Special needs people are terrified of Starmer’s reforms

“People are just frightened. There is no sense that the state in Britain is going to support us if we get into trouble. In fact, it’s the opposite. This doesn’t look like it’s fundamentally changing under Labour.”

So said a special needs friend of mine as we were chewing the fat. With the government kicking a review into disability “benefits” — the quote marks are because I find it difficult, given my own experience, to see any benefits to being disabled — into next year, I could only nod along. As you can probably guess, it was not a happy conversation.

Why the delay? I think I can answer that. Consider, first, that this is a government that has slipped on just about every banana skin in its path, in stark contrast to, say, Tony Blair’s first Labour administration. There is, therefore, a rather pressing need for Keir Starmer and co to get back on the front foot. So, we have been treated to the PM getting out and about, declaring that “Britain is not working” while promising the “biggest employment reforms in a generation”.

The nation’s jobcentres, or Jobcentre Plus as they are now known, will in future become part of a “National Jobs and Careers Service”. The language is of “help” and “support”. The NHS will be involved in the effort to tackle “economic inactivity” as a result of long-term sickness. Young people are another focus. It all sounds marvellous. But businesses will play a key role in determining whether this is a success or a failure. And they have pointed out that it takes some degree of cognitive dissonance to say all these things when you’ve gone and hiked employer national insurance contributions (NICs), an increase that functions as a tax on jobs.

Hidden in the Department for Work and Pensions’ announcement is a promise to “bring forward measures to overhaul the health and disability benefits system so it better supports people to enter and remain in work and to tackle the spiralling benefits bill”. What do those words mean in practice? We don’t exactly know. However, Labour has said it is sticking to the previous government’s promise to knock £3bn off the benefits bill over five years. This could be quite challenging at a time when unemployment is rising and businesses are saying the NICs increase will force them to add to the claimant count by cutting back on staff. None of which bodes well for Britain’s disabled people.

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

If Starmer’s big announcement on jobs is the carrot, next year’s review is the stick. The first thing that neither the Tories nor Labour appear to be able to get their heads around is that a lot of special needs people are simply too sick to work. The second thing is that there are a large number who want to work, but find the Labour market to be a cold and hostile place — where recruiters see only the disability and not the person. The third is that plenty of those of us who are in employment rely on the meagre support that is available to keep it that way.

This being the case, I have a question for Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for work and pensions: how is slashing that support going to help you achieve your aim of securing an employment rate of 80 per cent? It looks very much like the government is, with one hand, unveiling plans that are ambitious and largely to be welcomed, while preparing to sabotage them with the other. All this on top of an assisted dying bill that scares many of us — including me — witless.

The best of it is that the attitudes of the British public are far more compassionate and human than those of the British government. Polling has consistently shown that people are opposed to the replacement of benefits such as the personal independence payment (PIP) with patronising and dehumanising vouchers, and even think that the amounts awarded are too low. So once again, we have a government that appears to be wildly out of step with the electorate. Perhaps Kendall and Starmer might care to think about that.

James Moore, The Independent