Wrong, badly wrong, and it won’t easily, if ever, be forgotten or forgiven. To take £5bn from those with the least, disability claimants already well below the median income who are clustered in the poorest towns, will leave a lasting scar on Labour’s reputation.
Sending Labour ministers out on the airwaves to defend the indefensible has been like sending lambs to the slaughter. The welfare secretary, Liz Kendall, and the employment minister, Alison McGovern, used to speak with passion about their optimistic plans for the future of work – but they never meant £5bn cuts. Torsten Bell, the treasury minister, is fresh from heading the Resolution Foundation with its myriad reports on reducing poverty and inequality, but he had to back £5bn cuts on Newsnight. Stephen Timms, social security and disability minister at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), is one of the most thoughtful and knowledgable ministers about social security. He surely never intended this, yet he too was sent out on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Rachel Reeves was a Keynesian, not originally a cutter, but the Treasury is good at frightening the life out of chancellors, and was likely induced to stick to her iron fiscal laws with threats of a Truss crash. With deeper cuts expected, and some departments losing up to 7% of their budget, you can expect no spring in the step of Labour ministers after next week’s spring statement.
A woman called Emma recently contacted me. Do I remember her? How could I forget, although it’s 13 years since I visited her in Horsham, West Sussex, back when the then Tory work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, was inflicting savage disability cuts. Hers is one of those stories of misfortune and fortitude that stays in your memory with “there but for the grace of God” admiration.
Here’s what I wrote then about her life with three hyperactive disabled children living in a two-bedroom home: “Rhys, six, is in special school, a child with no sense of danger, on impulse throwing himself down stairs, pulling furniture down on top of himself or hurtling into the road regardless of traffic. Outside he needs a wheelchair. Barely speaking, he eats with his hands, smearing food everywhere and he needs Ritalin to manage at school. He wakes at 4am every morning and has to be watched every waking minute from then on … Martyn, seven, manages in mainstream school with a teaching assistant to help: he bounces about the sitting room with the youngest, Caitlin. She has just had a heart operation, wears a hearing aid and, aged three, hardly talks, so she starts in special school soon.”
Emma told me then that if she had understood what the autism diagnosis meant for her first two, she never would have risked having a third. As often in families under stress of disabilities, her marriage has broken up since we met.
Now Emma herself uses a wheelchair, as she has severe rheumatoid arthritis, so she relies on her personal independent payment (Pip). Without it to pay for her car and her wheelchair she couldn’t have travelled to her beloved but low-paid job as an NHS administrator for the past four years. All three of her children are now on Pip: Martyn, 21, is holding down a job in WH Smith but needs support; Caitlin uses a wheelchair, and is still at school. Rhys needs the most help – after leaving his special school at 19, he’s now at college on an independent life skills course. “He has just learned to cross the road safely. The jobcentre took one look at him and said he couldn’t be there unaccompanied, so I don’t think an employer would look at him. I hope one day he might volunteer somewhere,” Emma said. The prospect of what will happen if her family lose their benefits has given her panic attacks. Rhys gets £800 a month: “He really needs that to get him to college, for his lunches, his phone, his basic needs. But he’s not 22 so he’ll lose that. He’ll be on about £300 a month universal credit, and we won’t manage.” Together, the family stands to lose thousands.
Although Emma is assessed with “ongoing” needs, she fears she faces another test. To keep her Pip, she needs to score four points for any one incapacity. “I have 13 points, but only twos or threes for any one activity,” she told me. Here’s how it works: anyone needing help to dress or wash their lower body (two points), help to manage incontinence (two points), help to bath or shower (three points), help to cut up their food (two points). Emma doesn’t have four points for any single one of her needs. And some imagine that the benefits system is too lax.
“Keir Starmer came to our hospital once and said hello when I was at work. He seemed a nice bloke,” she said. “I wouldn’t expect him to do something like this.” Yet here we are, back in Duncan Smith territory. When Labour said “no return to austerity”, it only meant no return to austerity as severe as the George Osborne era at its worst.
The original plans Kendall and McGovern used to talk about were all to do with support, encouragement and training for good jobs with good prospects – not any old job – with highly skilled work coaches offering face-to-face personal help. Kendall will still have £1bn to do some of that New Deal programme that worked for the last Labour government. The focus will be on those almost 1 million Neets, the young not in jobs or education, need a big support programme. But there’s an irony in that £5bn cut: that number is almost exactly the sum in 1997 that Gordon Brown seized in a windfall on privatised utilities to spend on Labour’s new deals for young people, disabled people, lone parents and the over-50s: it was spent with singular success in getting people into jobs. This time, analysts say that £5bn cut will get relatively few off benefits while mostly inflicting a brutal hit on families such as Emma’s. And no, benefits tests have not got easier: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation points to a higher rate of refusals over the past five years.
Why do this? Spending on working-age adult benefits, at about 5% of GDP, has changed little in two decades. A third of the growth over the past five years is due to the rise in pension age, with disabled older people claiming while they wait. The government could instead redistribute triple-locked pensions – one of the most generous welfare benefits, but the winter fuel payment row doubt deters them.
Though they’re yet to see the final details of Reeves’s plan, children’s charities estimate about 100,000 more children will fall into poverty because of disability cuts in their family. Labour, so scrupulous about sticking to its fiscal responsibility straitjacket, seems less concerned about its manifesto pledge to “develop an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty” which “not only harms children’s lives now, it damages their future prospects, and holds back our economic potential as a country.”
Maybe Labour’s child poverty review, due out in the summer, will reverse this backwards direction of travel. But if so, that’s no help to the million, like Emma, about to be knocked down by these cuts. Just in from work, Emma said to me: “Today I have been shaking. I have palpitations. I am tearful. I don’t know what I am going to do. I won’t be able to afford to work – we could lose everything.”
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
