People with special needs are terrified by Starmer reforms

“People are just scared. It makes no sense for the British State to support us if we get into trouble. In fact, it is quite the opposite. “This does not appear to be fundamentally changing under the Labor Party.”

That’s what a special needs friend of mine said as we chewed the fat. With the government launching a review of disability “benefits” (the quotes are because, given my own experience, I find it difficult to see the benefits of being disabled) until next year, I could only nod. As you can probably guess, it wasn’t a happy conversation.

Why the delay? I think I can answer that. Consider, firstly, that this is a government that has slipped in almost every respect in its path, in stark contrast to, say, Tony Blair’s first Labor administration. There is therefore a rather pressing need for Keir Starmer and company to get back up to speed. So we have been treated to the Prime Minister leaving home, declaring that “Britain is not working” and promising the “biggest labor reforms in a generation”.

The country’s employment centres, or Jobcentre Plus as they are now known, will in future become part of a “National Employment and Career Service”. The language is “helpful” and “supportive.” The NHS will be involved in the effort to tackle “economic inactivity” as a result of long-term illnesses. Young people are another focus of attention. It all sounds wonderful. But companies will play a key role in determining whether this is a success or a failure. And they have pointed out that it takes a degree of cognitive dissonance to say all these things when employers’ National Insurance Contributions (NICs) have been increased – an increase that works like a tax on jobs.

Hidden in the Department for Work and Pensions’ announcement is a promise to “bring forward measures to reform the health and disability benefits system so that it better supports people to enter and stay in work and cope with the rising bill.” benefits.” What do those words mean in practice? We don’t know exactly. However, Labor has said it is sticking to the previous government’s promise to cut £3bn from the benefits bill over five years. This could be a challenge at a time when unemployment is rising and companies say the rise in NICs will force them to increase the number of applicants by cutting staff. None of which bodes well for disabled people in Britain.

“It looks quite bleak,” Fazilet Hadi, head of policy at Disability Rights UK, told me. “They are sticking to the Tory plan to cut £3bn from the benefits bill, but they say they won’t necessarily stick to the way the Tories would do it. They say they will talk to disabled people about how they will make the cuts. “It’s really not a great deal.”

If Starmer’s big jobs announcement is the carrot, next year’s review is the stick. The first thing that neither the Conservatives nor Labor seem to be able to understand is that many people with special needs are simply too ill to work. The second thing is that there are a large number of people who want to work, but consider the labor market to be a cold and hostile place, where recruiters only see the disability and not the person. The third is that many of us who have jobs depend on the little support available to stay that way.

This being the case, I have a question for Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions: how will cutting that support help her achieve her goal of securing an 80 per cent employment rate? It appears that the government, on the one hand, is unveiling plans that are ambitious and largely welcome, while, on the other, it is preparing to sabotage them. All this on top of an assisted dying bill that scares many of us, including me.

Best of all, the attitudes of the British public are much more compassionate and humane than those of the British government. Surveys have consistently shown that people oppose the replacement of benefits such as Personal Independence Payment (PIP) with patronizing and dehumanizing vouchers, and even consider the amounts awarded to be too low. So, once again, we have a government that appears to be wildly out of step with the electorate. Maybe Kendall and Starmer would like to think about that.

James Moore, The Independent