Johnson’s social care ‘fix’ is ‘disappointing… regressive… and insulting’
Disabled campaigners have delivered a withering response to the government’s long-awaited plan to “fix social care” in England.
The proposals were announced on Tuesday by the prime minister, Boris Johnson, who claimed they would “fix social care” and the NHS treatment backlogs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first reading of a bill to introduce the levy was approved yesterday (Wednesday) by MPs.
But there was almost universal criticism across the disabled people’s movement of the inadequate level of funding, the failure to address the needs of working-age disabled people, the lack of detail, and the disproportionate impact of the plans on lower-income workers.
Where Johnson called his plans “responsible, fair, and necessary”, disabled people’s organisations and grassroots groups described them as “disappointing”, “regressive” and even “insulting”.
The plans focus on the introduction of a new 1.25 per cent national insurance levy and a similar rise in dividend tax rates, ringfenced for health and social care, but with most of the new funding put aside for the NHS, at least for the first three years.
The key social care measure – to be followed by a health and social care white paper later this year – is the introduction of a new cap of £86,000 on lifetime personal care costs and a more generous support system for those with significant assets, particularly older people who own their own homes.
But ministers have not yet been clear exactly what they mean by “personal care” (see separate story).
The initial responses to the announcement from disabled people and disabled people’s organisations were overwhelmingly negative and dismissive.
Professor Peter Beresford, co-chair of the disabled people’s and service-user network Shaping Our Lives, said the prime minister’s proposals “treat older and disabled people with contempt and they further signal his government’s primary commitment to the well off and the powerful”.
He said the national insurance rise was a “broad brush attack on lower income tax-payers”, while there was nothing to address social care employment, the “poor law principles of means and needs testing” that lie at the heart of the current social care system, or local variations in provision.
And he said there was “not even a nod in the direction” of the proposals put forward by the disabled people’s movement for a free, universal system of independent living that would be funded by progressive taxation, through a National Independent Living Support Service (NILSS).
Inclusion London was just as dismissive of the government’s proposals, and said it was “extremely disappointed” with the plans.
Svetlana Kotova, Inclusion London’s director of campaigns and justice, said the current system excludes thousands of people with support needs, and condemns many of those who do receive support “to a life of isolation” because they are trapped at home with care visits that only last 15 minutes, which “barely ensures basic survival”.
She said: “The existing structure forces disabled people, already on means-tested benefits, to pay unjust charges and makes them even poorer.
“At the same time, it pays care workers a pittance and heavily relies on unpaid carers.”
She said the increase in national insurance was “not a progressive move” and would “not fix a broken system”.
She added: “The cap won’t fix our broken care system – it won’t provide social care for many hundreds of thousands of people currently excluded from support.
“It won’t improve the quality or amount of support people currently get, which is woeful.
“It won’t stop the scandal of charging for social care that is robbing disabled people of essential disability benefits income and pushes them into extreme poverty, and it won’t improve wages or conditions of care workers or address the recruitment and vacancy crisis.
“Social care must be free at the point of need, funded through progressive taxation.
“The government needs to provide an urgent injection of funding to stabilise the system and start to actively work with disabled people to develop a social care service fit for our needs and the years to come.”
Disability Rights UK (DR UK) said the plans were “too little, too late”.
Fazilet Hadi, DR UK’s head of policy, said: “The proposed measures do not kick in for another two years.
“They may not be enough to cover care costs, they may still rely on those with minimal assets having to contribute to care costs, and they do not cover the vastly greater accommodation or food costs, known as hotel costs, for disabled people in residential care.
“We also believe it is the wrong mechanism to use national insurance contributions instead of income tax.”
The Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance dismissed the government’s proposals as a “tax without a plan”.
Mark Harrison, a member of ROFA’s steering group, said it was “a con to get working people to disproportionately bail out the private sector, who deliver inadequate social care services to disabled people for profit”.
He said Johnson’s plan was “focussed on preventing older Tory voters in the south of England from ‘losing their homes’ and will do nothing to resolve the crisis facing working-age disabled people”.
