*Sigh* Ok, fine. I steer clear of politics in this blog as much as I can, and have especially avoided mentioning Reform given their deliberately and dangerously divisive way of conducting themselves. But it was inevitable that they were going to start attacking disabled people, as they’re already adept at spreading misinformation and inciting hatred towards immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and anybody they consider ‘woke’ or ‘lefty’. Of course we were next. I may be visually impaired, but like most people I saw this coming a mile off.
Disabled people are simply a burden they don’t want to deal with, so they want to cut as much support as possible and shift the responsibilities on to others, without caring if people suffer as a result. And it will naturally be a vote-winner amongst their supporters to paint us as fraudsters and scroungers, because they have no respect for us and no understanding of the benefits system (even though any of them could need it at any time, and some of them already do use it).
Me writing a post like this isn’t going to change their minds either, I know that. As much as I’d like them to read what I have to say, consider it thoughtfully and discuss it with politeness and respect, I won’t be at all surprised if I just get insults thrown at me instead. That seems to be what happens if you dare to criticise Reform on social media, and I could easily put together a bingo card of predictable responses. But I’d love a Reform supporter to prove me wrong, showing a willingness to read and think about things with an open mind, instead of just blindly believing what their party tells them.
I also know that their welfare policy announcement and press conference – for which they didn’t consult disabled people as far as I can tell – is just an attention-seeking distraction technique, and me having a rant is exactly what they want to keep that discussion flowing. So I’ve been in two minds as to whether to write anything about it. But I don’t appreciate them using disabled people like myself as a political football, in their latest attempt to try and kick discussions about their dodgy dealings and a pointless by-election into the long grass, especially when it involves spreading lies about us and threatening to wipe out our support. We can’t just roll over and let extremists treat us like this.
So here are my initial reactions to Reform’s proposals, beginning with some clarifications about PIP.
Contents
PIP Misconceptions
The Purpose of PIP
First of all, let’s be clear on what PIP is actually for.
Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is – as the name suggests – intended to give you the personal independence to live your life as a disabled person, by enabling you to have an equivalent standard of living to everyone else. It therefore enables lots of people to work when they couldn’t otherwise.
Essentially, disabled people have a much higher cost of living compared to others. They have to pay for aids and support in order to have the same basic lifestyle and standard of living as non-disabled people, and by definition are then able to get into work once those foundations are in place.
PIP is therefore intended to bridge the gap, to reduce the inequality in society. And it gives disabled people the freedom to choose how they use it. Reform say that people are getting “stuck” on disability benefits instead of coming off them eventually, but the reality is that many need to stay on them indefinitely to continue living. That’s the whole point. After all, it’s not the fault of disabled people that they’re saddled with those extra costs, and they can’t avoid them.
Think of it this way. Imagine two work colleagues, one disabled and one non-disabled, who are doing the same job to an equal level of competence and success for the same level of pay. For heavy simplicity, we’ll assume that they have the same basic living costs (groceries, bills, etc), and the disabled person is not yet receiving any benefits, but their employer is generously giving them all the support they need to carry out their role (unlikely I know, but let’s go with it).
In this situation:
- Once the non-disabled person has spent part of their salary on their bills and essentials, they will then have disposable income left over which they can potentially use for home improvements, leisure activities, entertainment, holidays, a car, savings and investments, etc.
- The disabled person, however, not only has to pay out for bills and essentials to live on, but they also have to pay for additional aids and support in order to live a similar basic quality of life as their non-disabled colleague. And that can cost quite a lot. So by the end of all that, they won’t have as much (if any) disposable income to spend on other things, and may be even making a loss every month if their salary doesn’t cover everything.
In that scenario, the disabled person is forced to spend money purely to survive, even if it means making a loss every month, with little to no opportunity to enjoy the more leisurely aspects of life beyond that. Meanwhile, their non-disabled colleague is free to live a more fulfilling existence, despite the fact that they’re doing the same job. Hardly fair, is it?
