Rebel Labour MPs send final warning to ministers before disability cuts bill is published

Rebel Labour MPs delivered their final warnings to the government this week, ahead of yesterday’s publication of a government bill that will cut billions of pounds a year from spending on disability benefits.

A group of 15 Labour backbenchers took part in a photo-call organised by Disability Rights UK (DR UK) and DPO Forum England to show their opposition to the cuts proposed in the government’s Pathways to Work green paper.

The following day, the government published its new universal credit and personal independence payment bill (see separate story).

One of the Labour MPs, Nadia Whittome, said: “With one in 10 of my working-age constituents in receipt of these disability benefits, I am concerned that these cuts will further devastate my community after 14 years of brutal austerity by the previous Conservative government.

“Poverty is a political choice. I will not choose to make my disabled constituents poorer when we could be choosing to tax the super-rich instead.”

Another MP, Neil Duncan-Jordan, who has helped lead backbench Labour opposition to the cuts, said: “The facts are undeniable: these cuts won’t create jobs, they’ll only push three million people deeper into hardship.  

“After 14 years of Tory cuts, the benefits system is already driving disabled people into destitution. 

“Another wave of cuts won’t clean up their mess, it’ll make things worse.  

“I urge ministers to pause, withdraw these cuts, and work with disabled people’s organisations to redesign a fairer benefits system.”

Georgia Bondy, from DPO Forum England, said after the photo-call: “We are glad to see there are MPs who understand just how essential it is to vote against disability benefits cuts for the 24 per cent of the population who are disabled. 

“However, we need more MPs to join them in stopping this catastrophic legislation if we are to avoid devastation to disabled people’s lives, carers’ income and local councils’ financial stability.”

Mikey Erhardt, DR UK’s campaigns and policy officer, said the photocall was “a strong demonstration that the government’s minor concessions have failed to convince MPs that these cuts are anything except dangerous, ill-thought-out and needless. 

“Despite promising a consultative process, the government is trying to force through a vote on proposals it won’t even share detailed information about.

“Rather than delivering change, this government is attempting to implement cuts that are even more severe than those of the austerity years.”

The MPs were speaking on the day that some of them took part in a parliamentary debate on disabled people in poverty.

Richard Burgon, one of those who took part in the photo-call, told the Westminster Hall debate that the “immoral” package of cuts would become “a millstone around the necks of not just the Labour government but every MP who fails to vote against it”, as thousands of their constituents are “thrown into hardship”.

Disabled MP Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesperson, warned of the impact of the cuts on deprived communities.

He told fellow MPs: “I represent the most deprived community with a Liberal Democrat representative, Torbay, and I am concerned that the cuts to PIP will see cash sucked out of some of our most deprived communities across the country. 

“That is money that would go to people doing support work such as cleaning, helping people to go shopping, taxis and so on being sucked out of what are already our most impoverished communities.”

Labour’s Rachael Maskell, who took part in the photo-call, told ministers: “The diagnosis is wrong and the treatment is no cure; all these cuts will do is to displace the cost and displace the problem. 

“It was not disabled people who broke the NHS waiting-lists. 

“It was not disabled people who removed the access to mental health services.” 

She said: “It is the system, which has failed them for 14 years, that has done that to them – which is why we must change direction and not progress with these cuts.”

Duncan-Jordan, who secured the debate, said he believed the government was “rushing these proposals through” and he reminded fellow MPs that PIP was not an out-of-work benefit, “so cutting it is likely to undermine efforts to get people into employment, rather than supporting them into gainful work”. 

He argued that the rise in the number of PIP claimants, which the government has repeatedly highlighted, was “largely the result of declining public health in this country combined with the increased financial hardship that disabled people are facing”.

Danny Kruger, a Conservative shadow work and pensions minister, said he did not believe Labour’s cuts would lead to “significant savings” because “the costs will be shunted elsewhere in the system”, such as onto local authorities and the NHS.

He admitted that the benefit reforms introduced by his own party in government over 14 years meant “the axe fell disproportionately” on some groups, although he claimed that “some genuinely positive measures were introduced”.

Labour’s Bell Ribeiro-Addy, said the briefing she received from the disabled people’s organisation Disability Advice Service Lambeth had “only deepened my conviction that the cuts are wrong and deeply damaging”.

She said the government should instead be looking for savings by slashing the profits of the multinationals “that make a profit off the humiliating PIP assessments”, with Maximus, the US firm that carries out many DWP assessments, recently reporting a 23 per cent rise in profits.

In her response to the debate, employment minister Alison McGovern spoke about the action taken by the government on issues such as wealth taxes, the child poverty strategy, free school meals, the NHS, and employment support, but she said almost nothing about the many concerns raised by MPs about the PIP cuts.

She said that the level of poverty among disabled people “demands our attention and action” and that disabled people “have the right to dignity, the right to work and the right to have power, choice and control over their lives.

“When someone is in poverty, regardless of whether they are disabled, they are robbed of the opportunity to choose how to live their own life, which is why the situation we face today is so very shameful.”

Meanwhile, disabled activists and allies have warned that the government’s cuts would also have a significant negative impact on disabled people who menstruate.

They say that PIP applicants with conditions like endometriosis and fibroids face a much lower than average award rate, with their debilitating symptoms often dismissed as “just a period” and the PIP process failing to account for the “cyclical exacerbation” of their symptoms and support needs. 

The open letter, prepared by activist Hat Porter, hosted by menstrual justice charity Irise, and supported by other menstrual justice and disability organisations, calls on the government to reverse its “catastrophic” cuts.

It warns that tightening the PIP eligibility criteria “would make it even harder for people with conditions and support needs which fluctuate on a daily basis and through their menstrual cycle”.

The letter says the cuts would “further entrench the longstanding failures of the UK disability benefits system to recognise the ways in which symptoms, challenges, and support needs can fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle or be intrinsically linked to menstrual and gynaecological health”.

And it calls on the government to engage with disabled people to consider how the PIP system can meet the needs of disabled people who menstruate, take better account of the experiences of people with fluctuating conditions and impairments, and adapt the PIP system to “explicitly recognise managing menstruation as an activity of daily living”.

Credit for this article goes to John Pring with the Disability News Service