Labour’s assault on sick and disabled will push almost half a million into poverty.

[Kev45]

Cut that will do almost nothing to fill Reeves’s imaginary ‘black hole’ will have massive impact on disabled, ill and vulnerable.​

A DWP whistleblower has confirmed that Labour’s assault on the sick and disabled will push them into poverty. The former benefits assessor has told the i (paywall) that the government’s move to make sickness and disability benefits harder to obtain will cost well over 400,000 people just under £400 a month and force many who have been certified as unfit to work into the punitive ‘prepare for work’ category.

Liz Kendall’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) expects the plan, a continuation of the changes planned by the last Tory government, to cut around £750m a year from the benefits bill – a drop in a bucket compared to the made-up ‘£22bn black hole’ invented by Labour to justify its cuts and assaults on poor children, pensioners and the disabled and long-term sick.

Keir Starmer has said his government wants to make sickness benefits harder to access. Labour is also said to be planning to replace the monthly PIP (personal independence payments), paid to disabled people to compensate for the huge extra costs of living with a disability, with a one-time ‘grant’.

The whistleblower, a trained nurse who worked for years assessing disabled people, told the i:

You would hope the assessment process could be changed to make it a fairer system, more humane. But this is about trying to cut the benefits bill, which is frightening. There needs to be more support for disabled people, not less.

People need regular payments. Cutting PIP payments would leave a lot of people struggling badly. It will force people into poverty.

Disabled people’s groups condemned the plan as ‘devastating’ and ‘farcical’. Mikey Erhardt, of Disability Rights UK, told the paper:

It sounds like the drive is getting people into work and scaling back what people receive. They seem content to lump getting people into work and personal support together.

As long ago as 2018, the Tory DWP was revealed to be aware that the number of disability benefits claimants attempting suicide had doubled by 2014, compared to 2007, after the introduction of the cruel and punitive Work Capability Assessment – which Labour now wants to toughen – and was a horrific 43%, a number likely only to have climbed in the decade since of Tory (and now red-Tory) persecution of disabled and sick people, and of corporate price-gouging masquerading as a ‘cost of living crisis’.

So horrific was this deliberate harrying and deprivation of the poor, disabled and vulnerable that UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston concluded, after a tour of the UK, that the system was intentionally designed create stress, distress and hardship (video) – and to tell them that ‘you’re on your own’.

More than a year ago, Skwawkbox revealed exclusively that Labour had undertaken no impact assessments at all of the effects of their policies and planned cuts on vulnerable people.

Labour’s assault on sick and disabled will push almost half a million into poverty

Cut that will do almost nothing to fill Reeves’s imaginary ‘black hole’ will have massive impact on disabled, ill and vulnerable A DWP whistleblower has confirmed that Labour’s as…

skwawkbox.org