Will Cutting Disability Benefits REALLY Save Money?

Right, so Rachel Reeves sums don’t add up, Labour have forgotten something absolutely massive when it comes to their disability cuts and the mainstream media have missed it completely it seems, so whilst there is a lot that can be unpacked from the Labour government’s Spring Statement, particularly in relation to those social security cuts, the worst assault on disabled people in living memory as they are, far exceeding anything the Tories had done, they are going to fail to deliver the cash Rachel Reeves believes they will, because they’ve completely forgotten one major aspect of the wider picture when it comes to disabled people and the support they need and it really does expose just how thoughtless they’ve been in these cuts, that Reeves perceived hatred of those on social security, her infamous pledge to be tougher on benefits than the Tories has come from a position of total ignorance and she can’t even point to the impact statement from the Department for Work & Pensions, of Liz Kendall, hidden away as it was until after Reeves statement, because even more shockingly in my mind, the impact assessment has actually missed this as well. Where it is right and just that so many are talking about these cuts, that they are gaining mainstream media attention and are being universally slammed outside of Labour, the Tories and Reform UK at any rate, who are broadly supporting them, we have to talk about the catastrophic incompetence on show here too, that the sums don’t add up and they don’t add up, because Labour have failed to even present to themselves the full picture here. So what have they missed in their calculations then that means this cruelty is pointless and doomed to failure? Well, watch on and I’ll tell you.
Right, so that was a clip there of Labour Chief Secretary To The Treasury, Darren Jones, being confronted with a few home truths on Newsnight, by Victoria Derbyshire with regards to Labours plans versus the contents of the impact assessment, which already states that 250,000 more people will be plunged into relative poverty – that is that they will have an income less than 60% of average, so that’s a serious loss of income - of which 50,000 will be children and that’s the low end of estimations, it could be as high as 400,000. There’s a couple points worth picking up from that clip because they really underline how big a balls up Labour are making here in what they’ve missed that I want you to keep in mind going forwards.
Jones you will note essentially rubbishes the impact assessment throughout, measuring this policy move by work, rather than being an actual support to disability support, which is not a work related benefit, it helps people meet the additional costs of the additional needs their disability brings upon them. It doesn’t cover the positive aspects of moving into work whilst ignoring the fact the impact assessment is there to show who cannot work, that the cutting or making more increasingly difficult for people to claim those support benefits will force people to consider work who wouldn’t otherwise is the thinking, more support will be there to help people find work who want to – not a choice, being coerced is where we are at, yet with more jobs disappearing and unemployment at its highest since 2021 and disabled people less likely to be employed than fully able bodied people if I might put it like that, this is absolutely demonic politics and there can be no forgiveness for Labour MPs who vote this through.
The bit I wanted to pick up on most of all though, was when Darren Jones said the biggest driver of child poverty is larger families two parents, where only one of them works, where the second parent is unable to. Well for one, you could fix that by scrapping the two child benefit cap keeping those extra kids in poverty, punishing them for daring to exist, because that is the net effect isn’t it? But you won’t do that, you’d prefer to push that second parent towards work by taking a massive chunk of their income away if the tick box exercise that is the Personal Independence Payment assessment doesn’t go their way.
I draw attention to this example Jones presented, because not every family with a disabled family member even has one person in work because that able bodied former worker, may have given up work to help care for the disabled person to help them meet their additional needs and this is something not only all of the politicians have missed, but crucially, so has the impact assessment, meaning the true impact on families in this country when it comes to being plunged into relative poverty could be massively worse.
I took the impact assessment, and I put unpaid carers into a search of it and came up with nothing. The word carer’s comes up just 5 times in the entire impact assessment and that is one appearance in a footnote referencing the Office For Budget Responsibility’s calculations and the rest in the annex sections near the end of the report. Nowhere in the assessment at all are unpaid carers mentioned, nor the crucial role they play taken into account because that would be an uncomfortable truth it seems. There are figures in those annexes relating to unpaid carers though, which I’ll come back to.
Unpaid carers are the people who, like I me, gave up conventional work to look after loved ones, I’ve spoken about my wife and daughter many a time on this channel, my wife has fibromyalgia and my daughter spina bifida and I care for both, I gave up my trade as a fabricator and welder to care for them, to help them meet their additional needs because cash is one thing, but so often you still need someone there to physically help apply it. Something has to pay for the stairlift maintenance, the changes to the home, the access aids, ramps, something has to pay for the access to medical appointments, be that public transport or a motability vehicle if you happen to get the high rate of the mobility element of PIP and can afford the advance payment on them, because for ever idiot saying every disabled person gets a free car, the truth is a long way from it. The carer aspect of this aside for one moment, we musn’t of course forget the PIP is the very assistance that enables many disabled people to be able to work themselves, therefore cutting it to get people into work is completely counter-intuitive, but I’ve discussed this point elsewhere and that’s not what this video is about.
