The government should abandon its ill-health and disability benefit cuts

Our campaign is calling on Labour MPs to demand the government abandon these cuts. If it proceeds with them then they should vote against them.

We share the widespread outrage at the government’s proposed cuts to ill-health and disability benefits. The Guardian got it right when it said “It is shameful for a Labour government to place a higher value on fiscal rules, and commitment not to raise taxes, than on the needs of disabled people. Campaigners must keep fighting.”

The Department of Works and Pensions described the cuts to Personal Independence Payments as “focusing support on those with highest needs”. The 4 point rule (see note 3) was precisely designed to cut the number of people receiving it. This change is not subject to consultation. It will stop an estimated 800,000 to 1,200,000 from receiving it. Since PIP is a ‘passport’ benefit, which enables you to get others, the Resolution Foundation says that some people could lose up to £10,600 a year.

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The motivation for these cuts is not to get people into work but to save money. They flow from the self-imposed fiscal straight-jacket of Rachel Reeves, and the government’s stubborn refusal to tax wealth. It is the same austerity which led the government to keep the two child cap, means-test the winter fuel payment and freeze the Local Housing Allowance (which is driving councils to the financial edge). As Preston Council Leader Matthew Brown has said, these measures will also place further strain on housing, welfare and debt advice services of local authorities.

The DWP described the benefits bill as ‘unsustainable’. Their ‘evidence’, to justify this, was a grossly misleading statistic which exaggerated the increase in the number of people on Universal Credit without a requirement to look for work (see note 4). The Office of Statistics Regulation demanded they withdraw it.

PIP provides disabled people with support to cover the extra costs of disability regardless of whether they are in work or not. Indeed, it enables many disabled people to stay in work. The loss of it and any associated benefits (150,000 are estimated to lose Carers Allowance) is likely to drive some of them out of work. What sense does that make? The main obstacle to employment of disabled people is the reluctance of employers to employ them because they will have to apply ‘reasonable adjustments’.

As a campaign for council housing, whose members include council and housing association tenants, we are in close contact with the realities of the lives of the poorest people in our communities. Owing to the acute shortage of council housing you have to be poor or in some way disadvantaged to get a council tenancy. That’s reflected in the findings of the English Housing Survey for 2023/24 which estimates that 59% of social housing households have at least one person suffering long-term ill-health or being disabled. The scale of poverty is reflected in their estimate that 73% of council households have no savings, making them especially vulnerable to even the smallest change of circumstance. As a result tenants will be hard hit by these cuts. Council rent arrears have doubled since 2015-16. They are likely to further drive up arrears and increase the occurrence of damp and mould, as more tenants are faced with the terrible choice of ‘eating or heating’.

The government is consulting on young people being stopped from receiving PIP or incapacity benefit if they are under 22. For them the housing element of universal credit often doesn’t cover their rent. So top-ups can keep them with a roof over their head. Take away the top-up and they may well be evicted when arrears build up.

The cuts have rightly been described as “balancing the books on the backs of the disabled”. In a Freudian slip the OBR said that “The larger reductions in the generosity of and eligibility of health and disability benefits would be expected to reduce income and increase working incentives for existing claimants”. So ‘work incentive’ is less money to live on!

These measures have thrown hundreds of thousands of disabled people into a state of anxiety. Even a supporter of the Labour leadership like Polly Toynbee says these proposals are “a stain that Labour may never get rid of”. If they are allowed to proceed they will ruin peoples lives and lead to more deaths.

Currently there are 25 Labour MPs with the whip who have committed to vote against these measures. The rest should be lobbied vigorously. Our MPs should take the side of the victims of austerity and the housing crisis, and vote against these proposals. They weren’t elected to impoverish disabled people and those suffering ill-health.

Notes

1) The “static costing” of this policy (that is its impact on existing claimants) would reduce spending by an estimated £7.9 billion by 2029-30, and would reduce the number receiving the PIP daily living component by an estimated 1.5 million people (32 per cent). This is estimated simply on the basis that 58 per cent of onflows and 52 per cent of award reviews among the existing stock of claimants qualify for the daily living component without scoring four points or more in any descriptor. The much lower figure of £4.8 billion is based on guesswork by the PBR of ‘behavioural results’, such as fighting harder for the four points and successful appeals.

2) In addition the OBR has assumed a £1.6 billion saving on a policy which has never been implemented. The previous government had planned to make changes to the Work Capability Assessment that would have led to 450,000 receiving lower benefits by the end of the Parliament. It pencilled in £1.6 billion savings. However, after a successful legal challenge to the previous government’s consultation these changes would never be implemented. You can’t save money that has never been spent. Hence the New Economics Forum estimates that the real cut could be £6.4 billion.

3) Only people who score 4 points in at least one activity area will be eligible for PIP. You currently get the Standard rate if you score 8 points and the enhanced rate if you score 12 points.

4) The DWP is being forced to withdraw “entirely misleading” statistics about the number of people found incapable of work from a press release, launched as part of the softening-up process prior to the Pathways To Work Green Paper release. The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) received a number of complaints, including one from Benefits and Work, about the claim in the 13 March press release that:

“The number of people on Universal Credit health element with no requirement to look for work] has almost quadrupled since the start of the pandemic when 360,000 people were considered too sick to look for work – a 383% rise in less than five years.”

The OSR found that “The statement that the number of people claiming disability elements of Universal Credit has increased by 383% presents an entirely misleading picture to the public.” This is because the overwhelming majority of the increase is due to the fact that new claims for employment and support allowance (ESA) had been replaced by UC claims. So, as the number of ESA awards shrank, the number of UC awards rose.