Conservative manifesto is empty of new policies aimed at improving lives of disabled voters

The Conservative party has published a general election manifesto without a single new policy aimed at improving the lives of disabled people.

Analysis by Disability News Service of the manifesto shows that the few policies targeted at disabled voters are existing government pledges, or extensions of current schemes.

The manifesto also includes a statement – in a section that targets disabled benefit claimants – that was found, in a slightly different form, to be potentially misleading by the UK statistics watchdog just days earlier.

The party had not said by 11am today (Thursday) why it ignored the ruling by the Office for Statistics Regulation.

A significant chunk of the manifesto is devoted to explaining how a Conservative government would cut spending on disability benefits to put it “on a sustainable footing”, as part of £12 billion a year in cuts to spending on social security by 2029-30 (PDF).

These benefit-related policies have all previously been announced over the last year.

A key policy would cut spending on personal independence payment (PIP), although there is no suggestion of which measures in April’s PIP green paper the party would introduce, as a public consultation is ongoing.

The Conservatives also promise to tighten the work capability assessment, “overhaul the fit note process” and accelerate the universal credit rollout, all of which ministers have previously announced.

The manifesto says: “People are now three times more likely to be assessed as not fit for any work and put on the highest tier of sickness benefits than they were a decade ago.”

Four days before the manifesto was published, the Office for Statistics Regulation concluded that a similarly-worded statement was potentially misleading (see separate story), but the party appears to have ignored the regulator, other than slightly tweaking the wording.

A day after its publication, the Public and Commercial Services Union warned in its own general election charter that universal credit was “a dangerously flawed system, the most vulnerable continue to slip through its cracks and our members are the scapegoats for over a decade of social security failures”.

Ther is no mention in the manifesto of how a Conservative government would address these flaws, or the wider safeguarding issues within DWP that have led to hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths being linked to its actions over the last 14 years.

The manifesto also promises “tougher sanctions rules” and a fraud bill that will give DWP fraud investigators new powers.

DWP has previously said it wants its investigators to be able to make arrests, conduct searches and seize possessions, allowing the department “to control the end-to-end investigation in the most serious criminal cases, applying for the warrants, leading the operation and searching and seizing evidence”.

The manifesto also refers to the party’s pledge to create 60,000 more places in special schools, a promise referred to earlier this year by education secretary Gillian Keegan and also mentioned by the government in March.

Disabled activists warned last month that the government’s policy of opening more and more segregated special schools was stripping funding from mainstream settings and handing it to profit-making bodies.

On social care, the party promises only a “multi-year funding settlement to support social care” at the next spending review, and it repeats its delayed pledge to implement a cap on care charging costs from October 2025.

On disability employment, there is a promise to increase the capacity of the existing individual placement and support programme – which provides intensive, individual support in the workplace for people with “severe mental health conditions” – by 140,000 places.

The Conservatives also promise to pass a new law “to provide better treatment and support for severe mental health needs in the first session of the next parliament”, which appears to refer to the draft mental health bill the government dropped from its legislative programme last year.

Many of the other disability policies in the manifesto are either too vague to analyse or refer to measures already introduced, such as a pledge to “continue to modernise autism and learning disability services”, and to “improve accessibility at 100 train stations, starting with the 50 stations announced in May”, which refers to the long-standing Access for All station improvement programme.

And there is nothing in the manifesto about how a Conservative government would address the accessible housing crisis, even though the government consulted on raising accessibility standards of new homes four years ago.

The absence of any policy on accessible housing suggests the party has been pressured by the housebuilding lobby to drop its long-delayed plans.

One of the few potentially positive disability-related policies in the manifesto is to “give councils the power to ban pavement parking, provided they engage with businesses and residents to ensure they are not adversely affected”.

But this comes four years after the government consulted on such a ban, with the last update issued 12 months ago, when the Department for Transport said it was “evaluating the feedback we received and will provide further information in due course”.

There are also two other disability-related measures that were included in the government’s much-criticised Disability Action Plan, which was published in February.

One is to improve support for disabled people who use guide or assistance dogs, and the other is to “explore” whether it could bid to host the 2031 Special Olympics.

Despite the absence of new policies in the manifesto to address the barriers faced by disabled people, the party insists in the document that its ambition “is to make this country the most accessible place in the world for people with disabilities to live, work and thrive”.

Picture: Conservative leader Rishi Sunak being interviewed this week on Sky News

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