As an unpaid carer though, before YouTube changed our lives really, in exchange for giving up a job that paid some £400 a week as I did at the time, I got Carer’s Allowance. Carer’s Allowance is now £81.90 a week. Could you live on that? Well you have to care ie work, unpaid caring for your loved one, for a minimum of 35 hours a week to qualify for this pittance, so it is a full time job, the government acknowledges this, but they’ll pay you criminally below minimum wage rate as well as pay your national insurance contributions. They can get away with this, because you have no choice and no leverage. You care for your loved one or what? Leave them to their own devices? Forced back into work as these disability cuts seek to do? It doesn’t work. More stick less carrot doesn’t apply here and yet the government seek to do just that. The disabled person is still disabled. Just because needing help to use the toilet doesn’t warrant enough points in their assessment anymore, doesn’t mean somebody suddenly stops helping that person to the toilet does it? They still do what they have to do, they will just have to do it whilst enduring even more poverty.
Another aspect to this is a great many of these carers are children. Darren Jones and his larger families, how many will have to make the choice that a child will have to step up so the family can make ends meet? It’s a thought that greatly concerns me that a whole new generation of child carers could be created by this cruelty.
Coming back to Carer’s Allowance though, how this is funded highlights another grave concern.
To qualify for that pittance, the person you are caring for must be in receipt of certain benefits, you don’t just get it for asking. PIP is one of them. You can get carers allowance if the disabled person gets the daily living component, there are a few other benefits you can get that do for this as well, much less claimed, outgoing disability living allowance for example, Scottish equivalent benefits, but the main one is PIP.
Where PIP qualifies you for carers allowance though, the disabled person needs to also be in receipt of Universal Credit or an equivalent. When I was getting it, we were in receipt of Employment and Support Allowance, phased out as that is being in favour of Universal Credit, but to pay for my carers allowance, my wife lost a premium off her ESA of pretty much the same value, so its not even additional money coming into the household really, the only incentive to claim it at all was for the national insurance contributions. That still essentially holds true now.
Coming back to the impact assessment, to one of those annexes I referred to and it relates to that 4 point requirement Labour are now shoving into the PIP assessment, if you don’t get 4 points on one aspect of the assessment you no longer qualify for PIP, because in this bit, Table A4 of the impact assessment if you care to look it up yourself, and this is the only real reference to anything cares oriented in the whole thing, because under this table it reads:
‘By 2029/30 an estimated 800,000 people will not receive the Daily Living component of PIP who would have under current rules, a significant proportion of these people will retain access to the Mobility component and will remain on the benefit. A further 150,000 people will not receive Carer’s Allowance or the UC Carer Element as a result.’
Lets put this in some further context though, because if the whole carers allowance thing is still making you shrug your shoulders then lets put in terms of how much these costs will actually cost you.
It is estimated by carers.org that roughly 1 in 10 people in this country are carers, regardless of whether PIP is claimed or not, already hard to get, many carers will still have to be caring regardless of whether they get carers allowance, so that 150,000 figure quoted under a table in the impact assessment, is a drop in the ocean of the real, wider effects in society when 1 in 10 people care to some degree, collective saving the government more than £132bn annually – equivalent to a second NHS budget to pay for. If you lose the carers in numbers, the economic cost of that far outweighs their return to work and any economic benefit that might come from that, the economic benefit these people already provide is massive and yet they are treated like dirt and, under the radar, are the hidden victims of Labour’s disability cuts and reforms.
The government are claiming they need to make these cuts to save money, but this clearly isn’t going to do that, it will cost more and who exactly are the government saving money for? Rachel Reeves and her self imposed fiscal headroom. She’s decided she needs £9.9bn to meet her own rules which are based on nothing but her own ideology, they serve no purpose in the real world. If she’s only savin money to meet her own rules, where is the benefit to the country? This will fail and if the only reason to save money by demonising people supposedly there to be helped with this money, the reality is its just more money going to the rich. The donors and the corporate class will be delighted as disabled people are impoverished. That’s why no politician voting for this must ever get a vote from us ever again, there is no logic, no benefit, no purpose to this at all. It is conscious cruelty against those unable to fight back, who lack the leverage to do so, just so Reeves hits her own target and it could cost us all even more in the end.
It's becoming a bit of a trend to see Labour cutting from those who can’t fight back. Infant school meals have become another target, Rachel Reeves again saving her own skin off the back of the next generation as well is just so typical of her now, absolutely vile. Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch. Please do also hit like, share and subscribe if you have not done so already so as to ensure you don’t miss out on all new daily content as well as helping support the channel at the same time which is very much appreciated and I will hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.