Reform UK Still Don’t Get Disability — But They’ll Cut It Anyway

Right, so Reform UK are doing what every broken government and every sham opposition has done before them — finding a new enemy in the disabled. They call it “common sense,” “fairness,” “getting Britain working again.” What it really is, is another front in the same old war against anyone who costs money but don’t necessarily make any. You’d think after fifteen years of austerity, suicides linked to benefit cuts, and a 0.4 per cent fraud rate, they’d have learned the difference between waste and survival. But they haven’t. Richard Tice is tweeting about “Motability scams,” Nigel Farage is promising to “slash disability spending,” and the crowd’s still clapping like a bunch of barking seals. The cruelty never went away — it just got repackaged from Tories to Reform. And if you want to know how the system kills while pretending to help, you don’t need a manifesto for that. You just need to listen to who they call a burden.
Right so Reform UK like to say they speak for the taxpayer, for the people who work hard and play fair. Every slogan they use sounds reasonable until you look at who they’re pointing at. The target is always someone already down — the jobless, the migrant, the disabled. A fist punching down might as well be their party logo. This time it’s disabled and long-term sick people being lined up for another round of punishment sold as fairness and as long time watchers of this channel know, as anyone who reads the descriptions of my videos knows, I take this quite personally as an unpaid carer. It isn’t a new idea; it’s the oldest trick in British politics. When the economy fails, blame the people least able to fight back, those without leverage to resist more cuts.
Reform’s plans basically divide disabled people into two camps, division is their stock in trade so why not? Those with “severe disabilities or serious long-term illnesses” are told they are deserving, but will still end up with face to face assessments, presumably asking people all over again, when their arms will grow back or when they plan to stop having cancer or some other terminal so they can get back to work and stop being a burden. Everyone else is told we don’t think you need this support, we think you just need to get up in the morning, get out of bed, go to work or education and do something with your life. They call it reform. What it really is, is austerity under a different banner. It’s the same split George Osborne drew when he talked about “those who can work” and “those who can’t.” Reform UK have just redrawn that line and are once again getting applause from those who still don’t get it.
We already know what this ideology costs. The Women’s Budget Group worked it out: disabled women lost thirteen per cent of their income during the austerity decade. Families with a disabled adult and child lost over £8 000 a year — eighteen per cent of household income gone. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation puts the poverty rate for disabled people at thirty per cent, ten points higher than everyone else. These aren’t statistics; they’re the measure of political cruelty. It is not the fault of these people that their basic standard of living just costs more.
Behind those numbers are choices. Sixty-one per cent of disabled people can’t afford to keep their homes warm enough. Forty-three per cent skip dentist or optician visits. Forty-one per cent delay replacing mobility aids they rely on. Scope says the extra cost of disability averages £583 a month, and one in five people face over £1 000. That’s what the last fifteen years of welfare “reform” achieved: higher bills, lower incomes, and a permanent state of anxiety. And I’m coming back on that particular condition in a moment because it had a spotlight shone on it this week. Reform UK are just promising more of this.
Richard Tice, Tricky Dicky, has called this a “new era of responsibility.” His party’s own paper Working Welfare describes current disability support as “broadly passive.” Farage tells his rallies a Reform government would “slash spending on disability benefits.” None of them can point to any problem large enough to justify that threat though. The Department for Work and Pensions puts PIP fraud at 0.4 per cent. But the truth isn’t useful to them. Suspicion is. Suspicion wins them applause. The suspicion of someone getting something for nothing.
Speaking of Tice though, then came the tweet this week. Tice posts a photo of a Motability advert and writes: “The great Motability rip off grows… Now they are giving you £750 cash back with taxpayers cash … No wonder the scam continues.” Every word is wrong. Motability is a registered charity. The lease payments come from the claimant’s own mobility component of PIP or the War Pensioners’ Mobility Supplement that they will already be in receipt of before they can even have a sniff of a car. The cashback is paid from Motability Operations Ltd’s surplus – charity remember - not from public funds. There is no “taxpayers’ cash.” That line itself is nonsense, taxes don’t pay for anything, the cash is always there, taxation is just a brake on inflation, but the lie stays up because it does its job. It tells the public that independence is a con. It tells disabled drivers they’re being watched.
That’s how stigma works now — a quick post, a viral lie, and a thousand people convinced their neighbour’s car is a scam. It costs nothing to spread but it corrodes everything it touches. It feeds the next headline about fraud and the next policy promising to stop it.
