Crippled. Frances Ryan

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 woman who had had both hands amputated and burns on her face and torso.’ In recent months, she tells me, volunteers have delivered food parcels to disabled people’s homes – they’re starving but they haven’t got the help to physically get to a food bank.

      For different reasons, even a food bank is shut off from Bessie. Her mental health problems mean she can’t eat solid foods – she has a fear of being sick – and she lives off specialist protein and nutrition drinks. Besides, even if a food bank gave her soup as a last resort, there’s no cooker or microwave in the house to heat it. I speak to Bessie after she’s gone two days without a single meal. With her benefit appeal coming up, she’s saving her last few pounds to afford the medical certificate and postage she needs to send to the tribunal panel.

      She’s just called the GP to see if she can get her specialist food on prescription – ‘even if they could give me half a week’s worth’ – but they refused; budget cuts mean they could only give it to someone if their weight had already fallen below a certain level, not as a way to prevent malnutrition. ‘I suppose that’s some good news. That I’m still a healthy weight,’ she says. Her utility company has let her have a pre-paid card for gas but not electricity, so she’s started to ration the light. In the end, with her benefits stopped and no crisis help available, a friend bought Bessie some packets of food. When that runs out, she tells me she’ll drink loads of tea and water to stave off any hunger pangs. ‘Basically people have to freeze and starve these days,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing to fall back on any more, is there? It’s all been taken away.’