NOT ONE PENNY FROM DISABLED PEOPLE

The Socialist Federation condemns “Making Welfare Work”, the welfare policy Reform UK published on Monday 17 August, and in particular its plan to take cash support away from disabled people while keeping the name of the benefit that paid it.

Reform does not say it will abolish Personal Independence Payment. It says it will “retain but fundamentally reform” it. On their own figures, that means 2.89 million disabled people reassessed, beginning with what the document calls “mental health and trivial claims”; 2.16 million left holding their present cash entitlement; and £19.65 billion taken out of disability spending by 2028-29. Those who lose their cash would be moved onto council-run “Disability Support Accounts”, which would “pay only for verifiable additional costs”.

Asked to justify this, Jenrick said: “This is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs.”

Jenrick is not disputing an assessment decision. He is telling you what he believes disability is: something visible - a broken back or a lost limb.

Everything else — mental illness, chronic pain, long Covid, ME, the conditions that do not show up on an X-ray and do not resolve — he regards as an epidemic of something other than disability. He does not say fraud because he does not need to; many others in the press have done that work ahead of him.

The dehumanising word he uses is “epidemic”, and everyone understands what an epidemic of claims is supposed to mean.

The document is blunter than he was. Setting out the order in which people will be reassessed, it begins with “mental health and trivial claims”. Trivial. That is Reform’s word for what people live with.

And it states the purpose plainly. The new system, it says, “will ensure that the welfare system does not encourage people to consider themselves disabled”. Not that the assessments are wrong. That disabled people have been talked into it.

This is a definition of disability from a century ago, revived because it is cheap. It writes off, at a stroke, the people who have had the hardest time being believed by the system as it already stands.

But PIP is not an out-of-work benefit. It is not means-tested. It is not reduced by savings or by earnings. It is not conditional on looking for work, because it was never about work. It exists because being disabled costs money that non-disabled people do not spend: equipment, adaptations, taxis where a bus will not do (because while buses carry 70 of you they can only carry 1 wheelchair user, and only if there’s no prams on board!), heating a home you cannot leave, care, extra laundry, the more expensive food you can actually eat - or accounting for waste because of what you spoil or can’t eat.

Those are all real experiences, based on real conditions.

And large numbers of people who receive PIP are in work. For many of them, PIP is what makes work possible. Take it away and you do not move a single person into employment. You move disabled people out of it.

Reform gives the game away with its proposal for “return to work cover”, under which employers or their insurers would fund the first two years after an employee is signed off sick, once Statutory Sick Pay runs out. Reform says employers will not be out of pocket: National Insurance will be cut by 0.2 percentage points, and firms of five or fewer are exempt.

Look at who that helps. The cut goes to every employer in the country. The cost falls only on employers whose staff fall ill. It is a transfer from the firms that employ disabled people to the firms that do not, and disabled workers would pay for it.

And ask what any employer would actually do when facing that bill. They would decline to hire the candidate who discloses a condition. This is a tax on employing disabled people.

Reform has published criteria. That is worse than not publishing them.

Buried in the costings, the document explains how it decides who is protected. It rebuilds the PIP caseload as a grid of 186 cells, every condition crossed with every award level, and prices each one. Then it draws a line. Enhanced daily living awards are protected, unless the condition is what the document calls “treatment-responsive”, in which case exactly 60% of them are protected.

Sixty per cent. Not a threshold, not a test, not a diagnosis. A proportion. Two people with the same condition on the same award: one keeps their money, one does not, and nothing in the document tells you which. Somebody decides later, and they decide until the number comes out right.

“Treatment-responsive” appears exactly once in the whole document, in that sentence. It is never defined.

And the number they are deciding towards is printed alongside it: “a protected share of 47% of spending”.

There it is, in their own arithmetic. Reform has not worked out who is disabled and then costed it. It has settled what to spend and will find the disabled people to fit. “Gravely ill and severely challenged” is not a clinical category, and it is not simply a vague one either. It is a budget line. However many disabled people can “be afforded” is however many will turn out to be gravely ill.

We already know which way that definition travels when it needs to move. Jenrick has told us: broken backs and lost limbs.

