who are long term sick or are disabled are more likely to be economically inactive than other groups.

But disabled people are not the problem.

The reason for this isn’t because ‘life on benefits is easy’ (in fact it’s not, many people who claim benefits live in deep poverty). It is because our public services are crumbling, the quality of jobs is poor and the rate of poverty amongst disabled households is growing.

Is it any wonder health is deteriorating when the overall number of waits for non-emergency treatment in England was 7.5 million in February. When it comes to mental health, according to the charity Mind, there are more than 2 million people waiting to access treatment.

Announcements from the Prime Minister to make the welfare system tougher and more punitive won’t address this health crisis. In fact, they are highly likely to be detrimental to health, pushing people further from work. There is plenty of evidence to show this approach is totally counter-productive and, ultimately, more costly.

What we need is a fundamental rethink about how we value disabled people in this country, and how we can genuinely support individuals – without the threat of being sanctioned and having their benefits cut off – through the welfare system. Making, or threatening to make, a system harder to access just won’t do. And it ends up demonising disabled people.

If this government – and whoever forms the next government – is serious about wanting to help disabled people “reach their potential”, they need to invest in creating opportunities for disabled people, and removing the barriers in society which make it impossible but are out of individuals’ control.

Scope has just launched our Manifesto for An Equal Future, which sets out what the next government needs to do to transform disabled people’s lives. Change is possible, but it won’t be achieved this way.

There needs to be a bigger focus on employers, on flexibility to try working without fear of repercussions, and investment in the public services that are designed to keep us well and which presently are struggling.

Successive recent governments have set their sights on the disability employment gap – the difference in the employment rate of disabled people and non-disabled people. Yet it’s stayed at around 30 percentage points (roughly 80% vs 50%) for more than a decade.

The government claims it wants to help more disabled people get into work, and yet it’s stripping away the actual schemes that might support people find a job, if it’s right for them. They are ending the Work and Health Programme, the one national employment support programme for disabled people. In its place will be smaller programmes – WorkWell and Universal Support. Both of which are delayed, both of which are far less ambitious in the amount of individuals they intend to support.

And the government needs to be cracking down on employers’ negative attitudes. Many workplaces continue to discriminate against disabled applicants or workers.

Scope’s employment services help disabled people find and apply for the jobs they want. We’ve heard from people who’ve had job offers taken away after they told their employer they were disabled.

One neurodivergent customer was made to leave their job after asking if they could move their desk to allow them to concentrate better.

Other customers weren’t allowed by their employers to use assistive technology to help with admin.

The government needs to make sure disabled people can get the right support in work. Access to Work is a central fund which helps cover the cost of equipment and other support someone might need to do their job.

But the system is nowhere near flexible enough, isn’t given the right level of investment, there are huge backlogs, and many employers have never heard of it. We’ve heard from people who’ve had to leave their jobs after a few months because Access to Work was too slow to come through.

These latest announcements also see the government wanting to cut Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which helps cover the extra costs disabled people face. These costs include things like needing to use taxis because public transport isn’t accessible. Needing specialist equipment such as electric wheelchairs and bed hoists. Or needing to use more energy for heating because your condition makes it much harder to regulate your body temperature.

Scope’s analysis found these extra costs add up to £975 a month, even after someone’s PIP is taken into account. These extra costs mean the cost-of-living crisis has been particularly devastating for disabled people.

Our helpline at Scope has been inundated with calls from people having to ration how much they can use their wheelchairs because they can’t afford to charge them. Using candles instead of switching the lights on. Going without food for days. For the government to want to cut support is truly horrific.

And this financial hardship predates the latest crisis. The number of disabled people living in poverty has grown enormously over recent years. There are 1.8million more disabled people in poverty now compared with 15 years ago.

Support for disabled people has been squeezed and squeezed over the past decade. For 4 years, many benefits were frozen so didn’t increase in line with inflation – a real-terms cut. Then in the midst of rampant energy hikes, the government quietly cut eligibility for the Warm Home Discount – around £150 a year – for 300,000 disabled people with the highest support needs. And there was a callous disregard for disabled people during the covid pandemic, whose needs were largely forgotten despite making up 6 in 10 of all those who died.

Disabled people make up a quarter of the population, but we have been failed by successive governments for far too long.

We are a force to be reckoned with, and it’s time our voices were heard.

We want the next government to tackle the extra costs of disability. To transform attitudes to disability. To ensure that those of us who want to work can do so. To fix the broken benefits system.

It’s more crucial than ever that the next government puts a stop to these dangerous and lazy narratives demonising disabled people, and instead starts to tackle the real issues with new ideas.

Only by doing that can they create an equal future for all of us.

You can sign Scope’s petition, demanding the government stop demonising disabled people on the following link.

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