Disabled People To Be Hit By Cuts Of Almost £2 Billion More Than Widely Reported
The widely reported numbers were that 4.8 billion of cuts would lead to 250,000 people being pushed into poverty, including 50,000 children.
However, the NEF says that the way these figures have been presented “concealed the reality”.
Its analysis finds that cuts will hit Disabled people by almost £2 billion more than the reported figures and could see around 100,000 additional people pushed into poverty.
The NEF sets out that:
“The headline figures downplayed the scale and impact of these cuts by factoring in the decision not to proceed with a policy announced by the previous government and pencilled in, but never fully confirmed, by this government. This policy would have changed the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) to make it harder for people to qualify for a higher rate of universal credit (UC) on the basis of illness or disability.
Ever since the previous government’s consultation on these plans was struck down in the High Court, it had seemed unlikely that the changes would proceed as planned. This government’s Green paper revealed that the WCA would be scrapped altogether in 2028 and that they would not implement the previous government’s planned changes ahead of that.
This allowed them to claim that they would effectively be “spending” £1.6bn (what they were projected to save if the policy had gone ahead) and lifting 150,000 people out of poverty, by not implementing a change that hadn’t even got past an initial consultation phase.
As the Resolution Foundation pointed out:
“In strict scorecard terms, this is the correct approach, but as it represents the cancellation of a never-implemented cut, it will never be felt as a positive impact by households and we do not consider it further [in our analysis].”
However, figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) show that changes to the personal independence payment (PIP) assessment and cutting the health top-up in Universal Credit (UC) will see Disabled people lose out on £7.5 billion by 2029 /2030 :”This will be offset slightly because this group will receive around 43% of £1.9bn being spent on increasing the basic rate of UC, bringing their total cuts down by £800 million to around £6.7 billion.”
The NEF highlights that the Government is yet to produce any estimates or evidence of how many Disabled people will return to work as a result of their reforms.
And that meanwhile, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility reports that they received too little robust information from the Government to make their own assessment.
As a result, the NEF says that:
“Politicians and the public are therefore being asked to support cuts to benefits for ill and disabled people, and a consequent rise in poverty, both of which have effectively been understated in government and OBR figures, on the promise of better employment support (and an assessment of its likely impact) at some point in the future.
Returning to the reality of how these cuts will be experienced by ill and disabled people, we know from our research that hardship, anxiety around losing benefits and the threat of conditionality all fundamentally undermine the sort of genuine engagement with employment support that leads to people overcoming barriers and returning to work.
The government may want to present these cuts as being consistent with the promising reforms to employment support announced in last year’s white paper, but the truth is that they are contradictory and incompatible agendas.”
Source and for full analysis see The true scale and impact of benefit cuts for ill and disabled people available from neweconomics.org.
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