Disabled and ill people and their families are being hit hard by cuts to the benefits and services they rely on.
Many are living in fear of huge cuts to essential benefits including Disability Living Allowance (cut by £2.17 billion) and Employment and Support Allowance (cut by £2 billion). The total cuts will mean an estimated £9 billion loss to families’ incomes over the next four years, on top of cuts to many local care and support services.
This affects people and families across the UK living with conditions like cancer, dementia, arthritis, Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis, sensory impairments, learning disabilities, mental health conditions and physical disabilities. Their everyday lives depend on support that is under threat.
The Government’s plans to cut billions from support for disabled people and their families. Their proposals include:
- Cutting 20% from the budget for Disability Living Allowance (DLA). Disability Alliance estimates that over 700,000 disabled people could see their benefits reduced or removed. DLA helps disabled people with the extra costs of disability and without it more disabled people would be pushed into poverty. The cuts could have a knock-on impact on Carer’s Allowance, leaving thousands of families even worse off.
- Taking mobility payments away from disabled people living in residential care and children going to residential schools. Cutting these payments would trap many in their own homes.
- Cutting off payments of contributory Employment and Support Allowance after a year to people struggling to get back into work due to disability or serious illness.
The Hardest Hit campaign brings together disabled people and carers and organisations and groups who represent them and to send a message to Government - you are hitting disabled people and their families the hardest: stop these cuts.
Politicians continue to complain about the ‘something for nothing’ culture, supporting the assumption that people on Benefit, especially Disability Benefit, are mere ‘scroungers’ This is a popular angle, and it provides jouicy headlines for some popular newspapers. But being unemployed is expensive; buying newspapers to look for adverisements; producing cvs and adapting them for each application; mailing applications; travelling for interview and back, and then waiting for a reply which most employers do not take the trouble to supply; attending courses and projects which employ people to advise the unemployed. The whole circus feels like an expensive joke, with the poorest people cast as the object of derision or of sad pity. It seems to be pointless to make the obvious response, which we go on making although no one can find an answer – WHERE ARE THE JOBS????
I write as the elderly father of a man with a disability (profound deafness) who has stacks of qualifications but who has applied for every possible kind of work. we have lost count of the unsuccessful interviews which he has had during the past nine years or so – ten just during the current year. Of course we must go on demanding the attention of politicians; but if the popular press can make money by selling the story that unemployed people are scroungers, why should the politicans take any notice of us?
Having worked all my life, and only had 3 jobs in a 42 year work span, at the age of 56 I had to retire through ill health (Acoustic Neuroma (brain tumour) Sarcoidosis,Chronic Asthma,Lumbar Disc Decease,Mental Health Issues) those are some of my disabilities.
At moment Social Services are putting together a Personal Budget for me so that I can look after my care,I dont like being on my own in case I have a tumble, my wife goes to work but she has reduced her hours at work so that she can be at home more although I get benefits ( incapacity benefit long term,DLA both high rate at mobility/care indefintly) without her income we would be in trouble,we lost our house through my disabilities and am now renting a housing assosiation house.
I had to go through two assesments by ocupational health doctors so that the company I worked for could retire me and after 40 years I found it hard to adjust.Because of my tumour DVLA took my licence and returned it with conditions and have to reapply in 2013 so my wife does all the driving.
Its no fun being disabled and this government is so wrong in what it is doing I like so many others did not ask to be disabled yet it is doing its hardest to turn people against us by claiming that we are scroungers. I have sent of many e-mails to DWP ( duncan smith) but I have never had a reply.
I hope that something can be worked out so that we can live the rest of our lives in peace and have some quality of life with out having to worry about our benefits all the time or will they?
I emailed Newsnight and The Wright Stuff. Received a standard letter from Newsnight but nothing from The Wright Stuff. Says it all really. Sue