­­Disabled people ‘back in the firing line’ on cuts after ‘hostile’ Reeves statement

Disabled people are back “in the firing line” on spending cuts, activists have warned, following a trio of decisions announced by Labour’s new chancellor, Rachel Reeves, this week.

Reeves told MPs on Monday that there would be cuts to social care and winter fuel payment to address what she described as a “£22 billion hole in the public finances” left by the previous government.

But among a series of other measures, she also appeared to suggest that cuts to benefits would be announced later in the year.

Reeves (pictured) told MPs that it would “not be possible” to take forward reforms to adult social care charging that were repeatedly delayed by successive Conse­­­­­­rvative governments.

The reforms – although widely seen as regressive and unfair – would have introduced a lifetime cap of £86,000 on how much anyone pays for social care in England.

The reforms were based on some of the recommendations made by the 2011 Dilnot commission on care funding.

A Treasury document this week said the previous government had committed to introduce the reforms in October 2025 “but did not put money aside for them”.

Scrapping the reforms will save £30 million this year and £1.075 billion in 2025-26.

The announcement came just days after a report by the disabled people’s organisation Disability Law Service showed that disabled people across England were continuing to face unlawful discrimination and inequality on an “unparalleled” scale due to “unjust” social care charging policies (see separate story).

Among other cuts, Reeves announced that winter fuel payment – worth between £250 and £600 every winter to those over pension age – will now only be available to those who also receive pension credit, universal credit, income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance or income-related employment and support allowance.

Further decisions on tax and spending will be announced at the new government’s first budget, on 30 October.

But Reeves warned that she would “look closely at our welfare system, because if someone can work, they should work”.

She said that “welfare spending ballooned” under the last government, while “inactivity has risen sharply in recent years”.

She told MPs: “We will ensure that the welfare system is focused on supporting people into employment, and we will assess the unacceptable levels of fraud and error in our welfare system and take forward action to bring that down.”

Her comments mirrored those by work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall, who suggested last week that she wanted to increase pressure on disabled people to move off benefits and into work, while disregarding risks to their health, and that she wanted the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to move from being “a department for welfare” to becoming “a genuine department for work”.

Disabled campaigners have raised serious concerns about Reeves’ announcements and comments.

Fazilet Hadi, head of policy at Disability Rights UK, said the chancellor’s comments on economic inactivity “were interchangeable with those of the previous government”.

She said: “The reasons for more people being unable to work due to disability and ill health isn’t down to a poor work ethic, it’s because of an ageing workforce, high levels of mental distress, lack of NHS treatments, a failing social care system and negative employer attitudes and behaviours.

“We heard nothing about tackling these underlying drivers of ill health and disability.”

She also criticised the removal of winter fuel payment from millions of pensioners, many of them disabled people who were “living on the margins of poverty” and needed more heat and energy to manage their health conditions and charge their health-related equipment.

She said: “This was a truly shocking move from a new UK government, which purports to be on the side of the most disadvantaged people.”

Hadi said that, even though the new government had made it clear that “fixing social care” was not one of its early commitments, it had now confirmed that even the “very modest Conservative proposal” of capping care charges at £86,000 would not go ahead.

She said: “It would be good to know that this measure was cut because there are more radical plans to invest in social care and remove care charges in the pipeline, but this is in no way guaranteed.”

Linda Burnip, co-founder of Disabled People Against Cuts, said she had expected the new Labour government to be “awful” but it had so far been even worse than she could have imagined.

She said the government did not appear to recognise the “holistic” approach that would need to be taken if it wanted more disabled people in work, including funding free social care, fixing the NHS and the mental health system, and ensuring a well-functioning Access to Work programme, accessible transport and flexible working hours.

Burnip said the announcement suggested Reeves wanted those disabled people who could not work to be left without any support at all, or even deported to Rwanda.

She said: “I dread to think what else she’ll try to cut.

“Older and disabled people will be in the firing line, though, from the looks of things so far.”

Rick Burgess, a spokesperson for Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, said of the Reeves comments on benefits spending: “This hostile rhetoric is all too familiar to us.

“Not only does this approach fail to solve the long-standing problems of our social security system, it is also lethal.

“Keir Starmer’s election slogan was ‘Change’; we see no change.

“We need both language to change and actions to match.”

A spokesperson for Disability Law Service said: “In our recent report, Ending the charging system for non-residential care for Disabled adults in England, we made reference to the fact that the new UK government had committed to implement the reform of capping lifetime care costs at £86,000 from October 2025.

“Whilst we did not believe that these reforms went anywhere near far enough, they would have been an improvement on the current home care charging policy.

“We are therefore very disappointed by the UK government’s decision to go back on its commitment.

“For all future decisions, we urge the government to fully involve disabled people at each and every step of the decision-making process.”

Meanwhile, the new disability minister, Sir Stephen Timms, said in response to a written parliamentary question from Labour’s Cat Smith that DWP had received more than 16,000 responses to the last government’s consultation on reforming personal independence payment (PIP), which closed last week.

He said DWP would now “review those responses” and added: “The proposals in this Green Paper were developed by the previous government.

“We will be considering our own approach to social security in due course.”

The Modernising Support for Independent Living green paper, published on 29 April, included possible plans to make it harder to claim PIP and even replace cash payments with vouchers or one-off grants, and was described as a “brutal, ideological attack” on disabled people’s support.

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