He said ROFA was instead focused on developing and implementing its NILSS plans, which would allow the government to meet its duties under article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
And he called on Labour leader Keir Starmer to “seriously engage with ROFA members to coproduce a legal right to independent living backed by a transformational system”, rather than pushing Labour’s “out of date, 20th century solutions”.
The National Survivor User Network (NSUN) described the “inadequate” level of funding as “deeply disappointing” and criticised the government’s “regressive” solution of a levy on national insurance contributions, which it said was “not the answer to the social care crisis”.
The disabled author and Guardian columnist Frances Ryan spoke out about the plans as the BBC released Hen Night, a short drama inspired by her book Crippled, in which a young disabled teacher, Jessica, fights back after her social care is cut during the pandemic.
Ryan said: “Boris Johnson’s social care plan was effectively a plan without a plan.
“Nothing for working age disabled people drowning in care bills and unmet needs. Nothing for underpaid care staff. Nothing for family carers.
“There are hundreds of thousands of real life Jessicas out there and few of them will be helped by the government’s announcements.”
The grassroots disabled people’s organisation Bristol Reclaiming Independent Living (BRIL) said the amount of funding provided for social care was “both meaningless and insulting”.
BRIL said the only winners from the government’s announcement would be “the wealthy, and the owners of the private care companies”.
A BRIL spokesperson said the decision to unfreeze the minimum income guarantee [frozen by the government since 2015] for those paying care charges next year was “welcome, and no doubt due to the efforts of disabled activists drawing attention to this scandal”.
But he said it was “too little, too late” and “no solace for the thousands of disabled people who have been forced into debt, poverty and left without care and support for years”, while the failure to provide anything concrete on social care support for mental health service-users was “frankly unforgivable”.
Disabled People Against Cuts was another to criticise the use of national insurance to fund the proposals, and it described the minimum income guarantee offering as “a crumb rather than a slice of bread”.
Donald O’Neal, whose exposé of England’s social care system, The Lack of Care Act 2014, was published in July, said the government’s plan “says little about people of working age who live in the community” and nothing about centres for independent living and other disabled people’s organisations, “which have shown that they are best at supporting disabled people who live independently”.
O’Neal, a social care service-user for more than 35 years, said the government’s plan failed to address disabled people’s needs “beyond the basics”, such as washing, dressing and getting out of bed.
And he said the proposals read instead “like a plan that was created without disabled people around the table”.
O’Neal also said he did not believe the proposal to impose a levy on national insurance was a fair way to raise extra funds, because of the burden it imposed on low-income workers, and that he feared it would not raise enough funds to address the social care crisis.
The Disability Union was also critical of the funding solution, which it said “predominantly benefits the wealthy while being predominantly paid for by the poorest”.
9 September 2021
Government’s silence over gaping holes in plans to ‘fix social care’
The government has refused to explain why there are gaping holes in its long-awaited plans to “fix social care”, and it has even been unable to define what it means by “personal care”.
The proposals were announced on Tuesday by the prime minister, who claimed his plans would fix both social care and the NHS treatment backlogs caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the paper published by Boris Johnson – Build Back Better – offers just eight pages on the government’s new plan for adult social care in England, despite the prime minister announcing more than two years ago on the steps of Downing Street that his government would “fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared”.
The plans focus on raising revenue through a new 1.25 per cent national insurance levy and a rise in dividend tax rates, ringfenced for health and social care, but with most of the new £12 billion-a-year funding apparently put aside for the NHS, at least for the first three years.
A key aspect of the social care plan is to introduce a new lifetime limit of £86,000 on the amount an individual will have to pay for their “personal care”, starting from October 2023.
The government paper refers repeatedly to limiting lifetime “eligible personal care” costs, but it is not clear whether this only includes support with washing, dressing and getting out of bed.
If it does, disabled people who also pay towards council-funded help with housework, laundry and shopping, and support to enjoy a social life and to stay engaged in the community, will find those payments not included in the £86,000 ceiling.
