Oct 172016
Frances Ryan from The Guardian is putting together a feature on what it’s like to be a young disabled person in the UK. The idea is to highlight that – as the media talks about twenty somethings struggling to get into adulthood with poor housing options, low wages and high student debt – for young disabled people, they’re finding it even harder.
To do this, she’s on the hunt for case studies.
- a young disabled person who’s struggling in shocking unsuitable housing, anything from accommodation for the elderly (that we know is pretty common) to wildly inaccessible rental to stuck at home with parents into their thirties.
- young people who are struggling to get into work because of their disability.
- young people whose council has told them that, due to social care cuts, they have to go to bed early in the evening.
Contact: francesryan.journalism@gmail.com
What a fantastic story line! Coming from a family with a lot of autism I fully appreciate what life is like for the young people with, quite frankly, appalling unemployment statistics that successive governments have done little to address. Under this government many of them now find even disability allowances barred to them as well. A quite appalling situation. The punitive jobseekers system is nad enough, but to expect a young person with high functioning autism to adhere to the regulations, in competition with neurotypical people, is cruel indeed. I would be interested to know how many have fallen through the gap…to able to attract disability benefit and too vulnerable to cope with Jobseekers.