If, however, the disabled person is granted a fair level of benefits to cover their extra needs, then in theory they will end up with the same amount of disposable income as their non-disabled colleague, and will therefore be free to make the same decisions as to how they spend it. And by spending that disposable income, they will be supporting businesses and helping to grow the economy, with a lot of the money then filtering back to the government through VAT, business rates, etc. Disabled people are valuable customers too, and our expenditure benefits everyone.
Now, of course, the above is an extremely simplistic example. No benefits system can address inequality perfectly, because everybody’s needs are so different and they vary over time. To try and figure out the exact amount of money each person needs at any given moment would be impossible, hence it’s best to assign arbitrary amounts based on general levels of need. But reducing the inequality is the basic premise. And while the system is far from perfect, it is vital and life would be an awful lot harder without it.
PIP & Work
Reform’s policy taps into common misconceptions about PIP that Labour and the Conservatives have also tried to weaponise to justify welfare cuts in recent years. It isn’t just Reform who deliberately misconstrue it to get the public on side, but they’re certainly taking it to the most extreme levels so far.
In particular, they’re keen to give the impression that people on PIP should be working instead where at all possible. In other words, you should either be getting PIP from the government or a salary from gainful employment, but not both.
That is incorrect.
PIP is not an out of work benefit. It actually enables many people to work.
I cannot stress this enough. If PIP is cut, a lot of disabled people will be forced to leave their jobs as a direct and unavoidable consequence. Unemployment will rise, not fall. Sure, you don’t have to work to claim PIP, but it can hold that door open for you. Cut PIP and that door may be locked shut.
In my case, I’ve been working full-time and receiving PIP (formerly DLA) at the same time ever since I left university in 2004. And I’m one of many disabled people who work while also in receipt of that benefit. That’s perfectly acceptable and legal, and it’s thanks to disability benefits that I’ve been in a stable, comfortable position in life in order to do that.
Sure, my situation is different now, as this year marks the first time I’ve ever stepped away from full-time work, after more than 20 years, because I need to be a full-time carer for my mother instead. But I still receive PIP, because I still have my disability and the needs associated with it. And I am doing a little bit of zero-hours freelance work on the side for a bit of extra income. But caring is my main responsibility for the foreseeable future. So my disability isn’t preventing me from working full-time – my family circumstances are. Just because a disabled person isn’t working, even if they appear to be capable of it, doesn’t mean there isn’t a good reason for it. Never judge a book by its cover.
Are there people claiming PIP who could and should be working but are refusing to do so? Possibly, but in most cases I think you’ll find it’s because there are no accessible jobs available for them, despite their best attempts to try and find one. You might say it’s easy to work from home on a computer these days, but that still doesn’t guarantee a job will be accessible. Far from it. When I was working as a support worker for a blind friend over the last few years, I was amazed, yet not surprised, to see how poorly accessible a lot of the online software and websites were that they needed to use.
And the actual level of fraud is a very small number. The DWP’s own figures say that PIP fraud overpayments made up just 1.4% of claims in the last financial year compared with 0.4% the year before. So it’s gone up a bit, but it’s still extremely low. As I’ll explain later, PIP is extremely hard to get, so I’m not surprised at that.
For Universal Credit by comparison, their figures state that overpayments due to fraud have now fallen back to pre-pandemic levels, at 6.5% over the past financial year. So that’s significantly higher than PIP, because it’s a much more wide-ranging benefit with more avenues for people to attempt fraud. But even there, a lot of people genuinely need it, so great care needs to be taken in tackling fraud, to ensure that proper claims are still accepted.
Conditions
Another common misconception is that people are awarded PIP because they have specific conditions. But that’s simply not true either.
PIP is not awarded for a specific diagnosis.
Instead, it assesses the impact on your daily life of any conditions you have, not what those conditions actually are.
Two people with the same condition can therefore get very different awards depending on how it affects them. You do still need to tell the DWP what your disability is, but it’s obviously necessary for context so you can explain the impact it has.
