Labour has delivered a cruel and needless hammer blow to disabled people
Devastating cuts to benefits won’t help anyone back to work and will push thousands into deeper poverty
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Last week, I was talking to my friend Matthew about the Labour government’s plan to preside over the most devastating cuts to disability benefits on record. His mother has progressive multiple sclerosis and receives a personal independence payment (Pip) of £72.65 per week.
On 18 March, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall told parliament of the government’s intention to slash £5bn a year from the benefits system by 2030. In Wednesday’s spring statement, chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed £4.8bn in social security cuts, primarily to Pips.
Alongside changes to the eligibility criteria for Pip, Labour will cut the health element of universal credit by 50% for new claimants and then freeze it so it will not rise with inflation until 2030. According to the government’s own impact assessment, the cuts will force 250,000 people into poverty, including 50,000 children.
“It’s all very worrying. The stress has caused mum’s physical condition to worsen and she has been hospitalised with the worst case of shingles her nurse has ever seen,” Matthew told me.
Pip provides financial support for people with disabilities who face additional expenses such as care and equipment. Under new eligibility criteria, from November 2026, claimants will need to score four points out of 12, the most severe difficulty level, in at least one everyday activity to qualify for Pip, rather than qualifying for support with a score that describes less severe difficulties across a range of tasks.
What that means is that a claimant could need assistance to manage going to the toilet, taking a shower, dressing or undressing, or aids to speak or hear and still be denied payments. Those activities receive just two points under the current scoring system.
The fact is that life costs more for disabled people. According to the charity Scope, disabled households need, on average, an additional £1,010 a month to have the same standard of living as non-disabled households. From specialist gear to greater energy use, everything adds up. As utility bills, council tax and rents rise, many are increasingly anxious about their finances.
Changes to Pip could cost up to 1.2 million people between £4,000-£6,300 per year by 2029-30, according to the Resolution Foundation, an independent thinktank. The organisation has also found that seven out of 10 Pip claimants live in families that occupy the poorest half of UK income distribution and that the households set to lose out are heavily concentrated among those with lower incomes. British Muslim families looking after people with disabilities are more likely to be on low incomes and will be disproportionately affected.
Not so long ago, the UK’s welfare state was held up around the world as an example to follow. Now, our social safety net is one of the weakest among affluent nations and many who claim benefits are forced to go without basic essentials, such as regular meals and heating their homes. Compare that to Finland, recently ranked as the world’s happiest country for the eighth year running, with many residents citing its strong welfare system as an important factor in their sense of comfort and security.
The government’s cuts are cruel, unnecessary and will almost certainly push disabled people into greater hardship. Worse still is the attempt to dress them up as an act of benevolent reform. Labour’s line is that the removal of financial lifelines for the most vulnerable members of our society is about getting people back into work.
But Pip is not an out-of-work benefit. In many cases, payments help disabled people travel to their jobs. Making it harder for disabled people to access benefits will in many cases push them out of employment and into poverty. The belief that work lifts people out of poverty also ignores a number of important facts: 37% of people on universal credit have jobs; seven out 10 children growing up in poverty are in a working household and in-work poverty has rocketed over the past decade. According to a recent Trades Union Congress poll, one in six workers have skipped meals in the past three months to make ends meet.
People who are unable to work because they are disabled, sick or caring for others deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Labour’s justification for the cuts makes little economic sense and is rooted in the kind of demonisation of people who rely on the welfare state that we have seen under successive Conservative governments: a scroungers versus strivers narrative pushed by politicians and the media alike.
A life on benefits is not an easy ride at the taxpayer’s expense. Around five out of six households on universal credit regularly go without essentials such as food and heating, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Making claims is also an arduous task. Many have described the Pip application process as complex and humiliating, while the work capability assessment for disabled people was linked to nearly 600 suicides in the three years following its introduction in 2010.
Far from being about streamlining and improving the welfare state, these cuts are a cynical, penny-pinching exercise, introduced with the sole aim of adhering to the chancellor’s self-imposed fiscal rules.
Before the July 2024 election, Keir Starmer repeatedly promised that there would be no return to austerity. But, from the winter fuel allowance to welfare, that pledge has been needlessly shattered. In recent weeks, there have been growing calls from a variety of campaign groups including Oxfam and Patriotic Millionaires UK, and backbench MPs, including John McDonnell and Zarah Sultana, for a 2% wealth tax to be levied on individuals with assets worth more than £10m. The measure has public support and would raise up to £24bn a year — nearly five times as much revenue as will be gained from welfare cuts.
That’s not the only way to raise funds, either. As I’ve outlined before, Labour could equalise capital gains and income tax, and explore additional taxes on land, corporations and fossil fuel companies. Taking such steps, however, requires a boldness and vision that Labour appears to be sorely lacking.
As it stands, the government is set to unleash the most punishing erosion of disability benefits the nation has ever seen, the highest rates of child poverty since 1998 and our already battered and bruised public services are facing another hammer blow. This is the opposite of what people voted for and many are viewing having cast their ballot for Labour as a mistake they won’t make twice.
Matthew used to lecture friends and family about how important it was for them to vote for the party. “I remember guilt tripping them when necessary about how people like my mum couldn’t afford not to have a Labour government,” he says. “Now, I look like a fool.”
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