Contents
Trio of new disabled MPs join House of Commons 3
Campaigners welcome election defeats for DWP ministers, but frustration as key trio survive 8
Disabled people’s organisations call on government to ‘show you will be on our side’ 13
Other disability-related stories covered by mainstream media this week 15
Six days and 19,000 words into a new government, and just one mention of disability… then DWP claimant-blaming begins again
After six days in which disabled adults were ignored in a series of announcements from the new government, Labour’s work and pensions secretary has this morning launched an attack on the “unacceptable” number of people on out-of-work benefits.
In its first six days of government, after a crushing general election victory, Labour had mentioned disabled people just once in more than 19,000 words across 28 speeches and press releases, and that brief reference focused on disabled children.
But on the seventh day, just after midnight, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall announced that rising levels of economic inactivity were “unacceptable” and “immediate action” must be taken, stressing the “record 2.8 million people” who were out of work due to “long-term sickness”.
Although the language used was not as hostile as that used by the last Conservative government, Kendall still said this morning (Thursday) that economic inactivity was “holding Britain back” and was “bad for people, it’s bad for businesses, and it’s bad for growth”.
The early response this morning from at least some disabled people was that she was “blaming those too ill to work for holding Britain back”.
Kendall said: “We’ll create more good jobs, make work pay, transform skills, and overhaul jobcentres, alongside action to tackle the root causes of worklessness including poor physical and mental health.”
She announced a new jobs and careers service; new work, health and skills plans for “the economically inactive”; and more opportunities for training, an apprenticeship or help to find work for all those aged 18 to 21.
She said more disabled people and those with health conditions would be supported to enter and stay in work, by devolving more power to local areas.
Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting had announced on Tuesday that cutting NHS waiting lists would “get Britain back to health and back to work”, and that his department would make economic growth a priority.
Analysis by Disability News Service (DNS) of the first six days’ public announcements on the government’s news and communications web page shows disabled adults were not mentioned at all by any ministers before Kendall’s announcement.
The only mention of disability was in a press release announcing the appointment of a non-executive board member by the Department for Education (DfE).
The DfE said in the press release that the education and care system “does not currently meet the needs of all children, particularly those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)”.
And it said that “earlier interventions in mainstream schools” was “key for those with less complex needs”.
It announced that DfE would “restructure” its department to “ensure that improving inclusion in mainstream schools is the heart of our plans to improve opportunity for those children with SEND”.
It plans to bring policy on SEND and alternative provision under the responsibility of its schools group, one of the department’s six subdivisions that are each led by a director general.
None of the other releases by the government in its first six days in post mentioned disabled people, including a release describing Labour’s “six first steps for change”, or Keir Starmer’s first speech as prime minister, delivered outside 10 Downing Street.
Wes Streeting, the new health and social care secretary, managed to deliver his first speech in his new role without even mentioning social care, while transport secretary Louise Haigh set out her five “strategic priorities” without any mention of the huge access barriers disabled people face in using public transport.
Dr Marie Tidball, one of the new disabled Labour MPs (see separate story), suggested that disabled people should not read too much into this analysis.
Speaking before Kendall’s work and pensions announcement, she told DNS yesterday: “We’re not even a week in, and I think the damage that the past government did over the last 14 years is so great, there’s so much work to do across every aspect of government.
“But I think the fact that the social model is very much embedded in the manifesto, that the party has worked so hard to increase representation of a whole diverse range of people, including disabled candidates in key seats, should fill people with enthusiasm and excitement.”
She said Labour would be “mainstreaming disability” by ensuring that “every aspect of the way that we’re doing government is integrating it within it”.
Tidball highlighted key areas in Labour’s manifesto, including pledges on disability employment, education and skills, that will benefit disabled people.
She also pointed to the government’s policies on mental health, including putting mental health workers in every secondary school, and she said that one of the party’s five missions to rebuild Britain was to “break down barriers to opportunity”, which she said was “the social model writ large in one whole strand of the manifesto”.
11 July 2024
Trio of new disabled MPs join House of Commons
The new House of Commons looks set for a small increase in its disability representation, with at least three new disabled MPs winning seats in last week’s general election.