I think people misunderstand this because they’ve seen lists of conditions that PIP claimants have. But just because a condition is on the list:
- It does not mean that it’s the only condition that person has or that it’s the main condition impacting that person’s life. Many people have multiple conditions, but the DWP will sometimes only list one to represent each claimant – and I wouldn’t be surprised if they deliberately highlight the one that seems most controversial.
- It does not indicate the severity and impact of the condition. It might seem amusing or pathetic to see constipation listed, for example, but it is a genuinely severe, lifelong problem for people with a damaged or improperly formed digestive system.
Reform are also referring to conditions in their report with words like “trivial”, “mild” and “severe”. Who decides what is classified in those categories? Where’s the line between mild and severe in particular? A lot of people would clearly lose out when they’re deliberately placed just below the severe base line. And besides, as noted above, it’s the impact of the condition that matters, not the severity. My visual impairment is mild, but it still has a substantial impact on my everyday life.
You simply cannot assume anything purely on the name of a condition, or how mild or severe it appears to be. There will always be a much deeper individual story there. And also remember that a lot of disabilities are hidden. I absolutely guarantee that you’ve passed many people on the street, sat next to a lot of people on public transport and elsewhere, and seen neighbours in your area, who have hidden physical or mental conditions that you have no idea about.
Claiming PIP
Many people assume that PIP is easy to get, as if you can just ring up, say you have a condition, fill out a quick form, and that’s it. Some social media users even point to guides online that give advice on the claim process as supposed evidence that people can cheat the system.
And yet, strangely enough, nobody has ever proved it. If it were that simple, why haven’t journalists and social media activists successfully made false claims to expose it by now? And why isn’t the fraud figure much higher?
I’ll tell you why – because it’s nonsense. They believe it’s easy because they’ve never tried to claim it themselves.
The simple fact is that PIP is not remotely easy to claim.
The process of claiming PIP is lengthy and degrading, and it’s deliberately designed to put you off applying or appealing if at all possible. It’s a psychological endurance test, effectively, with no guarantee of a successful outcome even if your disability and your needs are indisputably obvious.
The Form
You first have to fill in a huge form, in a very limited time period, which asks you to evaluate everything you can and can’t do in your everyday life, right down to deeply personal matters like using the toilet. And you can’t just tick boxes – you have to go into great detail about every question that’s relevant to you and provide medical evidence as proof. You can’t just make things up.
So you basically end up writing a long essay about your daily life, where you explain everything you can’t do and why you can’t do it. It’s utterly depressing and demeaning to review your own life in this way. Most disabled people try to focus on the positives, embracing what they can still do and can still achieve, which I always do wherever possible. So to be forced to do the opposite, picking apart all of your shortcomings in fine detail for a complete stranger to pore over, as a way of pleading with them for support, is incredibly demeaning. I appreciate it’s necessary for them to know your limitations, but there must be a better way of doing it.
And yes, there are guides online that give tips on how to word things, but it’s no guarantee of success whatsoever. They’re simply designed to help you explain things to people in the DWP who are not medical or disability professionals in the slightest. You really do have to spell things out for them explicitly.
It’s actually quite difficult to explain the full impact of a disability to someone who has no experience of it, because you have to go into a level of detail that you never have to think about day to day when you’re just getting on with your life. So the guides online just help you to explain things in the clearest way possible, based on the experience of previous claimants who have had success communicating with the non-experts in the DWP. And even then you still have to provide adequate evidence to prove it.
Think of it like being in a job that you’re very skilled at, and training someone new to take over who has no experience of it. The basic duties may be simple enough to state as a list of bullet points, but if you actually try to write down every little thing you have to do, it can become surprisingly complex. When I left my role as a support worker earlier this year, I had to compile a handover document for my successor so that they had everything they needed. The list of duties I had, and what I had to achieve, was pretty short. But going into the details of how to do them resulted in a document that was over 40 pages long, and that was after I’d reduced it to a standard font size, after using large print when writing it.