Now I said I was going to come back to anxiety and I am. On Question Time this week the question was asked, “Is it fair to cut benefits for people with anxiety?” And the audience member explained she was on PIP and how the assessment process itself had nearly broken her. She said nobody goes through it “for the money.” Sitting across from her on the panel was GB News host and Reform member Matt Goodwin. He argued that he sees people with “mild mental-health conditions” taking “billions off white-van man.” He said they should be in “work, education or training.” He spoke with the confidence of someone who’ll never have to fill in a fifty-page form explaining why they can’t sleep or leave the house of course.
The DWP’s own study Understanding PIP Applicant Experiences shows the process intensifies anxiety; fraud is negligible; seven in ten appeals are upheld. But that data never reaches the stage. What reaches it is the smirk. After the broadcast there has been so much abuse concerning this woman in the audience online. “If she really had anxiety,” people wrote, “she wouldn’t sit on TV.” Well she didn’t say she only got it for anxiety, she didn’t say what her anxiety triggers actually were, so everybody mouthing off that she’s proof of the underserving because she could go on TV is doing the work of Tice and Farage and Goodwin for them. That’s the politics Reform UK have built — a movement where disbelief is a virtue. So here’s an education for Reform UK and the fools hanging on their every words in the belief punching down will somehow make their lives better and that their enemy is disabled as opposed to people travelling by private jet, or yacht, or in the case of Dickie Tice, a man so patriotic he lives in bloody Dubai.
Personal Independence Payment, PIP helps with extra costs of disability or long-term ill-health.
It’s not means-tested, not an unemployment benefit, and you can claim it whether you work or not, so blow to people bleating about scroungers here.
Like all benefits of course it is paid from DWP funds already budgeted for, that people are already entitled to — no separate “taxpayer hand-out”. That is a nonsense.
Anyone aged 16 to State Pension age, whose physical or mental-health condition limits daily living or mobility for 12 + months can qualify and that will be evidenced with medical records.
Mental-health conditions such as anxiety, depression or PTSD explicitly qualify if they cause “overwhelming psychological distress” or require prompting to engage in activities. This is all in the DWP PIP Assessment Guide, Part 2 if you want to look it up.
The assessments work on a points system.
Points are scored across 10 daily-living and 2 mobility activities.
Awards depend on functional impact, not diagnosis labels.
Decisions can be reviewed or appealed tribunals overturn roughly 7 in 10 DWP refusals, which already shows the in-built bias against claimants that gets overturned at greater expense to the public purse later on, and indeed the additional stress and anxiety of the process as described by the woman in the Question Time audience, but Dickie Tice won’t talk about that.
Fraud & error rates according to the DWP’s own figures to date show that total PIP overpayments account for 1.3 % of spend – that’s systemic incompetence.
Overpayments due to fraud ≈ 0.4 % — one of the lowest rates of any UK benefit and that is taken from the DWP Fraud & Error Stats 2025.
The average PIP award is ~ £117 a week. It helps cover extra costs like transport, heating, or care equipment — not luxury spending. If you cannot comprehend that disabled people have extra living costs because they have additional needs, you need to go back to school.
The claim process is clinically recognised as stress-inducing; DWP research links it to heightened anxiety in mental-health claimants according to the DWP Qualitative Study conducted in 2023.
Only about one in three PIP recipients are actually out of work; most use it to stay in work or education, actually helping them to get there Matt Goodwin. Take it away and they are then out of the work and education you want to see people in.
Ignorance on this scale isn’t random. It’s strategic. They know what they’re doing. In a country where headlines sell faster when they promise outrage, ignorance becomes currency. You can trace the line straight back to 2010. Then it was “strivers vs scroungers.” Now it’s “taxpayer vs scam.” It’s the same old story, are you really falling for it again from Farage’s lot?
And yet, the machine still runs. The PIP assessment regime — twelve activities scored by private contractors paid by case - was designed to fail claimants quickly and apologise later at greater expense to the public purse or ‘taxpayers’ as Tice would call it, but I’m sure he doesn’t really care if some corporation turns a profit from inflicting misery. Doctors’ letters carry less weight than a contractor’s stopwatch. If you can lift a cup once, you’re “fit.” If you can walk fifty metres on a good day, you lose your car. Tribunals correct the errors months later, but by then people have missed rent, lost heating, or lost hope and given up. Reform UK have looked at that system and seemingly decided it isn’t tough enough.