Of the 650 MPs elected last week, there may now be at least nine who identify as disabled people – compared to possibly as few as five in the last parliament – with further MPs who self-describe as disabled likely to emerge in the coming months.
There are at least three new disabled MPs: Dr Marie Tidball, who was elected for Labour in Penistone and Stocksbridge; the Liberal Democrat Steve Darling, elected in Torbay; and Labour’s Jen Craft, who overturned a large Conservative majority in Thurrock.
Tidball is a disability rights activist, a legal researcher, and an experienced Labour councillor, and has a law degree, a masters, and a doctorate in criminology, from the University of Oxford.
During the pandemic, she spoke out repeatedly about the disproportionate number of deaths of disabled people from Covid, as coordinator of Oxford University’s Disability Law and Policy Project.
Early in the pandemic, she edited a report which showed that the government’s policy-making had breached its duties to disabled people under both the Equality Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
She also accused the Conservative government of failing to “fulfil its national and international human rights obligations to disabled people” during the pandemic.
She later edited another report that found that the government’s National Disability Strategy had failed to address the “urgent challenges” posed by climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.
She won Penistone and Stocksbridge last week with a 10 per cent increase in the vote share.
She told Disability News Service (DNS) yesterday (Wednesday) that she was feeling “elated” and “really happy” with her victory after “two years of hard work”.*
She said she had felt “really uplifted” by the efforts made by House of Commons staff and authorities to ensure the induction process for new MPs was accessible to her.
Tidball said she saw part of her role as being “visible” as a disabled MP.
She said: “I very much feel 14 million disabled people stood behind me.
“There was David Blunkett when I was growing up, and a couple of other Labour MPs, but it was knowing that there was someone like David in the House of Commons at that time, who had a disability, that made me think, maybe one day I could do that.
“And I really want disabled people of all age groups to see this and go, ‘Maybe one day I could do this too.’”
Darling also has a background as a local councillor, and led Torbay council for four years, as well as spending 18 years working for the former Liberal Democrat MP Adrian Sanders.
He overturned a Conservative majority of more than 17,000 at the 2019 election to win by more than 5,000 votes.
Darling is blind, and has a guide dog, Jennie, now set to become a familiar feature of the Commons chamber.
Craft won the Thurrock seat by more than 6,000 votes from Reform UK, beating the previous Conservative MP Jackie Doyle-Price, a former minister who was defending an 11,000 majority, into third place.
Last year, Craft told Centenary Action – which campaigns for a gender equal parliament by 2028 – that she was “really passionate about SEND issues and disability rights”.
She described herself as “a stay-at-home mum and carer for my disabled daughter”, and added: “It’s very easy to overlook the role of an unpaid carer but it’s taught me a hell of a lot more than all of my other jobs.”
She told Centenary Action: “I am disabled myself, with long term mental health issues, and reform of the mental health system is long overdue.
“I feel like things have gone backwards for disabled people with funding cuts and a lack of access. I will definitely take this up and campaign on it if I’m elected.”
Another new MP, Labour’s Liam Conlon, has spoken of becoming disabled following an accident when he was a teenager, and being unable to walk for four years, before he had extensive surgery and a hip replacement.
Although it is not yet clear if he currently identifies as a disabled person, he told a news organisation last year: “I know from using a wheelchair as a teenager the indignity of not being able to access public transport, and how it limits disabled people’s opportunities to find work, and it is a key driver of social exclusion for disabled people.
“It’s why if I am elected, I am promising to set-up the first ever all-party parliamentary group on transport accessibility within 100 days of becoming an MP – and I want that change to start in south London.”
Conlon won the Beckenham and Penge seat with more than 25,000 votes, and nearly 50 per cent of the vote.
For Labour, Emma Lewell-Buck, Marie Rimmer and Marsha de Cordova, who have all previously identified as disabled people, were re-elected.
Labour’s pre-election shadow minister for disabled people, Vicky Foxcroft, who confirmed shortly before the election that she now identifies as a disabled person, was re-elected and won the Lewisham North seat with more than 25,000 votes.