Disability is like that, in the sense that we have to develop our own skills and workarounds, to deal with barriers and issues that other people never experience. And often it’s lots of little things that can cause bigger problems. Aspects of life that ordinary people take for granted can be a real challenge when you’re disabled. And we have to explain all of it.
Such is the level of detail required, and the insufficient space available on the form, that many people type out their answers and send them back with the claim form. In my case, by the time I’d typed everything out in large print, and then reduced it to a standard font size to reduce the amount of printing, it still came to 20 full pages of standard sized text.
And before you ask, no, it’s not at all sufficient to get AI to write it all for you. The DWP are already screening claims for AI-produced text, so while you can potentially use it to help structure your answers, it still needs to be your own words if you don’t want your claim to be marked as potentially fraudulent. You also still need to provide enough medical evidence and succeed at the assessment, neither of which AI can do for you.
The Assessment
Once you’ve sent your form off and all the supporting evidence – making sure you use recorded delivery so they can’t claim you didn’t send it – you then have to wait for an assessment, which can easily take a year or more, as it did with my last review.
The assessment takes place either face to face or over the phone, and you have to talk about your shortcomings again, with a physiotherapist or a low level medical professional who also has no knowledge about your condition. It would be great to see someone who is qualified in your disability who truly understands it, but that’s not how it works. For in-person assessments you may also have to do a few simple physical tasks to demonstrate things, and they monitor how you arrive and leave the venue and behave in the waiting area. It’s also vital to record those assessments, and to have a witness with you if necessary, because there are countless examples of assessors misinterpreting or outright lying about things that you’ve said when reporting back to the DWP.
The Decision & Appeals
Eventually you’ll then get a decision, and there are no guarantees that it will go in your favour. Lots of people with blatantly severe disabilities have been denied support. I really do think that they sometimes refuse people in the hope that they’ll give up and not appeal it.
At this point, if you haven’t been awarded PIP, or the level you have been awarded is too low, then you’ll obviously want to appeal the decision. But the DWP don’t want you to do that, because if you end up taking the case to an independent tribunal, with a compassionate judge and more qualified medical professionals present, you have a fair chance of success. 63% of PIP appeals in the third quarter of last year were successful, for instance, and the rate has often been above 70%.
So you can’t just go straight to a tribunal. Once upon a time you could, but the DWP have added an extra hurdle to wear you down further. You have to apply for a Mandatory Reconsideration, which is where somebody else at the DWP looks at your claim and gives their opinion. A few people succeed at this stage, just so the DWP can claim it’s not a waste of time, but most don’t. If you still want to take things further, they’ll then try and make it sound as if a tribunal is like an awful court case (which it isn’t). The hope is that, by that point, the stress and fear of it all will put you off taking it to tribunal, and in many cases that tactic sadly works.
So no, PIP isn’t easy to get. It’s a difficult, detailed, dignity-destroying, drawn-out process, where you have to put in a lot of time and effort to try and prove your case. If you’re going to try and defraud the government, it’s not the benefit that most to choose to go for.
Reform’s Policy
The Timing
Let’s be clear on this first of all. Although Reform have been working on this policy for a number of months, we know full well why they’ve published and promoted it now. It’s a cry for attention, to distract people from recent events. It doesn’t matter that the policy isn’t moral or workable, because they’re not in power right now, so they can say what they like and then quietly backtrack later without consequences.
All of the allegations about Nigel Farage’s financial gifts, and the investigations into him and other members of his party, have been dominating the headlines for a long time now. They all claim they’ve done nothing wrong and that it’s nobody else’s business. But I want to know. Millions of people want to know. This is a party who are very keen to get into power, so if they want to earn the trust of voters (if they even care about such a concept), they need to be open and honest about where their funding is coming from and what it’s being used for. And they’re not.