But when Disability News Service asked the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to explain what the prime minister meant by “personal care”, it had failed to do so by noon today (Thursday).
There are other gaping holes in the plans.
There is no mention in the proposals of the right to live independently under article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Johnson’s failure to discuss a legal right to independent living comes despite a call only four months ago by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for the government to introduce such a right.
The social care focus of the paper is instead on providing a more generous support system for service-users with significant assets, particularly older people.
The three case studies examining the financial impact of the plans on those needing social care all focus on service-users who are over the age of retirement.
There is no mention in the paper of working-age recipients of social care, other than when defining adult social care in the fifth paragraph of the document.
And there is almost no mention of the impact of the government’s plans on the thousands of disabled people who must currently pay significant care charges out of their monthly income, due to means-testing.
The only brief reference to means-testing is in the decision to unfreeze the minimum income guarantee for those who pay for their care, which has been frozen by the government since 2015 and will now rise again, but only by the rate of inflation, from next April.
DHSC declined to answer several questions about the proposals from Disability News Service.
The department declined to explain why there was no mention of the need for a right to independent living; why there was no mention of working-age disabled people in the three case studies; how it defines personal care; why there was almost no mention of working-age care recipients; why there was almost no discussion of the impact on people’s income, rather than their savings; and why the white paper was still not ready to be published, two years after the prime minister said he had a plan ready to go.
Instead, a DHSC spokesperson said in a statement: “This week’s announcement means that no one receiving long-term disability care and support – whether that care starts at 17 or 70 – will any longer face the catastrophic, unlimited costs they did before.
“An additional £5.4 billion is being invested in social care over the next three years, which includes an extension of the established disabled facilities grant to enable more people with disabilities to live independently in their own homes.
“We are determined to ensure the quality of care for disabled people who need it is consistently high and will work closely with disability groups as part of our work to develop the next steps in this ambitious reform programme.”
9 September 2021
Ground-breaking production will create a high-tech museum of DWP’s victims
The stories of 10 disabled people whose deaths have been linked publicly to the failings of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are to be told in a ground-breaking digital production that explores the devastating human impact of austerity.
Museum of Austerity uses the verbal testimony of family members and state-of-the-art technology to recreate the circumstances that led to the deaths of 10 disabled benefit claimants in the post-2010 austerity decade.
The mixed reality production uses recorded interviews with the family members and ground-breaking “volumetric capture” techniques that have produced high-quality, three-dimensional images.
Museum of Austerity will eventually include several rooms that each demonstrate a different element of the personal and public impact of austerity.
The first room focuses on the personal stories of disabled benefit claimants, whose deaths have all previously been linked by Disability News Service (DNS) to flaws in DWP’s assessments, sanctions and safeguarding systems.
A work-in-progress version of this room will be shown publicly for the first time at next month’s BFI London Film Festival*.
It has been produced by the English Touring Theatre and the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio, and devised and directed by critically-acclaimed theatre director Sacha Wares.
All of the relatives whose voices will be heard have previously spoken to DNS, including Mo Ahmed, the brother of Sophie (Faiza) Ahmed, whose suicide in 2014 exposed flaws in DWP’s safeguarding system; and Gill Thompson, whose brother David Clapson died after being left destitute when his benefits were sanctioned.
Other deaths covered by the exhibition include those of Mark Wood, Moira Drury, Diane Hullah and James Oliver.
It also includes testimony from Imogen Day, Joy Dove and Alison Turner, all three of whom have previously spoken to DNS to highlight DWP’s failings following the deaths of their relatives Philippa Day, Jodey Whiting and Errol Graham.
Dove said: “I need the story told for Jodey’s sake.
“Jodey’s death changed our lives forever from day one and we as a family have suffered continuing heartache.
“It has broken me. All that keeps me going is to get justice for Jodey and the other families.
“I want these stories out there. From day one of being told about this theatre project it has given me hope for justice and a hope that we can change the system.”
