THE UK government’s welfare ‘reforms’ amount to a ‘systematic violation’ of the rights of disabled people, according to an inquiry by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
The UN published its report in Geneva on Monday afternoon, and denounced the ruling Conservative Party’s cuts to disability benefits and social care budgets, saying such austerity measures ‘disproportionately affect’ the disabled.
The Committee slammed the UK, stating: ‘The Committee observes that measures have caused financial hardship to persons with disabilities resulting in . . . arrears, debts, evictions and cuts to essentials such as housing and food.’
The highly critical report noted that assessments by welfare assessors showed their ‘lack of awareness and limited knowledge of disability rights and specific needs’ and subjected disabled people to ‘anxiety and psychological strain.’
According to the CRPD, among other measures, housing benefit reforms, along with the narrowing of the criteria for social care, ‘hindered disabled people’s right to live independently and be included in the community.’
As part of its inquiry, the CRPD also looked at a range of recent welfare reforms and legislation including the Welfare Reform Act 2012, Care Act 2014, and Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. Disabled people were regularly portrayed negatively as ‘dependent or making a living out of benefits, committing fraud as benefit claimants, being lazy or putting a burden on taxpayers.’
Sanctions for some Employment and Support Allowance claimants ‘increased significantly’ from 2012-2014 and were ‘disproportionately applied’. The so-called ‘bedroom tax’ and social housing size criteria ‘failed to recognise the specific living arrangements’ disabled people require, and caused acute suffering.
Assessments did not take into account the ‘support persons with disabilities need to perform a job or the complex nature of some impairments and conditions.’ Some work schemes ‘had no visible impact in decreasing unemployment’ among disabled people, and some who accessed other programmes experienced punitive reductions in support or ‘loss of employment’.
The Committee made 11 recommendations to the UK government, including calling for a complete impact assessment of reforms introduced since 2010, and introducing measures to fight the ‘negative and discriminatory stereotypes’.
The British Prime Minister Theresa May’s government was not happy with the report’s findings and has deemed the report ‘offensive,’ according to Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green.
Meanwhile, the charity Mind has shown through Freedom of Information requests that there were 39,190 people with mental health or behavioural disorders in the Employment and Support Allowance Work-related activity group who were ‘referred’ – the first step towards sanctions being put in place – in 2014/15.
Of those,s 10,000 resulted in an ‘adverse decision’, which see claimants having their benefits cut for a period of time. ‘Despite having been found not well enough to work, these individuals are being threatened left, right and centre, often unjustifiably,’ said Tom Pollard, the policy and campaigns manager at the charity . . . There is a complete lack of evidence to show that stopping, or threatening to stop, someone’s financial support is an effective approach.
‘In fact, pressurising people with mental health problems to engage in activities under the threat of losing their benefit is counterproductive, causing additional anxiety, often making people more unwell and less able to work.’
Linda Burnip, a founder of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), said the UN findings ‘come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the stripping away of disabled people’s rights over the last six years.’
The UN report is in fact an indictment of the Labour Party and the trade unions who have allowed the Tories to repeatedly victimise the disabled and use them as easy targets for vicious cuts.
The only way to halt this Tory onslaught is for the trade unions to call a general strike in defence of disabled workers to bring the Tories down and bring in a workers government and socialism!
