This week marks one year since Black April: the month that saw multiple, simultaneous benefit cuts piled in on the people living with disability, illness and poverty. This is not an anniversary for cards and chocolates. More an eviction notice in a brown envelope or a voucher for the local food bank.
What a difference a year makes. Two-thirds of people hit by the bedroom tax – most of them disabled – are now in rent arrears. And up to 500,000 vulnerable people summoned to court for being unable to pay their council tax after £500m cuts to council tax support saw them have to pay it for the first time. A 170% rise in numbers going to food banks in the last 12 months. Listen to the recent budget and it’s clear the opinion is still these are people who don’t matter. The families worrying about finding money to top up the meter, not the Isa. The ones unable to work even if a job was available, physically dependent on benefits that are being cut, delayed, or removed entirely. Osborne didn’t even give them a mention. Except, of course, to announce the government will soon be making things even harder. The welfare budget is going to be capped at £119.5bn. If spending increases in one area, another, we can only assume, will just have to feel a further cut. Low-earning families versus disabled people and those who are long-term sick. Toss a coin and see who gets fed. The ones with barely anything are having everything taken. The response of this government is to find ways to take more, go one further and frame it as the right thing to do.
The consequences of this “moral crusade” are everywhere. But they plunder on, regardless of the impact of what they’ve done, pulling more strings from the safety net for people who can’t help but need it.
Just look at the emerging picture of Personal Independence Payments (PIPs). Already found to be causing “distress and financial difficulties”, with sick and disabled people waiting six months or more to have their claims even processed. How they pay for care assistants or the heating, in the meantime, is irrelevant. PIP is symbolic of the new way of treating people who need help: stay where you are and we’ll get to you when we’re ready; we know best, even when we’re leaving you to go hungry.
Even the Independent Living Fund (ILF), the fund that allows the most severely disabled people to live in their own homes, is of last month back on the government’s list of cutbacks. This, despite the “potentially very grave impact” the closure of the ILF is predicted to have on people who need help to get out of bed or to go the toilet.
Local authorities, apparently, will pick up the pieces. Yes, the ones that are increasingly cash-strapped and widely failing the disabled people who rely on them for care. More safeguards are needed to ensure people with disabilities are not being deprived of their human rights, the UK’s highest court ruled last month. It’s official. We are finding it too difficult to treat disabled people as human beings.
Last April was not a one-off; a painful but passing display of necessary changes. It was an attack on social security – as an idea and a system – that’s left thousands of disadvantaged people hungry, ill, and desperate. Worse, it was an attack that was only just beginning. This government has not finished. It’s ready and willing to tackle the luxury of a system that’s charging people for an extra room in their home to store oxygen cylinders and adult nappies. The welfare cap is lined up, as the bedroom tax continues and disability benefits falter. We will see next year, I suppose, what this next stage of this government’s moral crusade has done to the people already barely coping.