The Museum of Austerity team includes experienced and emerging disabled artists, including leading composer Adrian Lee – who has produced an original score in memory of those who have died – producer Meg Fozzard, assistant director Hana Pascal Keegan, and co-editor and specialist advisor John Pring**.
*Tickets are on sale from 20 September, with the exhibition open from 6 to 17 October, 11am to 9pm, at 26 Leake Street
**Eight of the 10 interviews were carried out by Pring, editor of Disability News Service, who has been working on the project for more than a year
***Museum of Austerity is supported by CreativeXR, a programme developed by Digital Catapult and Arts Council England. It is a Genesis Kickstart Fund project, supported by the Genesis Foundation; and is supported using public funding from Arts Council England, and co-commissioned by BFI London Film Festival – LFF Expanded
9 September 2021
Mobile video screen will tell delegates the ‘appalling’ truth about their Tory government
Anti-cuts activists are to hire a mobile video screen that will give disabled people the chance to tell members of the Conservative party attending their annual conference what they think of the government’s “appalling” breaches of their rights.
Manchester Disabled People Against Cuts (MDPAC) is calling on disabled people from across the country to record short video messages to the government that can be played on the mobile screen during next month’s conference in Manchester.
MDPAC hopes the action will allow disabled people who need to continue to shield from COVID-19 to express their feelings about the government’s repeated failure to protect their rights – rather than having to attend an in-person protest in Manchester – and allow those messages to be relayed to some of the Conservative delegates attending the conference.
MDPAC has hired a van with a video screen to spend several hours skirting the conference venue in the centre of Manchester on 4 October, due to take place on the day the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, delivers his set-piece conference speech.
MDPAC is now calling on disabled people to record their messages – ideally of one or two minutes – and upload them to MDPAC’s Dropbox account.
There will also be an opportunity to record messages during a Zoom meeting that will be held later this month.
Anyone who would like to contribute financially to hiring the equipment can visit a Crowdfunder page, which is already more than halfway to its £1,000 target.
An MDPAC spokesperson said: “There’s a lot of security so there is little we can do to impact on [delegates inside the conference].
“The one thing we can do is let them know that what the government is doing is not good for disabled people.
“They must never get the idea that everything is fine.
“The disability strategy and the [disability benefits] green paper have little announcements written throughout them about how great they are doing, which is a complete rejection of reality – there is no mention of the UN [which said that cuts to support for disabled people had caused “a human catastrophe”], of the welfare deaths, of the absolute collapse of social care.
“We are asking people what they want to tell the Conservative government about being a disabled person in 2021, because we don’t think they listen to disabled people.
“Wherever you are, whatever your situation, if you can find a way to get yourself on video, that would be great.”
He added: “We don’t want charities speaking for us or politicians, we will speak for ourselves, or sign for ourselves or caption for ourselves. It’s about our message.”
Tory conferences, held every two years in Manchester since the coalition came to power in 2010, have frequently been associated with DPAC protests.
Four years ago, activists from DPAC and the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN) held up Manchester city centre tram services for about 90 minutes by blocking tram lines outside the conference.
9 September 2021
Labour shadow ministers for equality and disability stay silent over party discrimination
Labour’s shadow ministers for disability and equalities have refused to comment on the party’s continuing failure to address the discrimination faced by its own disabled members.
Both Vicky Foxcroft, the shadow minister for disabled people, and Marsha de Cordova, the shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, both stayed silent this week on Labour’s ongoing refusal to address the barriers faced by disabled party members.
Their silence came after Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, failed to explain what had happened to the promise she made 18 months ago to address the issue.
Rayner called in March 2020 for Labour to do more to ensure that “disabled people’s voices are heard in politics”, and she said that the party needed “to start by looking at ourselves”.
She spoke out as part of her successful campaign to secure the deputy leadership, saying: “We need to ensure that disabled people have full access, to ensure that there are no barriers for anyone.
“I want to start by taking an honest look at what we are doing and whether we are living up to our principles.”
Rayner wrote a report in late March 2020, which included more than 20 actions that the party should carry out so it could become “the most accessible it has ever been”.