But due to her appointment as a government whip, she will not be able to speak out on disability issues in parliament, despite her experience as shadow minister and her popularity among the disabled people’s movement.
For the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooper, the party’s deputy leader, has previously spoken of having a long-term health condition and told Channel 4 News reporter Ruben Reuter in a pre-election interview – when asked how many disabled candidates her party had – that she had “a hidden disability”.
Of those disabled MPs who lost their seats last week, Conservative Paul Maynard was heavily beaten in the new Blackpool North and Fleetwood constituency, while another leading disabled Conservative and former minister, Robert Halfon, did not seek re-election.
Among other disabled candidates who fought the election, Emily Brothers, who would have become the first disabled trans MP if she had been elected, was beaten into fourth place in a tightly-fought Isle of Wight East seat, behind the Conservatives, Reform UK and the Green Party, but still secured more than 6,000 votes.
Kim Marshall came second for the SNP in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, behind the Conservatives, securing 10,757 votes.
Jody McIntyre, a candidate for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, came within about 700 votes of defeating Labour’s Jess Phillips in Birmingham Yardley.
Katharine Macy came fifth for the Liberal Democrats in Colne Valley, with 4.3 per cent of the vote, while Richard Whelan came fifth for the party in Basingstoke, with 6.5 per cent of the vote.
Sara Nicola Ruth came fifth for the Greens in Colchester, with 5.4 per cent of the vote, while Mags Lewis, the party’s disability spokesperson, came seventh for the party in Leicester East, but still claimed 4.6 per cent of the vote in a seat in which two former Labour MPs were standing against their former party.
Independent candidate John Urquhart came eighth in Cardiff West, with 0.5 per cent of the vote.
*DNS will publish a full article based on the interview with Marie Tidball next week
11 July 2024
Anger and frustration over Labour’s ‘disgraceful’ decision not to appoint Foxcroft as disability minister
The new government has yet to announce who will be Labour’s minister for disabled people, but the decision not to appoint Vicky Foxcroft to the post has set back relations with significant parts of the disabled people’s movement.
Foxcroft, who has instead been appointed as a government whip, spent nearly four years working to develop relationships between her party and the movement as Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people.
Despite widespread unhappiness among disabled people with some of Labour’s policies, and its failure to take a stronger stance on disability rights, she was widely liked and respected.
The decision not to appoint her is even more of a setback as she had confirmed shortly before the election that she now identifies as disabled herself, and so would have been the first disabled person in the post since Labour’s Anne McGuire between 2005 and 2008.
But her appointment as a government whip will mean she will not be able to take part in parliamentary debates, or speak publicly on disability issues, other than on constituency matters.
Rick Burgess, a spokesperson for Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, said: “We hosted a national disability hustings on 2 July with Disability Rights UK and Inclusion London at the People’s History Museum.
“We were proud to say that all of the representatives were disabled people – including Vicky Foxcroft, the shadow minister for disabled people.
“Vicky has been working hard in that role, making connections with grassroots disabled people’s organisations and giving many disabled people hope for the new government.
“Vicky made strong pledges on behalf of the Labour Party and we’re concerned about how that’s going to be actioned without her as minister for disabled people in this new government.
“Once again, under the Labour Party, disabled people feel as if we were promised the earth to win our votes, and now our rights have been kicked to the kerb.”
The response on social media was also overwhelmingly negative.
One disabled campaigner, Catherine Hale, consultant researcher at King’s College London and founder of Chronic Illness Inclusion, described the decision as “very disappointing and wasteful”.
She said on Twitter that Foxcroft was her MP and had “worked really hard as shadow minister for disabled people for four years and built a wealth of knowledge about our issues.
“For those in our movement to have to start again is exhausting and demoralising.”
Dennis Queen, from the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN), said the move to sideline Foxcroft was “disgraceful” and called on the government to “bring back Vicky”.
It was still not clear by 11am this morning (Thursday) who Labour will appoint as its minister for disabled people.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, has now appointed six work and pensions ministers, but most of their roles have not yet been announced.
