‘Disability cuts will lead to deaths’ — Camden New Journal

by Frankie Lister-Fell

Credit: Camden New Journal Thursday 27 March, page 6

“People are going to die” as a result of the disability benefit cuts, a Camden-based disabled rights group warned this week. Hundreds of people turned up outside No.10 yesterday (Wednesday 26 March) to throw bouncy balls at the big iron gates outside the PM’s Downing Street office. They yelled “balls to the budget”. 

They were protesting against the government’s announcement to cut welfare benefits for the disabled, which would mean 1.2 million people would lose their Personal Independence Payments (PIP) among other controversial reforms in Rachel Reeves’ spring budget.

If someone’s PIP is removed this will also mean that their unpaid carer’s allowance will be dropped.

Claire Glasman, co-ordinator of WinVisible which is based at the Kentish Town Crossroads Women’s Centre told the New Journal: “If people get cut off, people are going to die, especially people who are isolated and don’t have family to support them.

“PIP is a benefit that is needed by people in all different situations across waged and unwaged work.

So for those of us in waged work, it helps us to manage extra costs and for unwaged people, it’s things like heating, ready meals if you’re unable to cook, and extra costs that are not really recognised.”

Tracey Norton, from the group Support Not Separation, said: “I am fed up with the attack on disabled people. I am a mother with an invisible disability. 

“I have a severely disabled child and the benefits he gets in PIP doesn’t even cover my electricity bill to keep him alive. So if you want to cut that, what you’re going to do is, I’m going to have to cut my food.

“He can’t do without his electric wheelchair, his medical bed with all his needs, so that means I’m going to have to go without something and that will mean food and heating in my room.”

She added: “What’s wrong with a wealth tax? Why aren’t we taxing the top 2% of the country? This would give us up to £36 billion a year as opposed to the £5 billion they want to take off disabled people.”

Colin Brummage, CEO of Camden Disability Action, said he was “outraged” by the cuts and the main thing stopping disabled people from working is an “inaccessible society. He said: “We all want to live in a society where we have an equal chance to have paid employment. Disabled people want that too.

“But employer discrimination, inflexible working practices, inaccessible housing and broken transport and health systems have locked almost half of the adult disabled population out of the labour market for decades.

“Think of the person with an anxiety condition so severe they’re unable to function in an interview but whose requests for alternative assessments are ignored.

“Or think of the wheelchair user who cannot get to work in Kentish Town because there is no lift in the newly renovated tube station — or indeed in almost all of the stations in Camden.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said: “We inherited a fundamentally broken welfare system from the previous government. It does not work for the people it is supposed to support, businesses who need workers or taxpayers who foot the bill.

“This government will always protect the most severely disabled people to live with dignity but we are not prepared to stand by back and do nothing while millions of people — especially young people — who have potential to work and live independent lives, instead become trapped out of work and abandoned by the system.  It would be morally bankrupt to let their life chances waste away.”