Shock of activists as disability minister ignores disabled woman who collapsed on floor after cuts meeting

The disability minister has been accused of a “shocking lack of empathy” after walking past a disabled woman who collapsed on the floor at the end of a meeting about government plans to cut disability benefits by billions of pounds.

Representatives of the Christian charity Church Action on Poverty (CAP) were left stunned after Sir Stephen Timms, the minister for social security and disability, failed to express any concern about the woman’s wellbeing, and simply walked around her and left the room.

He later failed to send her a message to check if she had recovered.

Three disabled activists who work with the social justice charity had joined its chief executive Niall Cooper for the half-hour meeting at Caxton House, the Westminster headquarters of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), as part of the government’s consultation on its Pathways to Work green paper.

Cooper had been accompanied by a staff member and disabled activists Stef Benstead and Mary Passeri, while another disabled campaigner, Sydnie Corley, joined online.

But towards the end of a meeting at which Sir Stephen defended the billions of pounds of cuts announced by his government in March’s green paper, Passeri began to feel unwell.

She told Disability News Service (DNS): “It had been a long journey and I was so angry that he wouldn’t just stop and listen to us.

“I could see tears of frustration building in Stef’s eyes and running down her face, and I felt myself getting shaky and falling in Stef’s direction.”

Benstead saw that Passeri’s arms and legs had started shaking and she helped her onto the floor.

By this time, Passeri had passed out, which is not unusual because of her health conditions.

The two women were lying in front of the meeting-room door and the minister had to walk from the other side of the table and around Passeri and Benstead to leave the room.

Sir Stephen, who is leading the government’s work on its disability benefits reforms, made no attempt to check on Passeri and instead edged around the table without saying a word and then left the room with a member of staff.

Another member of DWP staff with first aid experience arrived soon afterwards.

A civil servant took a DWP laptop with them as they left the room, cutting off the connection with Corley, who knows Passeri well and had been offering advice on how to support her.

Corley said: “Mary has a lot of mini-strokes and strokes, and I didn’t know whether she had taken her meds, or whether it was a diabetic coma, or a mild seizure, or if it was hospital level.

“I was the only one who could tell the difference and I said, ‘don’t cut me off, I need to make sure she is OK.’”

But the DWP staff member cut off the connection and the CAP staff member had to call Corley on her phone.

Sir Stephen failed to contact Passeri afterwards to check if she was OK.

Passeri, who had travelled three hours by train from York to attend the meeting, said: “I feel it was utterly callous.

“He’s a minister, representative of his government, and it illustrates how the government feels about disabled and vulnerable people. We are in the way.”

Benstead, who had been talking to Passeri and asking her if she was OK and needed water, said: “The minister just left.

“If he had just stopped to say, ‘What can I do to help, I think we would all have said, ‘No, there’s nothing you can do, we know you have a meeting to go to, please go to the meeting.’

“But he should have asked. You ask, you don’t just walk out. That’s the bit I don’t understand.

“Maybe he spoke to one of his staff and maybe he was responsible for sending the first-aider, I don’t know, but he didn’t speak to any of us, he didn’t say goodbye, he just left.”

Corley said the minister’s behaviour – which she watched before the online connection was broken – was “really odd”.

She said: “If they treat us like that, how do they treat the rest of the people in the consultation?”

Sir Stephen openly talks about his Christan faith, and he is Labour’s Faith Envoy and a former chair of Christians on the Left.

Benstead said: “I am so completely thrown that someone who by all accounts has always been a very decent man and is a very experienced politician, and knows this area really well, is taking the stance he is taking and also didn’t stop to ask what he could do for Mary.

“If there’s a medical emergency of some sort going on, you stop to ask. He was the most senior person in the room. I just don’t understand it at all.”

Both Passeri and Corley receive the daily living element of personal independence payment, but they are among the hundreds of thousands of disabled people likely to lose their eligibility at some point after 2026 because they do not receive four points for any of the activities claimants are assessed on.

Passeri, who has several long-term health conditions, and was a further education lecturer and ran a community arts business for about 20 years before she became too ill to work, said: “PIP allows us to get taxis and the special diets and without the PIP we will still have the needs, we just won’t be able to do it.”

She said Sir Stephen’s behaviour was “a good indication of how removed he is from disabled people”.

He had told them that the cuts to benefits would cause a “cultural change in disabled claimants”.

Passeri said: “When we asked him what he meant, he said: ‘People like yourselves, with support, you could go to work.’”

A few minutes later, Passeri was lying passed out on the meeting-room floor.

She said: “He had no idea what to do with this woman lying on the floor who he had just told to get a job.”

She was fired from three jobs in further education because she kept collapsing, and has now reluctantly concluded that she will not be able to work again, other than occasional voluntary work with CAP.

She told DNS: “To hear him just say I can just get a job is heart-breaking, because I have had to give up so much already.

“It left Stef and I almost having to justify being alive.

“There was no acknowledgement from Timms that he understood or accepted that we were speaking to him from a place of fear.

“We were desperate to get over to Timms that the cuts in benefits won’t ‘cure’ disabled people and suddenly make us employable.

“Coupled with the cuts in the Access to Work budget, which helps disabled people to work, it shows that the cuts were never about getting disabled people into work.”

The three of them later wrote a blog about the meeting for Church Action on Poverty.

Benstead told DNS they had expected Sir Stephen to be “really conflicted” about the cuts because “he’s going to know it’s really bad, he’s going to know that they shouldn’t be making these cuts”.

Instead, he insisted that the government’s plans for employment support would be transformative, that it was wrong that sick and disabled people receive so much more in out-of-work benefits than non-disabled people, and that spending on PIP was unsustainable.

She said: “I honestly don’t know if he does believe it because I just find it so hard that he could look at the data and believe it, but he came across as genuinely believing that this was the right thing to do because they are going to get so many sick and disabled people into work.”

She told him that he could not tell disabled people that PIP was unsustainable because that was the same as telling disabled people that they are unsustainable, and she said it was the government’s responsibility to ensure there was money available to support them.

Corley said the minister had gone into the meeting “with his foot stamped down” and when he was challenged with difficult questions he became “abrupt and defensive”.

She said: “There was no expression of warmth, there was no sitting and listening; he was expressionless.

“There was no change in his expression, that was what was odd.

“He just kept saying, ‘It’s going to work, it’s going to work,’ like a child.”

She said she asked him to resign as minister to “make a stand and stop the cuts” and told him they were speaking on behalf of so many more disabled people just like them who had already shared their concerns.

In response to the concerns about Sir Stephen’s behaviour, a DWP spokesperson said in a statement: “At the heart of our welfare reforms is a mission to give people a better life – by helping disabled people into work where they can and protecting the most vulnerable.

“As we take these reforms forward we are listening to a wide range of views, and Minister Timms is grateful to Church Action on Poverty for the time and effort they took to come and share their thoughts with him.

“He and his team were present when a member of the group collapsed, and he was deeply concerned for her wellbeing.

“He ensured she was being well cared for before leaving.”

But Niall Cooper, chief executive of Church Action on Poverty, told DNS yesterday (Wednesday): “The severe proposed cuts are hugely harmful to many people’s lives and to UK society as a whole, yet the government seems unable or unwilling to grasp just how terrifying this situation is for disabled people.

“I have been working alongside activists to challenge poverty for 28 years but was shocked by the lack of empathy in this meeting and afterwards.

“Church Action on Poverty will be writing to the minister shortly to reiterate our dismay, but also to continue to press for a rethink on these immoral proposals.”

Picture: Sir Stephen Timms (left) and Mary Passeri in a train on the way to the meeting 

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