The six are work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, Sir Stephen Timms – who chaired the Commons work and pensions committee in the last parliament and served as a DWP minister under the last Labour government – Alison McGovern, Andrew Western, Emma Reynolds and Baroness Sherlock.
It is unlikely that Starmer would appoint a member of the House of Lords to the disability post, while McGovern was previously Labour’s shadow employment minister, and this Twitter post suggests she will take the employment role in government, while Reynolds has already been appointed as pensions minister.
This suggests that either Timms or Western will be the new minister for disabled people, although with his ministerial experience Timms is more likely to be given a welfare reform role.
In the Department of Health and Social Care, Starmer has – as expected – appointed Wes Streeting as health and care secretary, while Stephen Kinnock has unexpectedly been named minister of state for care.
Andrew Gwynne, who served as shadow minister for social care, has instead been appointed as junior minister for public health and prevention.
Last year, Gwynne told a fringe meeting at Labour’s annual conference that he wanted to be remembered by Labour party members as “the Nye Bevan of the 21st century” for building a new National Care Service if Labour won power.
Meanwhile, Bridget Phillipson has been appointed secretary of state for education and minister for women and equalities, while Anneliese Dodds has been appointed as a minister in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and minister for women and equalities in the Department for Education.
It is not yet clear how Phillipson and Dodds will divide the role, but it is unlikely that their responsibilities will include the minister for disabled people position.
Dodds said on Twitter that she would be working with Phillipson on the equality agenda and would “deliver our plans to support women and girls, advance race equality, break new ground for LGBT+ rights and stand up for disabled people”.
11 July 2024
Campaigners welcome election defeats for DWP ministers, but frustration as key trio survive
Campaigners have welcomed election defeats for a series of former Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) ministers, while also expressing disappointment that three of the most unpopular figures from the last 14 years managed to survive the Labour landslide.
There was some satisfaction at the Conservative election losses, both from disabled activists and relatives of some of those who lost their lives through the actions of DWP, and policies introduced by former ministers.
But there was also frustration that Labour in-fighting allowed the survival of Iain Duncan Smith, who led DWP from 2010 to 2016 and is held responsible by many activists for the worst of the department’s actions during the austerity years.
He held onto his Chingford and Woodford Green seat with a little over 17,000 votes, after Labour’s Shama Tatler and independent Faiza Shaheen – who had been deselected as the Labour candidate just weeks earlier – both polled more than 12,000 votes.
It has also emerged that Chris Grayling, DWP’s employment minister from 2010 to 2012, who had already stood down as an MP, is to be awarded a life peerage, despite his key role in some of the most dangerous and damaging decisions of the coalition government.
Esther McVey – who served as minister for disabled people, employment minister and work and pensions secretary during the austerity years – won her Tatton seat by more than 1,000 votes, although she saw her share of the vote plunge by nearly 19 per cent.
And Mel Stride, work and pensions secretary until the election, won his Central Devon seat by just 61 votes.
He had been responsible for a string of damaging policies on disability benefits while leading the department.
Just weeks before the election, Disability News Service (DNS) revealed how two statements he had made about disability benefits had been found to be potentially misleading by the UK statistics regulator.
Among those who did lose their seats were Therese Coffey, work and pensions secretary from September 2019 to September 2022; Tom Pursglove, minister for disabled people from 2022 to 2023; and Justin Tomlinson, who served twice as minister for disabled people.
DNS revealed two years ago how DWP watered down key parts of a plan drawn up to prevent suicides and learn lessons from claimant deaths, while under Coffey’s leadership.
During her time as work and pensions secretary, Coffey was heavily criticised for her attitude to the families of benefit claimants whose deaths had been linked to her department’s actions, including refusing to meet them to discuss their concerns.
She was also criticised for preventing the release of key details from scores of secret reports into claimant deaths.
And there was repeated anger over her claims that her department had no statutory duty of care to benefit claimants, including those whose deaths were caused by her department.
There was also anger among many activists at the decision to make Coffey a dame for “political and public service”.