Knowing that Nigel has received £5 million from an overseas cryptocurrency billionaire and has a close friendship with a convicted fraudster doesn’t sit well with me or a lot of other people, especially given all the stories that keep coming out about them, the latest of many being their connections to an unlicensed gambling service. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask questions about all of that. Reform are more than happy to scrutinise others, but always get angry and defensive when questions are asked of them. And in general, while they claim to support free speech, they always get mad if you criticise them, while they regularly criticise others. Their whole modus operandi is rage-baiting – speaking in a way that’s very negative, putting the country down as a failure and riling up people’s anger against anybody they perceive as different or who doesn’t share their views. And like many people I’m fed up with it.
On the other hand, while I may not agree with all that Labour has done in the last couple of years – especially their own threats to cut PIP – at least our new PM Andy Burnham is being friendly and positive, praising the good things about the country and trying to give us hope. That doesn’t automatically mean he’ll be any good in the long run, but his attitude is refreshing and has warmed me to him a bit, to the point where I’m happy to give him a chance to earn my trust. Free 24-hour bus travel for disabled people is a very welcome new announcement and long overdue, so that’s definitely earned him more respect, but there’s plenty more to do to show that he cares more about disabled people than Keir Starmer did. The point being, I’ve never felt that kind of positivity, hope and willingness to listen from any Reform politician. Their negativity and arrogance always puts me off.
Anyway, Nigel Farage attempted to distract people recently by resigning as an MP to trigger a completely unnecessary by-election in Clacton, inviting his constituents to be his judge and jury. It cost the taxpayer £250,000 – which Reform offered to pay for, but they were rightly told it would be illegal, given the unfair influence it would appear to give them over the democratic process. And it might cost that amount again if Nigel is suspended from the party and a recall petition is signed for a second by-election, which is possible.
Nigel relished the chance to have a big battle with Labour and the Conservatives and prove that the residents still wanted him the most, so he could brag about it when he won. But all the big parties saw his silly game for what it was and refused to take part, leaving him as the only major candidate among the 34 on the ballot paper.
Yet somehow he still only got 63% of the vote. Sure, he won, and got around 1,000 more votes than he did before. But when you’re the only possible winner, that’s very low. I think they had been expecting well over 70%. And from a 44% turnout, that means only about a quarter of the entire constituency were keen to support him. That means nearly 3 quarters of residents weren’t bothered. What’s more, 9,455 people (27% of those who voted, or 12% of the whole constituency) actively showed their support for Count Binface, in a hilarious protest vote for a joke candidate (who did actually have some good policies to be fair).
So after berating the big parties as cowards for not taking part, Nigel then refused to attend the count, scrapped his victory press conference the following day, and has been avoiding the press ever since, which is unusual given how much he loves being up the front. And he clearly knew he hadn’t done as well as he’d hoped, because before the result had even been announced, he told supporters in a tent in a field elsewhere that he didn’t want to be “demeaned and humiliated by nobodies” – which is quite an insult to the other 33 candidates who made the effort to take part in the election and actually turned up for the count. It very much suggests that he was scared of harming his image by standing next to a man with a bin on his head and being heckled by protestors.
Reform couldn’t admit that though. So they claimed that he’d been told by Essex Police not to go to the count for security reasons, only for Essex Police to say that wasn’t true. So Reform then changed their story to say that it was actually Nigel’s own security team who had advised him not to go, adding that they wouldn’t share evidence of that because the police can’t be trusted. But if he’s got such tip-top security anyway, they would have been able to keep him safe at the count, surely. After all, he wandered the streets during the campaign with them quite freely, doing staged greetings with his most ardent supporters to post on social media, and he was even heckled at the beach but brushed it off. And other politicians with security concerns have turned up to their own election counts, including Margaret Thatcher who had death threats against her.
In the end, it didn’t change anything anyway, because The Parliamentary investigation into Nigel has resumed from where it left off, and journalists are still questioning his finances. Richard Tice is also being investigated, and he’s angrily branded it a smear campaign, rather than calmly and respectfully proving his innocence. On top of that, Reform have been having mixed results in the polls lately, in part because of those stories as well as their general behaviour, and have been losing a lot of their councillors, including quite a few who were only elected back in May this year. Other parties have lost councillors too, granted, but given Reform’s insistence that they’re the best, it’s interesting to see them shedding so many so quickly.