These included ending the practice of holding constituency Labour party (CLP) meetings in inaccessible venues; providing training for CLP chairs on how to deal with discrimination; all CLP disability officers to themselves be disabled people; the appointment of a national disability officer with an allocated budget; and the party to provide resources to help disabled members with the disability-related costs of standing for election.
But Disability News Service (DNS) has been unable to find evidence of any of the actions being implemented after Rayner became deputy leader.
DNS has been reporting for several years on concerns raised by disabled Labour members about the barriers created by the party’s structures, policies and actions.
At the party’s last annual conference before the pandemic, in 2019, senior Labour figures were accused of discrimination and “oppression”, while the previous year a survey of disabled party activists revealed three-quarters of those questioned believed there was disability discrimination at all levels of the party.
Kathy Bole, co-chair of Disability Labour, said this week that there was little evidence of a “true commitment” within the Labour party to addressing the long-standing discrimination.
She said: “Disability Labour has been working with different areas of the Labour Party to improve access within the party.
“However, that being said, we have had little interaction with Angela Rayner or indeed with Keir Starmer about the commitments made to disabled members during their leadership campaigns.
“We have watched as programmes have been launched with little consultation and design in mind for disabled party members.
“Despite trying to remain positive that change will come, we are faced with having a face-to-face conference in Brighton [later this month], despite being told repeatedly we would not have conference there due to the general inaccessibility of the conference venue.”
She said Disability Labour feared that the financial problems facing the party would lead to many of the gains that had been made being lost.
Bole said: “We are still willing to work with the party, but we have seen little to show a true commitment.
“With the finances as they are, it seems inevitable we will not see the level of change which needs to come for disabled members.
“Less Labour Party staff means less support for the kind of change disabled members need.
“I urge the leaders in the party to meet with us to discuss the issues we have from ableist discrimination within the party.”
This week, DNS contacted both Vicky Foxcroft and Marsha de Cordova to ask them what action they and the party had taken to address the long-standing issues of discrimination within Labour.
Neither of them had responded by noon today (Thursday).
9 September 2021
Peers criticise government for ‘objectionable’ Equality Act failure
A cross-party House of Lords committee has criticised the government for its “objectionable” failure to bring into force key anti-discrimination measures that became law more than a decade ago.
The Lords liaison committee said ministers had also failed to use their much-criticised National Disability Strategy to implement “key provisions” from the 2010 Equality Act.
A report, published today (Thursday), says the committee “finds it objectionable that parts of the Equality Act, now over 10 years old, are still not in force”, which it says is “an affront to Parliament”.
Among the areas of the Equality Act that the government has failed to improve or implement over the last decade, according to the committee, are the public sector equality duty; access to taxis and private hire vehicles; and access to sports stadiums.
The report also highlights the continued delay in implementing the provision in the Equality Act that would give tenants the right to force landlords to make reasonable adjustments to the common parts of residential buildings, such as hallways and staircases.
Ministers have repeatedly pledged to implement this provision, but there will now be further delays, with the new disability strategy promising only a consultation rather than immediate implementation.
The Lords liaison committee also calls on the government to make it easier for disabled people to take discrimination claims under the Equality Act by extending the use of a process known as Qualified One-Way Costs Shifting (QOCS).
Disabled campaigner Esther Leighton failed last year with a judicial review that aimed to force the government to extend QOCS to Equality Act cases.
The committee said it found the government’s stance on the issue “disappointing” and added: “The Government should be focusing on the impact of the current costs regime on disabled people and the fact that it is preventing disabled persons from accessing justice.”
The report follows up an inquiry by the Lords Equality Act 2010 and disability committee, which concluded in 2016 that the government was failing to protect disabled people from discrimination, and that laws designed to address disability discrimination were “not working in practice”.
An analysis by Disability News Service of the government’s response to that report, which was published later in 2016, suggested that it had accepted in full only about eight of the committee’s 55 recommendations.