Other former DWP ministers defeated last week included Maria Miller, the first minister for disabled people under the Conservative-led coalition in 2010; and two other former disability ministers, Penny Mordaunt and Mark Harper.
Only last month, DNS reported how official DWP documents linked Mordaunt to a government cover-up of how a disabled man took his own life after being wrongly found fit for work.
Paula Peters, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts, said: “It was poetic justice to see some of the former secretaries of state for the DWP, ministers for disabled people and former employment ministers lose their seats as MP.
“However, it is with deep anger and distress that we note Therese Coffey has been awarded a damehood for her role in the Tory government via the dissolution honours list.
“This is a huge slap in the face to all the families who have lost loved ones as a result of the distress and harm the DWP have caused.
“It’s a kick in the teeth to disabled people across the UK who are living in terrible poverty as a result of the welfare reforms she presided over.
“We must demand this damehood be withdrawn without delay.”
She added: “There is a deep sense of anger that Iain Duncan Smith, Mel Stride and Esther McVey were re-elected to parliament.
“There is more deep anger that Mel Stride has been reappointed as shadow secretary of state for the DWP under outgoing former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s shadow cabinet.
“Our messages to both sides of parliament: we will continue to campaign and scrutinise policy, and hold ministers and MPs to account.”
Among those expressing relief at the end of 14 years of Conservative rule was Gill Thompson.
Her brother David Clapson, who had diabetes, died in July 2013 due to an acute lack of insulin, three weeks after having his jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) sanctioned.
Because he had no money, he couldn’t afford to pay for electricity that would have kept the fridge where he kept his insulin working, and he had also run out of food.
Four months after his death, McVey issued a press release in which she called for an end to the “something for nothing” culture and boasted of new figures which show JSA claimants had had their payments suspended 580,000 times in the nine months since “tougher rules” were introduced in October 2012.
Thompson, who has campaigned for more than a decade for justice for her brother and other DWP victims, said the election was “the best day ever” and that she felt that “now David can be put to rest”, although she said she would “always be supportive of the cause”.
She said: “I am glad Labour have won, but the biggest thing for me was to see this awful government out, and hopefully not to return, not easily anyway.
“An end to all this suffering, that’s all I ever wanted.”
Alison Burton, whose father-in-law Errol Graham starved to death after DWP wrongly stopped his benefits when he missed a work capability assessment, stayed up until the early hours of Friday to confirm that Coffey had lost.
Although Coffey was not in charge of DWP when he died, she was secretary of state for much of the time the family subsequently sought justice through the courts.
She has previously highlighted Coffey’s repeated failure to show sympathy for the families of those who had died, and her lack of action to address DWP’s part in those deaths.
Burton said she had been thinking of her father-in-law on election night, and of the damage done by Coffey.
She said: “I was determined to make sure that she lost her seat. It was one thing I wanted to see more than anything.
“Now she can’t do to another family what she did to mine.”
She added: “One thing I am damn sure of is I didn’t want the Conservatives in power.”
She said successive Conservative-led governments had “no excuses” for the continuing deaths of disabled benefit claimants, as there had been repeated warnings, including those from coroners.
She said: “They can’t step away from what they have done.”
Burton, who is disabled herself, said: “The Conservatives have created a hatred towards disabled people over the past decade among people who don’t have a disability.
“They have painted the impression in their minds that we are scrounging off their taxes.
“The Conservatives have created an awful lot of wrong and misleading information.”
And she promised that she was “not going to go away” just because there was a new government.
She said: “I don’t care who is in power. Many other families will do the same.
“We still need answers. We still need the truth and we still need justice.”
Joy Dove, whose daughter Jodey Whiting took her own life after her employment and support allowance was wrongly stopped for missing a work capability assessment, said she did not celebrate when former DWP ministers lost their seats.
But she said she was glad that Coffey was defeated because of how she attempted to prevent her family securing a second inquest into her daughter’s death.
She said: “I hope this new government grant us a public inquiry into all those who died because of the DWP.
“It’s about time we get justice and DWP are held to account.”
