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 short of a fiasco’,28 with reports of year-long delays and faulty rejections leaving family carers so poor they risked eviction from rent arrears and cancer patients 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