Cuts to disability benefits will exert pressure on services, and likely lead to more deaths, MPs are told

The government’s multi-billion pound cuts to disability benefits will cause huge pressure on services, make it harder for disabled people to find work, and likely lead to more deaths of claimants, disabled campaigners have told a cross-party committee of MPs.

They were giving evidence to the Commons work and pensions committee, as part of its inquiry into the government’s Pathways to Work green paper.

The evidence given yesterday (Wednesday) by Ellen Clifford and Mikey Erhardt repeatedly dismantled the arguments offered by Labour ministers for proposals laid out in the highly-controversial policy document.

But they also warned of the serious consequences of those policies.

The government announced billions of pound of cuts to disabled people’s support in its Pathways to Work green paper in March, particularly through £4.5 billion a year cuts to personal independence payment (PIP), and billions more from disabled people’s out-of-work benefits, although it has yet to reveal the true extent and likely impact of the cuts.

Clifford, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts, told the committee that it was “quite difficult to fathom” how the government justified taking the social security safety net away from “huge numbers of people”.

Erhardt, campaigns and policy officer for Disability Rights UK, warned that the spending cuts would probably increase the pressure caused by the current benefit assessment system, and likely lead to further fatalities, following many years of suicides and other deaths linked to DWP’s actions.

He said: “The assessments will get harder, the stress will be higher, and there is no way of sugarcoating that.”

Clifford told MPs she was not aware of any evidence for the government’s claim that the current disability benefits system disincentivises people from working, a claim it is using to justify cutting the universal credit health element.

This will see the health element cut for new claimants from £97 per week currently to £50 per week in 2026-27, while freezing it for existing claimants until 2029-30.

Clifford said the disincentive argument does “not seem to take into account the very real barriers that people face”.

She said: “I don’t think there’s an evidence base for this, and it’s certainly nothing that I’ve ever witnessed.”

Erhardt said the green paper seemed to suggest that people are only “deserving of support if you are working, and if not, you are in some ways a different class of citizen”, which was “incredibly distressing” and something that “loads of disabled people I speak to all the time already experience”.

He said the green paper was “just opening that up for more and more people”.

And he said workplaces are often “hostile to disabled people and our needs, they are pressurized, competitive in a lot of cases, in some ways dangerous and destabilizing environments”.

He added later: “You can’t cut people’s support and then think that that’s just going to lead to people going into work.

“It’s just fundamentally not how it works. We’re going to have more and more people feeling at risk, not getting the kind of support that we need.”

Clifford said she believed there would be a “huge additional pressure” placed on services by the billions of pounds of cuts to PIP.

She said: “If people have their PIP reduced, it’s going to mean that the amount that local authorities can charge for social care is going to be reduced.”

She added: “Where people are consigned to a life in poverty, there’s no hope for people, and when people don’t have hope, then they turn to drugs and alcohol.

“I really worry for our communities and the impact that these cuts will have.”

And she said the cuts would also create pressure on mental health services because of the impact on claimants who may not even end up losing their PIP.

Clifford said it would also likely see hundreds of thousands more people going through the benefit appeals system, which will create even more trauma for claimants.

She said that those who do not end up losing their PIP will still be traumatised because “the points awarded at assessment is done in such an arbitrary manner, so nobody is going to feel safe at all, and that means much wider impact than just talking about those who are going to lose it”.

She added: “There is huge amounts of information which is missing, and this isn’t something that MPs should be voting on when they don’t have that information.”

Erhardt said the cuts to PIP – even though it is not an out-of-work benefit – would also “make it potentially harder for people to find work, to have the solid base that you might need to feel that you can push on”.

James Taylor, executive director of strategy, impact and social change at the disability charity Scope, told the committee he believed the government’s plan to prevent those under the age of 22 from accessing the health element of universal credit would have “disastrous consequences” and risked “increased poverty, loss of independence, and barriers to employment”.

He said that, like many of the measures in the green paper, “a lot of the impact and detail is not there… and we’re sort of clutching at straws as to what the intent is”.

Jonathan Andrew, head of public affairs at the mental health charity Rethink, told the committee the government appeared to be working from the “strange logic” that “if you just take things away from people, they will realize they weren’t really ill and go back to work.

“It doesn’t work like that.”

Erhardt said the decision to remove the health element from younger disabled people was “completely arbitrary” and “really dangerous” and “fails to acknowledge all the reasons that young disabled people end up in a scenario where they might not be going on to further education or to work”.

Clifford said the damage this could cause young disabled people was likely to lead to “longer term negative life outcomes, which then require intervention and support throughout people’s lives”.

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