Then there is what replaces the money. “Disability Support Accounts” would hand what remains to councils and mayors, to pay “only for verifiable additional costs arising from a disability”: not money you hold, but purchases somebody else has agreed to.

PIP is paid in cash for a reason. Disabled people know what they need better than any administrator does. An account for approved purchases says the opposite - that disabled people cannot be trusted with money, and that somebody ought to check. That is not an accounting arrangement. It is a judgement about what disabled people are, written into the machinery.

Today a disabled person has a national entitlement to money that is theirs. Under Reform they would have an application.

And handed to whom? They would be handing this to councils that are issuing section 114 notices - councils which are going bankrupt. Are those councils going to prioritise disabled lives? Have they ever?

The British public have railed against postcode lotteries for years. Reform proposes to build one and call it localism.

And then there are the children.

Reform would restrict children’s Disability Living Allowance for anxiety, depression and ADHD to “the most severe 10% of cases”. Nine in ten of those children would get nothing. The document is candid about why: retaining the most severe tenth “preserves around 22% of expenditure”, which is to say it removes the other 78%.

The argument offered for it is that “in an average class of 32 children, two receive disability benefits”. That is presented as self-evidently too many. No case is made that those children are not disabled. The number is the argument.

And the consequences of these policies aren’t a mystery - we already lived through Austerity.

Researchers at the Glasgow Centre for Population Health and the MRC-CSO unit found 335,000 excess deaths across Britain between 2012 and 2019 following Austerity — deaths above what previous trends predicted, concentrated in the poorest communities.

More precisely, the reassessment process itself has been studied. Between 2010 and 2013 around one million people were reassessed for disability benefits in England. Research published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that for every 10,000 people put through that process, there were 6 additional suicides, 2,700 additional cases of reported mental health problems, and 7,020 additional antidepressant prescriptions. The effects were greatest in the most deprived areas.

Reform proposes to reassess 2.89 million people. Nearly three times as many.

None of this was announced on its own. The same document strips every non-British citizen of benefits, including EU citizens with settled status, and including disability benefits, so a disabled migrant loses twice over. The same morning, Reform confirmed it would restore the two-child benefit cap in full.

Disabled people, migrants, and third children. Three groups, one morning, one argument: that the people who cost money are the problem.

It would be easy to just leave it there - with an attack on Reform - who are, after all, from our perspective, by far the easiest target in all this. But here’s the real scandal in all this:

Reform is not breaking with government policy. It is simply pursuing preexisting state inertia to natural ends. The health element of Universal Credit is being cut now, by this government: reduced for new claimants, frozen for existing ones, leaving millions of households worse off. Reform’s document takes that as its starting point, and sets out to make entering it harder still.

We do not say the two sets of cuts are the same size. They are not. But we do say they rest on the same argument — that support for disabled people is a bill to be brought down rather than a need to be met — and it is the argument that does the damage.

Every time a minister describes disability spending as unsustainable, they write Reform’s next leaflet. Every concession to the idea that disabled people are a cost makes the deeper cut easier to propose. This is an auction that Labour cannot win, because whoever offers the harshest terms wins it, and that will never be a Labour government.

You do not defeat Reform by agreeing with its premise more moderately.

It’s up to us, the working-class in Britain, to stand and fight against this. We cannot rely on any government to protect us - only our organised collective power and solidarity.

Cuts serve only to protect the privilege and luxury of a tiny minority. We mustn’t be made to pay for their crises.

NEVERTHELESS, WE DEMAND

Of the Burnham government:

• Abandon the cuts to the health element of Universal Credit, and restore what has already been taken.
• Rule out, now, any reduction in PIP eligibility or value following the Timms review.
• Stop describing disabled people as a burden on the public finances. It is not a neutral description. It is the argument Reform is standing on.

Of the labour movement:

• Every union, trades council and labour body should commit publicly, now, to defending disability benefits against any government, Reform or otherwise — and to acting, not merely objecting, if the attack comes.

Disabled people are not an epidemic. They are our fellow workers, our brothers, our sisters; our children; our friends and comrades. An injury to one is an injury to all.

Not one penny more from disabled people’s pockets!