Sunak suggests he wants to lead fresh assault on disability benefits spending

Disabled people are facing an “existential threat” after the government suggested it was planning a further assault on disability benefits spending, while stirring up hostility towards disabled claimants.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Rishi Sunak said he planned to pay for further cuts to national insurance contributions (NICs) in the next parliament by cutting working-age benefits.

He again appeared to suggest that disabled people were partly responsible for the country’s economic problems, and that it was not “right” that so many disabled people had been found not fit for work and did not have to carry out any work-related activity.

He told the Sunday Times: “We now have almost 2.5 million working-age people who have been signed off as unfit to work or even look for work or think about working and I don’t think that’s right.

“It’s really important to me that we reward hard work and that’s why cutting NICs is the best way to do that.”

He said that “encouraging everyone who can to work” would bring “fairness to the entire system” and “make sure that we can sustainably keep cutting taxes”.

His comments came just weeks after figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) showed that 46 per cent of people in families with at least one disabled child and one disabled adult were living in poverty in 2021-22, even before the cost-of-living crisis.

Sunday’s article referred to the government’s existing plans to tighten the work capability assessment, confirmed last November, but it said that Sunak wanted to “go further”.

Asked if the prime minister was suggesting there would be a fresh attack on benefits, or was instead referring to the proposals announced last year, a Number 10 spokesperson referred Disability News Service (DNS) to DWP.

A DWP spokesperson refused to answer the question.

Mirroring his misleading use of statistics from October’s party conference, Sunak also said: “We now sign off three times as many people to be out of work than we did a decade ago.”

After being contacted by DNS about this claim, the Office for Statistics Regulation is now examining the government’s repeated use of this comparison, and has added the complaint to its online “issues log”.

There are now serious concerns that the government could be planning yet another assault on spending on disability benefits, but also that it could be attempting to soften up the public before it gives evidence to the UN committee on the rights of persons with disabilities on Monday (18 March).

The committee will examine the government’s progress since being found guilty in 2016 of grave and systematic violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, with most of those treaty breaches caused by policies introduced by Conservative DWP ministers.

Ellen Clifford, who has been coordinating work by the coalition of UK disabled people’s organisations that monitors implementation of the convention, said she feared a pre-emptive government attempt to discredit the committee’s findings.

And she said the latest moves were “ramping up” hostility towards disabled people.

She said: “I think the government saw what they can get away with against disabled people during Covid, so they’re going for it now.

“They are trying to push through things that they couldn’t get away with before Covid, in terms of taking away disability benefits support.”

Clifford, award-winning author of The War on Disabled People, was speaking at a webinar organised by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to brief journalists on the convention.

She said: “The government has never had any evidence base underpinning their welfare reform programme, the claims they make that justify it, for example that by doing this they’re getting more people into work, claims that by taking away our benefits we’ll be freed from the trap of poverty because we’ll suddenly find work, this idea that these conditions aren’t real.”

She added: “I do feel that disabled people are in a phase now where we’re facing an existential threat. I think it’s that bad. I am very concerned.”

Clifford, who will be part of a delegation of more than ten disabled people’s organisations visiting the UN to observe the government giving evidence, said: “I was already going to Geneva with concerns, and I’m even more worried now.”

Natasha Hirst, NUJ president and the disability representative on its national executive, told the webinar that the government was “quite happy to be very hostile towards disabled people, knowing that that’s going to be replicated and then consumed by the general public”.

She said the government’s narrative was “deliberately oppressive towards disabled people” and “reinforces the hostility that we experience in our day-to-day lives”.

A day before the Sunday Times interview, the Times had published a column by former Conservative MP Matthew Parris, in which he also launched an attack on claimants of disability benefits.

In a column headlined “Our disability benefits system invites abuse”, Parris claimed that autism was vastly over-diagnosed, and that he did not believe in ADHD.

Following publication of his column, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), which regulates most of the UK’s newspapers and magazines, told DNS it was assessing 27 complaints about the article.

The autistic-led charity Autistic Nottingham described Parris’s comments as “dangerously ignorant”.

Claire Whyte, Autistic Nottingham’s chief executive, said: “Matthew Parris’s comments on autism are dangerously ignorant of the reality of how difficult obtaining a diagnosis is.

“The concept of ‘all these over-diagnosed’ conditions is getting old.

“We have worked hard as a society to improve diagnostics and support for people with all conditions, including those with autism and ADHD.

“It is more common for people with these conditions to go through life without a diagnosis than it is to be misdiagnosed.”

She added: “With waiting-lists surpassing two years in some parts of Britain, no one is wandering into their GP surgery and walking out with a ‘fake’ diagnosis.

“Parris has no understanding of how neurodiverse conditions work, how they affect the day-to-day ‘functioning’ of individuals whom he perceives as ‘on a spectrum we are all on’ or how society is not set up to adequately support those who can mostly ‘get by’.”

Ella Griffin, Autistic Nottingham’s head of public relations, said that, after she was prescribed ADHD medication, her university grades improved from 40 per cent to 70 per cent because she could “finally get over that hurdle of starting my work, regulate my anxiety enough to finish the work, and focus enough to proofread it”.

She said: “My personal experiences aside, we have multiple studies proving the ADHD brain is wired up differently to those without ADHD – perhaps Mr Parris should read some of these studies before declaring that ADHD, among other conditions, is ‘bad medical science?’”

The Times had not commented on the concerns about the Parris column by noon today (Thursday).

Meanwhile, there is continuing confusion around an announcement made in last week’s spring budget of more funding to “support the processing of disability benefit claims”, which the Treasury said would improve the system’s capacity “to meet increased demand” for personal independence payment (PIP) and to handle “both new and existing claims”.

DNS asked for further details from DWP, but the department would say only that the extra funding would enable disabled people to receive the right support in a timely manner, and would be provided from April 2024 to September 2028.

But the Treasury’s spring budget policy costings document (PDF) suggests that, although the measure will initially cost DWP £110 million in 2024-25, it will eventually save the government as much as £150 million a year by 2028-29 because “more award reviews can be completed on time” and award reviews “can lead to a reduction in award amounts as some claimants’ conditions can improve over time”.

This suggests the extra funding is aimed at cutting spending on PIP rather than improving how the service works for claimants.

Picture: (From left to right) Ellen Clifford, Rishi Sunak and Natasha Hirst 

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