Tue 5 Mar 2019 12.59 GMT
Last modified on Tue 5 Mar 2019 13.40 GMT
Watching the government spin over anything from Brexit offers to money for deprived towns, there is an analogy that keeps coming to mind: a doctor amputates someone’s leg for no discernible reason, and then, when she notices the wound is bleeding, expects applause for offering a plaster. This image came to mind again today with work and pensions boss Amber Rudd’s announcement of reforms to the disability benefits system, including freeing disabled pensioners from “unnecessary benefit checks”.
Under the policy, 270,000 older people will not have personal independence payments (Pip) regularly reviewed, and may be able to fill in a form rather than seeing an assessor in person. In a speech on Tuesday to the disability charity Scope, Rudd is also set to announce a small-scale trial to test the feasibility of bringing together the Pip tests and work capability assessments into one – the disaster-strewn test that determines whether a disabled person is “fit for work”.
Rudd is right to acknowledge the physical and mental impact of repeated benefit tests on disabled people. But then, she should know – it was her party that brought them in for everybody. Before it was abolished and replaced by the “tougher” Pip in 2013 by David Cameron’s coalition, for years, disability living allowance provided “lifetime awards” of benefits, meaning someone like me with a genetic and unchanging condition could receive support without being needlessly retested again and again, though it might be subject to review. Similarly, it was sometimes possible to provide medical evidence without the need for a pointless face-to-face assessment.
To rightwing politicians and press, during the early austerity years, such awards became the poster child of the “out of control” disability benefits bill. As Iain Duncan Smith told the Telegraph at the time, disabled people on lifetime benefits “were just allowed to fester”. It is now standard practice for a disabled person to spend 18 months fighting to get their rightful benefits – from application, assessment, rejection and tribunal appeal – only to then have to start the whole thing all over again when a brown envelope arrives to say they’re due for another assessment.
This would be torturous for anyone – but imagine if you’re forced to do this while struggling in pain, exhausted, or racked with anxiety. Only yesterday on Twitter I saw a film of a young woman with ME going into violent spasms due to the stress of her Pip assessment. If it is cruel and unnecessary to put older disabled people through this, then there is no logical reason why it is humane and necessary to do it to younger people.
Rudd, then, is simply offering a diluted version of a policy that was already in place until her colleagues destroyed it – while disabled people of any age were once eligible to avoid retesting, now only a small section will be.
Her reasoning – that “disabled pensioners have paid into our system for their whole lives and deserve the full support of the state when they need it most” – may seem logical, as it speaks to a narrative central to the welfare state: that each of us “pay in” and then “get something out”. But it is a dangerous mindset, implying people who are so ill that they can’t ever work from an early age are somehow less deserving of our support.
Meanwhile, the piloting of merging Pip tests with “fit-for-work” exams is ominous. There could be some merit to it if the test being used were trustworthy – but Rudd is proposing to simply join up two equally inaccurate tests, aimed at assessing two very different things. I frequently hear from disabled people who are assessed as eligible for Pip, but given zero points for employment support allowance, or vice versa. It is already scary enough that one exam determines whether someone has enough money to eat for the next year, imagine the pressure if one faulty exam determined a disabled person’s entire income. To anyone who doubts this, the fiasco of universal credit should offer a warning over how drives to “simplify” social security often work in practice.
Reform of the disability benefits system is vital, and long overdue. As Rudd herself is due to say: “The benefits system should be the ally of disabled people” that protects us when we need it most. But today’s announcement does nowhere near enough to achieve that. Worse, it is yet more smoke and mirrors to hide the grossly negligent decisions that led us here.
It is akin to political gaslighting, in which a minister proudly delivers a new policy, insisting it will make life better for disabled people, when they are in fact simply tweaking the disastrous measures they themselves have forced onto us. Disabled people of all ages urgently need accurate assessments, logical exemptions from retesting, and a more efficient, humane process. Another grand speech by this government will get us nowhere.
• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