The Department, DNS editor John Pring’s book on DWP and how its actions led to countless deaths of disabled people in the post-2010 era, will be published by Pluto Press on 20 August. Visit TheDepartmentBook.com before publication for a 50 per cent discount
11 July 2024
Report poses crucial questions for Labour government on whether to scrap work capability assessment
A new report on the work capability assessment (WCA) has posed crucial questions for the new government on whether to scrap the test or improve it, just four days after Labour came to power in a landslide election victory.
The Conservative government announced last year that it would scrap the WCA after the election, and would tighten the assessment in the short term as a cost-cutting measure.
But Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger has this week published a report on the “much-hated system”, weighing up the possible advantages and disadvantages of scrapping the WCA.
The final report draws on input from scores of experts who examined his initial conclusions, including disabled people with lived experience of the social security system.
The report, After the WCA: Competing Visions of Disability and Welfare, concludes that both scrapping the WCA and reforming it could each lead to a “much better” system.
Baumberg Geiger, co-lead on the work, welfare reform and mental health programme for the ESRC* Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London, is now hoping to ensure the report is seen by Labour’s new ministers in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
The Conservative government said last year that it planned to scrap the WCA and rely instead on the personal independence payment (PIP) assessment to decide if disabled claimants are eligible for extra support through universal credit.
Under that system, decisions on whether disabled people are expected to carry out work-related activity would be made by jobcentre work coaches.
This week’s report aims to sketch out possible best- and worst-case scenarios if the WCA was scrapped.
It shows that increasing spending on disability benefit spending “does not mean that ‘welfare spending is out-of-control’” but is instead a result of a much larger drop in spending on other benefits, such as universal credit.
The report also calls for a substantial increase in the basic rate of universal credit, to address widespread poverty among both disabled and non-disabled people.
Baumberg Geiger lays out some ideas for improving the WCA, such as finding a way to match people’s “functional” capacity with the requirements of those jobs that are available, but also ensuring that assessors “accurately report” what they are told by claimants, improving safeguards for cases where assessors challenge claimants’ descriptions of their lives, and improving how medical evidence is fed into the WCA process.
He concludes that the WCA is “not quite as bad as it was in the early 2010s” but is “still associated with much claimant unhappiness and anxiety, is about to get harsher, and it remains a poor assessment”.
The worst-case scenario of scrapping it could see “much greater income losses for ill and disabled people”, with the possibility that extending strict conditions and sanctions to more disabled people could be “a disaster” and might even increase disincentives to work.
But he also describes a “best-case scenario” in which the current regime is replaced by a focus by DWP on “engagement not compliance”; on “voluntary aspirations, rather than mandatory commitments”; and on “genuinely useful steps towards work, rather than jumping through hoops” and “threats”.
He says the system “needs claimants to trust the DWP”, which is “the most obvious lesson from the last fifteen years”, as “many ill and disabled claimants have little trust in the DWP, feel insecure, and negotiate work and benefits with trepidation”.
He writes in his report: “The current system for disabled people does not incentivise work; it does not consistently protect people from poverty or destitution; it does not provide administrative justice; and it creates insecurity and anxiety for many ill and disabled claimants.”
He concludes that the decision on whether to scrap the WCA or reform it is less important than “the broader challenge of building a system that works for ill and disabled people more broadly”.
Among the disabled campaigners who fed into the final report, Kaliya Franklin, who was a leading member of the grassroots Spartacus Network in the post-2010 years, and spent years researching the flawed WCA, said there needed to be a greater focus on increasing the level of benefits to avoid people living in “long term destitution”.
She said there needed to be much more emphasis on what employers can do to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people and support them in the workplace.
Bill Scott, senior policy advisor for Inclusion Scotland, said the question of the “adequacy” of benefit levels has to be “tackled absolutely fundamentally”.
He said: “If we want to see where the epidemic of mental health issues has come from, look at the adequacy of benefits, and look at austerity policies and the poverty it’s created in our society, and the anxiety that creates within the poorer parts of the population – and you have an explanation for the huge rise in mental health issues amongst working-age people.”