Baroness Deech, who chaired the Equality Act 2010 and disability committee, said: “The government has missed a golden opportunity to tackle key issues including ensuring the public sector equality duty delivers results and improved outcomes rather than being a tick-box exercise, ensuring taxis and private hire vehicles are accessible to disabled people and ensuring sports stadiums have appropriate provision for all fans.
“Some of these provisions are already law and are just not being enforced; for the government to ignore them yet again in its national strategy means that it is not acting on what parliament has agreed.
“The government cannot expect disabled people to have confidence in its new strategy when it has consistently failed to enforce existing legislation or act on recommendations to rectify that.”
9 September 2021
Only a tiny proportion of responses to national survey were read, government suggests
Only a tiny proportion of the views expressed by the thousands of disabled people who took part in the government’s national disability survey have been read by a minister or civil servant, a freedom of information response suggests.
The new information has added fresh ammunition for disabled campaigners who believe that the National Disability Strategy – which was “informed” by the survey results and was published in July – has no legitimacy and should be withdrawn.
Most of the questions posed by the UK Disability Survey in January were restricted to multiple choice answers.
But four of them allowed “free text” answers, and the Cabinet Office says it received more than 25,000 answers from disabled people to these four questions.
A freedom of information response from the Cabinet Office now says that all 25,000 of these answers were analysed through so-called “topic modelling”, which the government has described as “a method of machine-assisted reading of text data, used to identify topics from free text responses to open format questions”.
A report on the survey responses says that only 1,200 of the 25,000 responses from disabled people were also analysed by researchers through “manual coding”, and even then, only with the aim of producing themes and sub-themes.
The freedom of information response says there is no written evidence to show how many responses were read in full by a civil servant, a minister or a researcher, with the Cabinet Office telling Disability News Service: “No information is held on the number of responses read in full by a Civil Servant, Research [sic], or Minister.”
The much-criticised survey is already being challenged by four disabled people through a high court judicial review.
Doug Paulley, one of the four taking the legal action, said: “I am unsurprised but dismayed that the government evidently doesn’t care enough about disabled people’s input into their strategy that they didn’t even bother to read most responses.
“The survey was so flawed that the strategy has no legitimacy, should be withdrawn and rewritten with disabled people.”
He said that the failure to read all the responses was not a surprise because the survey was “clearly deeply flawed from the start”.
He said: “The topics chosen were not directed by disabled people, the mechanism of survey was inaccessible to many disabled people and the restricted range of answers meant that the limited free text responses were for many the only way to put down what is really important to them.
“I spent time writing mine carefully; doubtless other disabled people did similarly – unless they were put off responding altogether due to the other issues.”
The Disability Unit declined this week to say how many of the free text responses were read by civil servants and ministers; how the government justified having the vast majority of the free text responses read only by a machine rather than a human being; and what the Disability Unit’s message was to the thousands of disabled people whose responses will not have been read by anyone, but were just “coded” by a machine.
The Disability Unit also refused to say if any of the free text responses were read by a civil servant or a minister.
But a Disability Unit spokesperson said in a statement: “All responses have been rigorously analysed and full details of the methodology for analysing the UK Disability Survey is published on GOV.UK.”
9 September 2021
Labour MP who holds DWP to account defends government appointment
The Labour chair of the committee tasked with holding the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to account has been accused of “total hypocrisy” after accepting a high-profile appointment from the government.
Stephen Timms, who chairs the cross-party Commons work and pensions select committee, has been appointed by the prime minister to an unpaid role as a trade envoy to Liechtenstein and Switzerland, with the aim of “helping businesses find new export and investment opportunities” and promoting UK trade.
Timms has defended himself this week from accusations that he will now find it harder to hold ministers to account.
But Paula Peters, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts, said his decision to accept the position was “absolutely appalling”.
She said: “This is a conflict of interest, as Stephen Timms chairs the DWP select committee and is supposed to be holding the government to account for its horrendous policies that have caused untold distress and harm towards disabled people.”
Peters said that both Switzerland and Liechtenstein had long-standing reputations for tax evasion.