The Proposals
Given all of their issues that they want to distract people from, it feels like Reform are getting desperate, and need their announcements to be quite extreme to grab the headlines. Telling millions of disabled people they’re work-shy layabouts who are going to lose support to save the country £50 billion is certainly an effective way of doing that.
I’m not sure it’s a great way of attracting disabled people as voters though – or their families, friends, support organisations, and others with a modicum of respect for the more vulnerable members of society. That’s several million people who they could be alienating with this new policy.
I also notice that this has conveniently come out just after the Clacton by-election. There are apparently 10,442 PIP claimants in that constituency (as of April 2026), so I do wonder how many of them voted Reform, and if they’re now reconsidering their allegiances. Indeed, several Reform-voting areas have a lot of residents on PIP, so this policy will hit them hard.
Anyway, I’m not going to go through every bit of Reform’s policy word for word, I’m just going to comment on a few aspects that stand out. I’ve pulled a lot of it apart already just by addressing the PIP misconceptions above, especially the fact that PIP is not a work-related benefit, as Reform keep implying.
The welfare system does need overhauling and improving, nobody’s denying that. It needs to be fairer and it needs to be easier for genuine claimants to get what they’re entitled to. It’s far too demoralising at the moment, and we end up feeling lucky to get anything at all.
And yes, it would be fantastic if more disabled people were in work. But the reason that many are unemployed isn’t due to receiving benefits – it’s because there aren’t enough accessible jobs for them and there is still a lot of discrimination by employers. So improving job prospects, including an overhaul of the Access To Work scheme so disabled employees can get support much more quickly and easily, would be much more sensible.
Reform also claim that welfare costs are spiralling way out of control (which, again, other parties have also used as an excuse). But that’s not strictly true if you consider the data. As a percentage of GDP, for example, it’s actually been coming down slightly, and is now lower than it was in 2010. It will fluctuate of course, with recessions and pandemics pushing it up, but overall it’s been fairly stable on that basis. And by far the biggest component of welfare spending is the State Pension, at £138 billion in 2024-25, compared to £34 billion for PIP and £65 billion for Universal Credit. So who’s to say they won’t come after the State Pension as well?
Welfare costs can also be offset in various other ways instead of slashing the benefits that are paid out. For instance, savings could easily be made in the way that benefits are administered, such as scrapping constant reassessments for people with lifelong, incurable conditions. You could also tax wealthy people and big corporations more – but as we know, Reform have a lot of rich mates who fund their operations, so that’s not a path they want to go down. They much prefer to lay the burden on the more vulnerable members of society.
In terms of costs, Reform claim that their plan will save £50 billion, but it’s extremely ambitious with very little detail to back it up. It just sounds like a headline-grabbing figure rather than a well-defined amount. Robert Jenrick has also refused to say in interviews exactly how many people would lose their benefits, although reports are saying it would be about 3 million, including children.
I also notice that the summary page says the report has been “developed over many months in consultation with experts, many of whom have previously served in DWP.” So not disabled people then, the people who would be most affected, who are the real experts in all this. The DWP have always been keen to reduce the welfare bill and put people off claiming benefits, so clearly this report hasn’t come from a neutral standpoint.
So their summary is basically saying that they’re going to wipe out support for millions of people, none of whom have been consulted about it. It’s good to know where we stand.
Among their proposals, they want to:
- Create a “rigorous Disability Needs Assessment” – This will determine what people are entitled to. Goodness only knows what “rigorous” means in that context. It’s good in theory that they will consider medical facts from people’s GPs, but does that mean GPs will be expected to compile long, detailed assessments themselves, taking up their already limited, precious time when they should be treating patients? Or will a simple look at the patient’s medical record be sufficient? And when disabled people attend the face-to-face assessments, led by people appointed by the government, will they be even worse than the current ones? I know a lot of disabled people would find it far too difficult or stressful to attend them, and it looks like they would be punished for it.