Catherine Hale, consultant researcher at King’s College London and founder of Chronic Illness Inclusion, pointed to a number of “injustices” in the WCA and the PIP assessment for people with chronic illness or energy-limiting conditions.
These include the “denial of cognitive fatigue and dysfunction” and its impact on work capability and employability; the “flawed rationale” in the WCA that takes more account of a single “severe” impairment than multiple fluctuating impairments when it comes to assessing capacity for work; and the failure of the PIP assessment to account for the needs and extra costs of people with chronic illness.
*Economic and Social Research Council
11 July 2024
Disabled people’s organisations call on government to ‘show you will be on our side’
Disabled people’s organisations (DPOs) have vowed to be a “critical friend” to the new Labour government, but they have called for it to “show our community that you will be on our side”.
DPO Forum England, which represents more than 350 DPOs across England, said it wanted to work with the new government to “coproduce the policies that will have a real impact on our lives”.
In a letter to the new prime minister, Keir Starmer, the forum said there were “many areas of our lives that have been neglected by the last government” and it called for recognition from the new government that it was “not possible to achieve a fundamental change in our lives without investment in public services”.
They say in the letter (PDF): “Accessible homes, good education support, investment in accessible transport, a well-functioning NHS and social care support in community are vital preconditions to enabling Disabled people to work, learn and have a good quality of life.”
Among their demands, they call for an end to the segregation and institutionalisation of disabled people, including involuntary detentions in psychiatric hospitals and forced treatment in hospitals and in the community.
And they call for a “real transformative disability strategy” that is co-produced by the government with disabled people, and for ministers to “urgently raise accessibility standards for new built homes”.
On disability poverty and disability benefits, the letter points out that the previous government “spent years in endless reforms of disability benefits and have laid the ground for a more brutal attack” on disabled people, with their policies causing “anxiety, distress and preventable deaths”.
It urges Starmer to take “urgent steps” to reject the Conservative government’s recent series of reforms to disability benefits, including its consultation on reform of personal independence payment (PIP); its plans to tighten the work capability assessment (WCA); its longer-term plans to link extra support in universal credit to the PIP assessment; and its reforms to the fit note system.
The letter also calls on the new government to “cease subjecting Disabled people to an unfair and harmful” regime of benefit conditions and sanctions, and to work with DPOs to “design a supportive benefits system that promotes our rights and respects our dignity”.
In a separate intervention, the Disability Poverty Campaign Group, which is led by DPOs Disability Rights UK and Inclusion London – both members of the forum – has urged the new government to “tackle the deep poverty experienced by millions of Disabled citizens”.
It said this week: “Poverty within the disability community continues to worsen and the new UK government needs to act urgently to support those struggling to afford food, energy, rents, care charges, medication and transport, and to prevent others falling further into poverty.”
It joined DPO Forum England in calling on the new government to co-produce solutions with disabled people.
Meanwhile, Disability Rights UK, along with other campaigning organisations, has written to Labour’s new work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, to ask her to reject Conservative plans to tighten the WCA from 2025.
These plans would mean cuts to support of more than £400 a month for 424,000 disabled people, who would also lose their protection from being forced to carry-out work-related activity as part of their universal credit claim.
They say in their letter: “Disabled people are already more likely to live in poverty, and recent research has shown that two thirds of people currently living in destitution are Disabled or have a long-term health condition.
“We believe these plans would serve to exacerbate this inequity.”
And they point out that the real terms value of the basic rate of benefits has in recent years hit a 40-year low, which could mean that disabled people affected by tightening the WCA are “likely to find themselves unable to afford essentials”.
11 July 2024
Other disability-related stories covered by mainstream media this week
Bristol City Council has admitted “institutional discrimination” against disabled staff and says it will take years to put it right. Bosses are “embarrassed and ashamed” over advice given to managers for decades that reinforced bad practice on what should be “reasonable adjustments” for disabled employees. The council now says it is making “lasting and meaningful change” after joining forces with staff and campaigners who were at their “wits’ end” and raised the issue last year with the then-chief executive who ordered directors to take urgent action: https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-city-council-admits-institutional-9388139
11 July 2024
News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com
