Susan’s two-bed bungalow is covered with the signs of her ill health: an electric wheelchair, grab rails and a bathing chair on wheels in the bathroom, and ‘two-handled’ mugs for her shaking hands. But it’s the empty cupboards that stand out. Nowadays, she can rarely afford food. Her bowel condition means she can’t safely eat solids or absorb vitamins naturally and needs specialist meals: a chemically pureed food her body can digest easily. But it’s £3.50 a go. Two years ago, she stopped buying it completely: since the benefit cuts have come in, she just doesn’t have the money any more. ‘My doctor’s telling me I need a certain diet but the government means I can’t afford it.’
Instead, she lives off cereal. Susan’s done the sums. A box is a couple of pounds. Porridge bulks out her stomach. She can’t eat meat because of her digestive condition but the alternatives may as well be pieces of gold. ‘Have you seen the price of fish lately? It’s a luxury.’ The only way she could afford it, she says, is if she won the lottery. ‘And I can’t afford that now. They’ve doubled the price of a ticket. Two pounds is a box of cereal.’
Susan’s lost four kilos in the five years since her benefits were cut and her weight is still dropping. ‘I’m starving,’ she says. ‘Starving.’ This is what it is to be disabled in modern Britain. In one of the richest societies in history, disabled people are living in near-Dickensian levels of hardship. It would be comforting to believe Susan was a rare case – an upsetting but ultimately token incident. Describe it to the average government minister and they would likely utter words of muted outrage – that what’s happening to one woman in the front room of an east London flat is sad but ultimately a blip in Britain’s otherwise fair and humane system. But talk to a local charity gifting a food hamper to a dad with Parkinson’s or a welfare rights adviser buried in benefit appeals forms from desperate clients – or, indeed, listen to people like Susan themselves – and such accounts of precarity are the tip of the iceberg.
Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) shows that 4 million disabled adults are now living below the breadline in 2018.1 To get a picture of the scale of this, that number accounts for over a third of all adults in poverty in the country.2 One in five disabled people in Britain are currently in food poverty, according to Scope research in 2017,3 which means routinely skipping meals or going without essential nutrients. The same study found one in six disabled people now report having to wear a coat indoors.4 They’re cold but they can’t afford to put the heating on.
In 2017, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released a study detailing what can only be described as an epidemic of disability poverty in Britain. It found that even having a disabled loved one is enough to push a whole family into hardship: almost six in ten families that include a disabled person are currently living without even basic necessities, such as food or shelter.5 That’s twice as many as the total population.
This would be bad enough but most calculations of the number of disabled people in poverty may actually be underestimates, as few take into consideration the extra costs of disability – that is, the fact that, unlike others, disabled people often have to stretch their income to pay not just for food, utilities and rent, but also for anything from a wheelchair to extra heating in the winter. In 2018, for the first time, as well as looking at incomes, the Social Metrics Commission measured poverty in a way that took into account what it called the ‘inescapable costs’ of disability. It found that more than half of families living below the breadline now contain at least one person with a disability.6
Poverty – and with it, inequality – for disabled people is not a fresh stain on Britain. In the nineteenth century, as the Poor Law set out to reduce the so-called financial drain of the poor, destitute disabled people were routinely housed in the squalor of the workhouses, while others – dubbed ‘idiots’ and ‘lunatics’ – were put in pauper asylums. At a time in which the state was deemed to have no duty of care to its disabled citizens, disabled people were forced to beg in the street or go cap in hand to growing charitable organizations, such as the tellingly named ‘Guild of the Brave Poor Things’.
As I grew up with a disability in the 1990s, this sort of treatment felt quite alien; a dark chapter for the history books. But even in the boom of New Labour, despite undeniable vast progress on a number of measures, millions of disabled people, supposedly protected by the modern welfare state, were still living in poverty. In 2005, three out of ten disabled adults of working age were below the breadline, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.7 That’s almost a third of disabled people in the country living in day-to-day hardship. Over the next decade, this disability inequality has remained firmly in place: as of 2015–16, poverty rates for disabled and non-disabled households stayed almost static (31 per cent and 19 per cent respectively).8
It would be grim enough that, as each year has passed, the UK has made next to no progress on lifting disabled people out of poverty. Or that far from uniquely being ‘protected’ by the British state, the very citizens most in need have, for decades, actually been more likely to be in poverty than anyone else. But as Susan’s empty cupboards show, when it comes to our government’s treatment of disabled people, we are at a point that’s more shameful still. Rather than the state struggling to provide a safety net for people with disabilities, it’s now actively pushing them further into poverty itself.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, David Cameron and colleagues set upon an unprecedented wave of austerity in which disabled people were the key target. Cutting disability benefits by tens of billions of pounds was said to be a necessity – a prudent ‘tough choice’ to get the deficit down and rebuild the economy. This was as much a moral case as an economic one: as so-called hardworking ‘strivers’ watched their wages shrink, ‘scrounging’ disabled people were said to be milking the system. The image of a disabled person in the new age of austerity was not that of a human being who deserved support but of a liar and leach, living on the taxpayer’s expense.
Since becoming ill, Bessie has washed her clothes in a bucket. The fifty-one-year-old has agoraphobia, Asperger’s and digestive problems and had worked in her late dad’s general store since she was twelve. But as her conditions got worse, even part-time hours became impossible – ‘I was crippled with agoraphobia and panic attacks’ – and by 2011 she had had to give up work entirely. For the next two years, she lived off her savings and some money she’d inherited from her dad, and when the money ran out, she applied for disability benefits.
The benefits themselves sound like government jargon – the out-of-work sickness benefit, Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) or Disability Living Allowance (DLA) – but for Bessie, they meant falling into hardship. As her illnesses forced her to live off social security, the most basic costs – food, electricity, clothes from a charity shop – were out of reach. Walk round Bessie’s two-bed flat in Nottingham and ‘a life of Riley’ is not the picture that comes to mind. There’s no oven in her kitchen, or a microwave. No freezer either; as she began to scrape by on social security, she got rid of that to save money. When her washing machine broke, she couldn’t afford to replace it – not even with a second-hand one. Instead, she’d wash her clothes by hand; trousers, jumpers, with the water squeezed out by a spinner.
For all the talk of a comfortable life on benefits, disabled people like Bessie were almost destined to fall into hardship: scraping by on low benefits, lucky to have enough for food and rent. The Living Wage Foundation calculated that the figure needed to cover the true cost of living was £9.00 per hour (£10.55 in London) in 2018–19,9 with the rise put down to the increased cost of household goods, rents and transport. Yet a disabled person like Bessie who’s too ill to work was receiving £102 a week on her classification of ESA – the equivalent of £2.55 an hour for a full-time worker.
Or, to put it another way, a sum so meagre that researchers at the Disability Benefits Consortium in 2015 found it