With so many disabled people shielding – justifiably in fear for their lives – it is a challenge to make visible the very urgent situations we are facing, marginalised and ignored as disability issues are within wider society.
And there are many, many pressing issues requiring the attentions of those in power. The fact that disabled people accounted for 59.5% of Covid-related deaths lsat year for one. Another, the subject of DPAC’s day of action today (1 March) is the fact that disabled people’s unavoidable expenditure has sharply risen as a direct result of the pandemic and yet the 2.2 million claimants still on legacy benefits – three quarters of who are disabled people – have been denied the £20 peer week uplift given to Universal Credit claimants from March last year.
There is widespread support for application of the uplift to legacy benefits but still the government has continued with its strong of excuses as to why this cannot happen. At first we were told the technicalities of setting up a system to make the extra payments would take too long. That was the start of the pandemic since when those techncialities could have been resolved many times over.
Then we were told that legacy benefits would be going up by 37p per week from April – an amount intended to reflect rising costs through inflation but representing an increase of only 0.5% while the state pension will be increasing by 2.5%. It is also an amount that comes no where near enough to cover the additional costs of incurred by those who are shielding.
We have also been told that legacy claimants have the option to transfer over to Universal Credit when the DWP knows full well that will severely disadvantage those currently in receipt of the disability premium.
Now the line is that there are a whole package of protection measures that disabled people could/would/may have benefitted from such as mortgage holidays. Now there definitely are disabled people out there with mortgages who are financially struggling but the reality of disabled people’s lives and the oppression we experience means that for many of us owning our own home isn’t something we can even aspire to.
Given that clear mismatch between the reality of disabled people’s lives and the government’s version of how we live, we decided that some communication and education were urgently needed.
Given current limitations we attempted to do that by collating the various letters, testimonies and comments that were sent into us over the last few weeks from disabled people and carers, from those who have received the uplift and know what it means to them and from those who haven’t, as well as from decent members of the public who simply care about the issue. We did two things with these: 1) compiled a document combining lived experience with key findings from recent reports evidencing the need to retain and extend the uplift [available here: #20More4All: testimonies, stats & facts – DPAC ]2) Printed them all out (anonymously), placed them in individual envelopes in a postage sack and arranged for a courier (paid above London Living Wage) to deliveer them to the Treasury for us.
However, we weren’t sure that even 190 letters and testimonies would get the message through.
So we created some very basic education tools in the form of wheelchairs to which we attached items and explanatory tags representing the essentials that disabled people are having to go without due to the financial pressures of the pandemic, including a blanket (heating); an incontinence pad (bathing, laundry and medicines); a face mask (PPE); an empty packet of cuppa soup (nutritious food) and an empty purse (enough money to live on).
Our lovely courier attempted to deliver these for us to The Rt Hon Boris JOhnson, MP, The Prime Minister; to The Rt Hon Rishi Sunak MP, The Chancellor of the Exchequer; and to The Rt Hon Therese Coffey MP, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
Unfortunately neither 10 Downing St, HM Treasury or the Department for Work and Pensions would take receipt of our carefully thought out gifts. So we can only assume their ignorance continues. The Treasury refused even to accept the bag of letters from disabled people. In fairness to the DWP they did take a copy of our document compiling testimonies and statistics which they told the courier they would pass on to Coffey but we aren’t expecting a reply any time soon. The resounding impression of the afternoon is that once again the Tories are leaving disabled people out in the cold and assuming they can get away with it.