She said: “How can you hold the government to account for its appalling treatment of disabled people at the hands of government policy and DWP assessments and yet represent the Tory government as a trade envoy in tax haven countries?
“This is total hypocrisy and shows Labour hand in glove with government. The rich getting richer while disabled people pay a heavy cost.”
Timms told Disability News Service that the post was “entirely unpaid”.
He said: “The rigour of my scrutiny of government policy on the select committee, and in the chamber of the Commons, will in no way be weakened by the appointment.
“One of my Labour parliamentary colleagues in the Commons has served for some years as the trade envoy to Bangladesh, and it certainly hasn’t affected her capacity to criticise the government.
“I had, of course, to ensure there was no concern in the opposition whips’ office before agreeing to take it on.”
He added: “All of us want UK trade to increase.
“It’s particularly important given the difficulties we face outside the European Union.
“I hope I will be able to make a useful contribution to increasing UK trade with Switzerland and Liechtenstein, not least in financial services, a sector which is an important source of employment to my constituents.”
The Department for International Trade (DIT) refused to comment on the concerns about a conflict of interest.
But a DIT spokesperson said in a statement: “Our new trade envoys will play a key role in delivering our ambitious global trade agenda by boosting opportunities for British businesses in some of the world’s fastest growing markets and promoting vital inward investment.
“Trade envoys are unpaid, voluntary roles chosen on the merits of their relevant skills and experience.
“All trade envoys undergo a robust due diligence process and complete a declaration of interests form before their appointment.”
9 September 2021
DPAC hopes to make some noise as it returns to the streets
Disabled activists are hoping to make some noise when they raise concerns about imminent cuts to universal credit in their first direct action since the start of the pandemic.
Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) is hoping its #AudioRiot protest in central London will help highlight concerns about a series of “devastating” changes to social security.
They are encouraging disabled activists and non-disabled allies to bring drums, whistles, cymbals, bells, klaxons, loudspeakers – as well as their own ear protectors – and anything else that might help to make noise as they protest about the government’s social security policies.
Among their concerns is the government’s decision to scrap – from the end of this month – the temporary £20-a-week uplift to universal credit that was introduced at the start of the pandemic.
The protest, which will gather outside King’s Cross station* at 11.30am on Tuesday 28 September, will also highlight the government’s refusal to offer recipients of so-called legacy benefits – including disabled people receiving employment and support allowance (ESA) – the same £20-a-week increase given to those on universal credit during the pandemic.
Andy Greene, a member of DPAC’s national steering group, said he believed there was a lot of pent-up energy among disabled activists who have not been able to take to the streets for more than 18 months.
He said: “People want an opportunity to come out and have the harm that has been done acknowledged.
“Pre-COVID times there were plenty of people hitting the streets and movements were growing and growing and I would certainly hope that we will give an opportunity for that to flourish.”
He said the government had made decisions during the pandemic that had led to the deaths of countless disabled people and had “got away with murder” because of the months of lockdown.
Disabled people had paid for the government’s decisions with their lives, he said, and there had been very little critical response to that, both from within parliament and outside it.
He added: “They have literally got away with it. History will look back and wonder how.
“There is no accountability. Nobody is holding anybody to account.”
The action will be the first time DPAC has taken to the streets since the start of the pandemic, and it will take COVID-19 protective measures for those activists taking part.
Greene said: “We understand that not everybody will be comfortable going back onto the streets and coming to London for direct action, which is why we will also have online actions, and we are calling for local actions as well.”
On Saturday 25 September, three days before the central London action, DPAC will be calling on members and allies to create an #AudioRiot in their local areas.
And on the day of the London protest, the high court will be hearing a judicial review being brought by two disabled ESA recipients who believe the government breached the European Convention on Human Rights by increasing the standard allowance of universal credit by £20-a-week, but not increasing the rate for 1.9 million ESA recipients by the same amount.
A vigil to support those taking the judicial review will take place outside the Royal Courts of Justice, between 9.15am and 10am on 28 September.
*DPAC has stressed that the action will not be targeting King’s Cross station
9 September 2021
News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com
