Reeves's unrelenting austerity

There was never any doubt that the new Labour government would be reluctant to make any meaningful moves away from austerity. The intensity with which Rachel Reeves is brutally attacking our country’s most vulnerable with her proposed welfare benefits cuts, however, has taken even those of us on the frontline by surprise.

According to the Department for Work and Pensions’ own forecasts, more than 3 million households will lose out due to the cuts to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Universal Credit (UC), with 250,000 people thrown into poverty, including 50,000 children. 800,000 disabled people will fully or partially lose their vital benefits, averaging £4,500 a year per household. Keir Starmer and Reeves’s unwavering commitment to serve capital by punishing the poor, in a vain attempt to balance the books, will be catastrophic and deadly for those most in need.

The benefits system is deliberately complicated, a fact that ministers are taking advantage of when popping up on our television screens to justify the unjustifiable. The average person would be forgiven for thinking that the main benefit being cut is work-related, but this is not the case. The first thing to know about PIP is that it is not related to work. It is a benefit designed to help with the extra costs associated with disability. This includes adaptations in the house, mobility aids, extra money for taxis where taking public transport or driving is not possible, and much more. In addition, PIP serves as a gateway to other essential schemes such as free prescriptions, free dental care, council tax reductions, and a railcard.

The proposed changes will make it significantly harder to “score” the amount of points necessary to receive PIP in the outsourced assessments almost all applicants must undertake. It barely needs stating that, in losing PIP and the benefits it comes with, tens of thousands of people who want to work will be blocked from doing so. If you are a disabled person for whom getting the bus to work is simply not an option, losing PIP will mean you can no longer afford to commute. If your access to free prescriptions is removed, you will rapidly become too ill to work.

These are not abstract predictions. They are simply what will happen if the cuts go through. At Harrow Law Centre where I work, almost all of our disabled clients live in poverty, which is the case throughout the country. Of course for many disabled people at risk of losing their PIP and currently being demonised by highly-paid Labour MPs, working is not an option. Poverty and illness are inextricably related, and 15 years of austerity has created an environment where people are too ill to work. The people who will be affected by the cuts are those with long-term mental health problems, which almost always affect general physical health as well. With waiting lists for treatment at all-time highs, the mental health crisis will continue to worsen, acutely exacerbated by cuts to benefits. The government plan to get people “back to work” looks instead like a formula to keep our most vulnerable unwell.

Another proposed change is the linking up of means-tested UC with non-means tested PIP, and the eventual removal of the Work Capability Assessment. It seems likely that disabled people who are deemed ineligible for PIP will lose their disabled UC status and will be forced to live at the whim of a DWP job coach, against whose arbitrary decisions there is no appeal process. This is hugely worrying, as disabled people will be put under huge pressure to look for work they are too unwell to do, putting them at huge risk of being sanctioned and, frankly, facing starvation.

As Starmer and Reeves would have you believe, work is the route out of a life of sanctions and health assessments, but for millions in this neoliberal paradise, having a job means being subjected to poor conditions, insecure hours and poverty wages, with 70% of children in poverty having one parent in work. Many of my clients have become chronically ill due to years of exhausting, poorly-paid labour, coming home to damp, mould-infested homes. And so the cycle continues.▼

Emily Coatman is a member of the Vashti Cooperative and a welfare rights worker from Leeds, based in London.