Tue 5 Feb 2019 18.30 GMT
Last modified on Tue 5 Feb 2019 18.55 GMT
Sarah Newton, the minister for disabled people, focuses solely on total government spending on benefits for disabled people (Letters, 2 February), but fails to address Dr Frances Ryan’s main complaint that disabled people are going hungry as a consequence of the Department for Work and Pensions’ draconian welfare reforms (In plain view, 30 January).
The minister should recall that on 10 January the Guardian reported that MPs were urging the government to appoint a minister for hunger in the UK to tackle the growing problem of food insecurity, affecting one in five children, but which is an especially important issue for vulnerable adults living solely on lifeline benefits.
A case in point is the plight of the majority of sick and disabled claimants placed in the employment and support allowance (ESA) work-related activity group (WRAG), victims of George Osborne’s heinous £30-a-week cut that politics forgot. A DWP response to my freedom of information request reveals that 68% percent of these 401,530 sick and disabled claimants are struggling to survive solely on jobseekers’ allowance because they haven’t been awarded the personal independence payment. Their benefits are manifestly inadequate and it stands to reason that these deplorable cuts must be reversed: 10 vulnerable WRAG people are dying each day – perhaps prematurely – and hunger and chronic stress are likely factors in their deaths.
In 2015, nearly a third (28%) of 500 disabled people surveyed by the Disability Benefits Consortium said they couldn’t afford to eat on the amount they received from ESA.
The DWP’s disregard for the subsistence needs of ESA WRAG claimants is shocking. When sick and disabled people don’t have enough money to live on, let’s not pretend that by focusing solely on getting them into work but leaving them still choosing whether to heat or eat, we are actually tackling the disability employment gap.
Samuel Miller
Montreal, Canada
• As usual for a government apologist, Sarah Newton tries to mislead us with her figures. If spending on the disabled has risen by £4bn since 2010 to a total of £52.7bn, that’s a 7.6% increase. This is markedly lower than the rate of inflation over those years, thus confirming what we knew: that spending has decreased in real terms. They can’t fool all of us.
Michael Miller
Sheffield
• The plight of Stephen Smith is shameful (Man, 64, fit for work despite debilitating illness wins legal appeal, 5 February). Compounding the obvious error in denying him the support he needed is the routine apology from the DWP that they are “committed to helping people get the support they are entitled to”.
Stephen’s case, and many others, show this is nonsense. For every person who overcomes the obstacles placed in this man’s path, there will by many times that number who languish at home, barely able to call their lives living. For them, lack of money has become the dominant feature of life.
For years the Conservatives have castigated anyone claiming benefits with the aim of getting them into work, and applying hideous pressure for this to take place.
This is a time for a review of how we manage our society and what our aims are. In the name of effectiveness, efficiency, morality and freedom, there should be a level of income which is guaranteed to everyone. Local experiments in giving people a basic level of income upon which they can build have proved successful, when politicians have the courage to perform them. What is lacking is the political imagination to believe that poverty in a world of plenty is immoral, and incurs heavy costs of its own.
With Brexit as well as climate change approaching, we clearly have to manage poverty and wealth better. Less of each, please.
Dr Colin Bannon
Crapstone, Devon
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