Labour’s push to cut disability benefit should outrage us all

Whenever I hear the phrase “moral duty”, I feel the contents of my stomach turning – all the more so when it is MPs who are using it.

So you can imagine my reaction when a group of Labour backbenchers declared it a “moral duty” to get the long-term sick into work, amid mounting discomfort in the parliamentary party over the decision to leave the government’s economic policy failures at the door of those with health conditions and disabilities.

Slashing £6billion-worth of support to these people has even been characterised as a “progressive” choice by three-dozen MPs in the newly formed parliamentary “please give us a junior ministerial job in the next reshuffle” group. I jest, but you get my drift.

As a disabled person myself, who has worked ever since a truck rolled on top of me and gifted me with a suite of entertaining new physical challenges, I have watched the debate over disability “benefits” with mounting horror.

It has been characterised by a series of false narratives, as well as a complete lack of understanding of the challenges disabled people face by MPs and ministers, whom I suspect only ever meet people like me when they want to get their pictures taken with a smiling wheelchair user.

Per Scope, the charity, there is still a yawning gap between the rates of employment of disabled people (54 per cent) vs non disabled people (82.2 per cent). That is nearly 30 percentage points.

There are fully 1m disabled people in Britain who are willing and able to work, and who desperately want to work but who can’t find jobs. Does that even register with Labour’s moral crusaders? It doesn’t appear to.

The hard fact is that it takes much more than a “job coach” armed with a guide on how to produce a CV, along with a list of openings which may or may not be suitable for someone who is legally blind, uses a wheelchair, has a degenerative muscular condition, a dicky heart, crippling pain – I could go on – to get employers to play ball.

When confronted with a candidate with a disability or a health condition, that is all many of them see. And it applies to public sector recruiters as well as private businesses.

Even if they can clear the considerable interview hurdle, the “help” that Labour has been banging about is desperately difficult to obtain.

For example, the government runs a scheme called “Access to Work”. It is supposed to provide support for those with disabilities or health conditions when they are at work. A friend of mine, who rates it highly, recently attempted to renew their place on it, only to be sent a “do not reply” email that said they would have to wait 26 weeks for their application to be processed.

Isn’t it a “moral duty” to ensure the help Labour keeps banging on about is actually available? Houston, we have a very big problem if people end up being thrown out of work as a result of being unable to secure the help that’s been promised because the system is overwhelmed.

Another issue, absent from this debate, is that a big reason for the rise in people on disability benefits is because long delays in treatment are worsening people’s disabilities, which, in the absence of early care, have a nasty habit of becoming entrenched.

Stifling NHS bureaucracy is often at fault. I work through medical struggles that are exacerbated by the difficulties I frequently encounter in securing treatment. A good chunk of my earnings now goes towards paying for it via the private sector. I’m lucky in having the resources to do that. Many don’t.

These issues have scarcely surfaced in what has been one of the most ill-informed political debates I have ever had the misfortune to witness.

You can see that in the way the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) has been lumped in with work-related benefits, when it is, in fact, designed to help with the ruinous extra costs disabled people face.

An open letter to chancellor Rachel Reeves, signed by 16 leading disability charities, urges her to “safeguard” disability benefits from cuts, warning that they would have a “catastrophic impact on disabled people up and down the country”.

It would be a genuine moral outrage if Reeves and work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall were to put the bill for the government’s own economic failings on the shoulders of disabled people, at a time when Reeves’s decision to increase taxes on jobs is making work much more difficult for anyone to find.

I hope there are at least some Labour MPs who see the problem, and are discomfited with the idea of theirs being the new nasty party.