- Create “Disability Support Accounts“ – These are meant to support people with milder conditions instead of PIP. These would be run by local authorities. So rather than treating disabled people with respect, by enabling them to decide how to support themselves with PIP as happens now, it sounds like we’ll have to beg our local council every time we need something instead, giving evidence to prove it. And councils are already severely cash-strapped as it is. Reform say it will be funded by a “a ringfenced Local Disability Support Grant”, and would only pay for “verifiable additional costs arising from a disability”. But what costs will be permitted, and what happens if the total costs exceed the grant given to the authority? Will disabled people lose out if the council can’t afford any more?
- Conduct Reassessments – Reform state that: “Existing working-age PIP claimants for mental health or trivial conditions would be reassessed.” It’s very telling that they’ve deliberately put “mental health” and “trivial” together there. The rise in mental health claims is cited by Reform as being a particularly serious issue that they want to cut back on, and this shows just how little they care about it. And what other conditions would qualify as trivial in their eyes? It’s irrelevant anyway – as I said earlier, PIP is about the impact of a condition, not its severity. It’s not a simple correlation between the two.
- Introduce Return To Work Cover – Employers will have the responsibility of covering the first 2 years of an employee’s benefits after they sign off sick, to “ensure that the connection between employees and employers is not severed”. The employer’s National Insurance Contributions will be cut to offset that, but will that be enough? Given that there’s still discrimination from many employers already, are they really going to appreciate having that responsibility put on them, or will it just further dissuade them from employing disabled people in the first place to keep things simple? Where’s the incentive for employers to take them on to begin with? And what happens after the 2 years are up?
- Force Community Service – This appears to be more related to unemployed people on Universal Credit, but I wouldn’t put it past them to include PIP claimants as well. If people they deem to be capable of work (no idea what criteria that entails) claim benefits for more than a year, then instead of helping them to get proper employment that they would enjoy doing and succeed at, Reform will make them do 20 hours a week doing things like litter picking, cleaning, clerical work, etc. If they don’t take part or don’t do it well enough, they’ll be punished, including having their benefits stopped. Reform acknowledge that it’s far harsher than previous schemes governments have tried along similar lines, but claim they were scuppered by “legal challenges from activist left-wing lawyers”. They can’t resist blaming those darn lefties can they? Instead of trying to listen and understand, they just assume that if you’re a “lefty”, you’re wrong and dthat’s it.
So it basically looks like Reform want to slash people’s benefits, irrespective of how badly affected they are, and people who stay on benefits for too long will be punished, even if they have a good reason for claiming them. And they want to shift a lot of the responsibilities onto GPs, councils and employers, regardless of whether they have the time and resources to deal with it. Presumably they can then blame them if anything goes wrong.
Suffice to say, it doesn’t sound like a supportive, respectful, disability-friendly approach to me.
Conclusion
I had already decided long ago never to vote Reform. I’ve never trusted them and I don’t like their negativity, division, arrogance and lies. And I had always expected them to treat disabled people with disdain and contempt. So I’m not at all surprised by the fact that they’ve launched this ill-informed attack on a welfare system that, for all of its many flaws, is a vital lifeline for so many, including myself. It does need an overhaul, we all agree on that, but severe sweeping cuts aren’t the answer.
For people that don’t receive welfare benefits, it can look like we’re scroungers who don’t deserve to have any joys or luxuries in life. But you cannot know what it’s like until you’re in that position. And remember, any of you and your loved ones can become disabled at any time, through illness, an accident, or just the ravages of old age. It could happen tomorrow. Nobody’s immune to it.
To pretend that welfare policy doesn’t affect you is foolhardy to say the least, because chances are you will need some kind of support one day. So I would be very careful before voting for something that is clearly detrimental to those in need. Karma takes no prisoners.
That’s my reaction to it all anyway. I know it gives Reform the additional publicity they crave, but it’s not a topic we can stay silent about, when people who clearly don’t understand our needs, and haven’t cared enough to consult us about them, are spreading misinformation and potentially putting many lives at risk in their quest to save as much money as possible.
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