• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About DNS
  • Subscribe to DNS
  • Advertise with DNS
  • Support DNS
  • Contact DNS

Disability News Service

the country's only news agency specialising in disability issues

  • Home
  • Independent Living
    • Arts, Culture and Sport
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Employment
    • Housing
    • Transport
  • Activism & Campaigning
  • Benefits & Poverty
  • Politics
  • Human Rights
You are here: Home / Independent Living / Labour conference: DLA ‘gave me back my life’, says activist
Catherine Scarlett seated behind a table, speaking

Labour conference: DLA ‘gave me back my life’, says activist

By John Pring on 2nd October 2015 Category: Independent Living

Listen

An activist has told a Labour conference fringe meeting how her attempts to secure the support she needed after becoming disabled left her feeling “like a human pinball”.

Catherine Scarlett became disabled four years ago, and has faced an “incredibly steep learning curve” in finding out “what support is available and how to get it”.

She told the fringe event, which was hosted by Scope and the Fabian Society and focused on the extra costs of disability, how it was only receiving disability living allowance (DLA) that allowed her to fund the manual wheelchair with powered wheels that she needed.

Last year, she said, she faced “quite frightening” disability-related costs of more than £10,000.

She said: “If it hadn’t been for DLA payments I would not have had the money in the bank to get the wheelchair; I wouldn’t have been able to carry on working.

“I managed to carry on working for a year after I got it. It gave me back my life. It means I can get around independently.”

But she said that coalition spending cuts to working-age DLA, introduced as part of the move to the new personal independence payment (PIP), needed to be reversed.

She said the PIP process was “designed to stop people getting benefits. It is taking away the money that they need to lead independent lives.”

Scarlett (pictured at the fringe event, watched by shadow disability minister Debbie Abrahams) also said the government needed to remove the “disgusting 20-metre rule”, which has slashed the qualifying distance for the higher rate of mobility support from 50 metres under DLA to just 20 metres under PIP.

She said: “I have heard from so many people who have lost their independence because they have lost their ability to have [a Motability vehicle].

“They cannot work because they have lost their ability to get out of their houses. Those people need to be given their independence back. It is totally wrong.”

Scarlett said that having to deal with DLA – and later apply for PIP – employment and support allowance, wheelchair services, hospital departments, social services and the council’s housing department had left her feeling like “a human pinball bounced around by all different departments”.

She is also taking her employer to an employment tribunal, after facing three years of “really severe disability discrimination at work”.

Scarlett, now a town councillor in Driffield, said: “I feel like in the last three years my life has been scripted by Kafka; it’s been going from bizarre to even more bizarre.”

Share this post:

Share on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on WhatsAppShare on Reddit

Tags: Catherine Scarlett Debbie Abrahams dla Labour Motability PIP

Related

DWP decision to resume face-to-face assessments ‘is too soon and too dangerous’
1st April 2021
Pandemic backlog means PIP claimants could lose support while waiting in queue
18th March 2021
Atos pays out for negligent PIP assessment after visit from debt enforcement officers
4th March 2021

Primary Sidebar

Access

Latest Stories

DWP staff admit inflicting ‘psychological harm’ on claimants during coalition years

Government ‘treats disabled people with contempt’ by handing £2.4 million to charities

Legal threat to PM over lack of BSL interpreter in £2.6 million briefing room

Government faces legal action over ‘disrespectful’ strategy consultation

‘Vaccine passport’ scheme is ‘deeply troubling’, say disabled artists

DWP decision to resume face-to-face assessments ‘is too soon and too dangerous’

DWP admits number of disability employment advisers plunged during pandemic

DPOs call on minister to scrap ‘unfair’ SEN coronavirus measures

Government’s ‘shocking’ pandemic rights list of shame

Disabled student’s ‘five years of sheer hell’ at university

Advice and Information

DWP: The case for the prosecution

Readspeaker

Footer

The International Standard Serial Number for Disability News Service is: ISSN 2398-8924

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site map
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2021 Disability News Service

Site development by A Bright Clear Web