This is where ignorance turns lethal. We already have the evidence. The coroner in Michael O’Sullivan’s case ruled his suicide was triggered by a “fit for work” assessment. Between 2011 and 2014 more than 2 300 people died after being declared fit. The National Audit Office found the DWP still failing to safeguard claimants at risk of self-harm. These deaths weren’t accidents. They were the end-points of policy choices.
While Reform UK shout about fairness, Keir Starmer’s Labour government quietly keeps the same framework alive. The Universal Credit and PIP Bill passed this year tightens eligibility again. Reuters estimates 150 000 people will be pushed into poverty by 2030; the Treasury expects to save £5 billion, but at the expense of how many lives? Ministers call that stability. It’s the same arithmetic as before — the rich get reassurance, the poor get re-assessment.
Inside Labour, dissent barely registers. MPs who warn of harm are told to be realistic instead of answered. The debate isn’t whether the system is cruel, but how publicly to admit it. When both main parties treat disabled lives as fiscal variables, Reform UK’s cruelty stops being fringe. It becomes national consensus. Three parties promising abject cruelty to varying minimal degrees.
Outside Westminster, the results are everywhere. Six in ten disabled people ration heat below safe levels. Food-bank use in households with a disabled member has doubled since 2019. Carers provide more than 35 hours of unpaid care a week for just £83.80 a week. Unless you are doing a minimum of 35 hours, you don’t get it at all, so at best, carers unable to take on additional work are getting paid just £2.38 and hour. Public transport remains patchy, workplaces remain inaccessible, and the disability pay gap still sits near 14 per cent. These are the realities hidden behind the word “motivation.” You can’t “incentivise” someone into a job that doesn’t exist or a building they can’t enter, whether that be because of a physical or a mental disability.
Reform UK call this telling hard truths. But the hardest truth here is that they don’t understand the lives they’re deciding on — and they don’t want to. Their politics runs on disbelief. They think hardship is a moral failing, and pity is bad economics. That’s not common sense; that’s cruelty rebranded as efficiency.
Every time Tice or Goodwin speak, they turn private suffering into public spectacle. Every time a headline screams “benefit cheats,” another door closes. The DWP’s fraud statistics never go viral because they don’t feed resentment. But resentment is the fuel of modern populism, and Reform UK are experts at striking that particular match.
The press help them. GB News, Goodwin’s employer, sells outrage by the clip. The tabloids have run “disability scam” stories for years without corrections reaching page one. Editors know their audience feels poorer and angrier, and anger always needs a target. So disabled people become the proof that the system’s rigged — not because they are, but because it’s easier than admitting who rigged it and they can’t fight back.
This is what happens when ignorance meets infrastructure. A social security system built on disbelief meets a media industry built on provocation, and together they make cruelty feel inevitable. Every assessment, every headline, every jeer in a comment section pushes the same idea — that disability itself is suspect. That’s how you normalise neglect.
Reform UK say they’re not against the disabled, just against waste. But the evidence tells another story. Fraud at 0.4 per cent. Appeals won 70 per cent of the time. Deaths linked to assessments documented by coroners. If this were any other policy area, those numbers would trigger reform in the opposite direction. Here they trigger applause.
Ignorance this rehearsed becomes political weaponry. When Tice calls Motability a scam, when Goodwin sneers at anxiety, when Farage promises cuts, they’re all speaking one language — the language of disbelief. And it’s lethal. Because disbelief justifies everything that follows — the sanctions, the delays, the empty fridge, the cold flat, the funeral that never makes the news.
The cruelty isn’t loud anymore. It’s procedural. It hides in letters with deadlines too short to meet, in call-centre scripts, in tribunal queues. It hides behind words like “reform,” “fairness,” and “efficiency.” Reform UK promise to make that process quicker. They mean harsher.
The truth is simple. Disability isn’t rare. One in four adults lives with a condition that limits daily life. Anyone can cross that line overnight. Any of us can have a life changing accident or develop an incurable disease. Reform UK’s message — that benefits are being exploited — isn’t just a lie about others; it’s a threat to everyone who might one day need help.
Britain keeps repeating this cycle because it refuses to admit that austerity was a moral collapse, not an economic plan. Instead of learning, our politics doubles down. Now cruelty is habit. Reform UK want to turn that habit into doctrine. They call it reform. The DWP calls it efficiency. History will call it what it is — punishment for being poor, for being ill, and for being visible. How dare you be seen.
For many in Labour it has been the last straw and has triggered waves of resignations, including earlier this year, so do check out this story here as your recommended next watch.
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