Cuts leave nothing to build on – the demolition of PIP

“Look, there it is,” Wayne says. My brother is standing there, pointing his finger at a white-washed plank of wood. “That’s not normal,” he adds.

The plank of wood sits wedged under a patchy stack of bricks, poking through the corner of the kitchen ceiling. Those bricks are all that remains of the fireplace, which once stood strong, doing its job. Left behind, though, is a chimney stack. It hangs in the balance, leaning on the plank of wood. “It’s completely botched,” Wayne continues to tell me, his eyes following the hairline cracks across every wall.

We talk as water drips from the ceiling, pooling over the floor. Directly above the kitchen is the drenched bathroom. There’s so much water, that it has begun seeping through. And, if left any longer, that plank would have rotted. With it, the roof stairs and side wall would have come tumbling down. Just one accident – a shower left on – could have destroyed everything.

A plank of wood cannot do the job of a long-gone fireplace. There are just two solutions to this problem. Either, we reconsider how to support the chimney, or we remove the chimney. In other words, we could ease the strain from the plank of wood, retiring it, or, we could overhaul the house, addressing the root cause.

As a disabled person reading through Labour’s welfare green paper, this government has chosen neither solution. They have instead committed to pretending the plank of wood can remain in place, albeit a few bricks removed from above, like a game of Jenga. But, it is a lone, rotting plank now. A plank that is desperate for meaningful change.

These days, it’s easy for me to feel overwhelmed. Most likely because I try to press on as a normal person with an unusual condition which makes normal very difficult.

Since developing this condition I’ve had to trade fitness for fatigue, energy for exhaustion, and the ability to move for being motionless. I’ve had to accept I am no longer the person I was with aspirations for a better life. Take it from me, it’s no holiday being permanently in pain.

Even writing this blog has been a long-drawn-out task.

Meanwhile, the long-term prognosis is grim.

Any disability benefits I receive help me to function rather than not. They remove some of the worry around making ends meet. More importantly, they offer me dignity, to be of value to the community as well as to my family and friends. I mean, who doesn’t want a good neighbour or a shared trouble once in a while?

However, life is still a tough ride. Worse still, I fear it’s going to get a whole lot tougher, for myself and many others like me.

How is this fair? The answer is, it’s not. We only need to look at the impact of the PIP 4-point rule.

Firstly, the government “consultation”, DID NOT actually consult on changes – merely on how having these benefits withdrawn should be dealt with. We don’t even know where the 4-point PIP concept originated from. Equally unknown is what the impact might be of increasing the qualification for basic standard daily living to 9 points from the current 8 points?

It has also been established that the PIP 4-point rule actively discriminates against women, to, in effect, reduce the number of PIP awards. Smoke and mirrors effectively.

We all need answers. The governments justifications for being judge and jury regarding our medical conditions would be a start. The fact is, civil servants and ministers are not medical experts. Yet it is a ‘decision maker’ who determines our fate not the state of our health.

Government departments already have a track record for ignoring medical evidence and using nudge psychology. Ask anyone who’s ever applied for disability benefits, been marked down, or had a claim rejected. DWP claim forms warn claimants not to send in particular types of evidence, despite being allowed to submit everything relevant to your case to a tribunal panel.

With the current system already deeply flawed and falling far short of offering a safety net, positive change does indeed need to happen. The government needs to stop playing games with people’s lives, and stop denying the sick and disabled the help they ought to be eligible to receive.

I regularly hear from many people who have given up pursuing a claim simply because they are on the back foot from the outset. The DWP are trained in their roles. The claimant is generally at a disadvantage. In fact, these are not medical assessments despite one document commonly known as a ‘medical report’. Assessments could be more accurately described as legal tests. There is nothing ‘medical’ about picking up a coin or a pen. Their questions need to be answered with a solicitor’s wits. And the musculoskeletal exam is unreliable. I had an assessor bully me into answering her questions; unfortunately, this type of behaviour is commonplace.

Chronic illness means working three times as hard to achieve half as much. I’ve been dismissed from my job on ill health grounds, yet the government claims they can cure me? Are the government now saying disabled people are no longer disabled? Surely, they have a duty to share their finding with the medical research field, which has been trying to find a cause, cure and treatment for over 200 years?

Besides, where are all the employers with extra accessible, well-paid jobs even coming from? They say those who genuinely cannot work will be protected, yet there is no evidence to suggest that threatening disabled people with destitution motivates them into work.

Have the government really thought things through? If “jobs will (supposedly) be available for everyone who has their PIP cut”, why not start filling those vacancies with the already unemployed? I doubt the 70-year-old PIP claimant with carers visiting around the clock will be reassured by the guarantee of gainful employment in the near future.

I would also like to point out that having a debilitating health condition is effectively a full-time job. At the very least we want to stay out of hospital – alive and as well as can be.

I’m tired of putting on a brave face. But I’m sure the DWP already know this and believes a job will be good for me as well as their economy. But seriously, when did they become experts in my condition? Does the government think it can get away with these cuts without terrible consequences?

As someone totally dependent on benefits, I’m scared of what the future will bring. If you receive the basic rate of state benefits you cannot afford additional care costs to manage health issues which crop up. A taxi to A&E or a medical appointment is out of the question. Last year, I underwent a medical procedure which required anaesthetic and sedation. I contemplated driving myself the short distance to avoid dependency or additional costs. This would have been madness to do so. How many more times do disabled people need to contemplate such drastic actions in order to live?

Another fact is that some disabled people may appear to be capable of work, when they aren’t. Not reliably, not timely, not safely and not in ways employers need. But the benefit system doesn’t like to recognise this. So, if you are not visibly incapable of work, you are expected to ‘try’. Employers expect their employees to get the job done. It’s not a case of inclusive work environments; it’s ultimately about output. If someone’s disability means they cannot sustain that output physically, cognitively or both, then no number of reasonable adjustments makes that job viable.

There’s no category in assessments for ‘sometimes functional sometimes not’, or ‘appears ok then crashes hard after 30 minutes of concentration’. If you can lift a box or click a mouse once, the DWP assume you can do this for 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.

I am certain it would be impossible to find anyone willing to employ me around my health issues and disabilities. Ideally, it would need to be someone who can provide constant support, near to home – as transport would be too challenging on my own – with level access and somewhere to rest regularly. Someone who can provide cover at short notice, or who won’t mind me taking more days off than working. Someone who doesn’t mind if I lie down on the job, snap at co-workers, or wince a great deal. Someone who doesn’t mind planks of wood, even though the job requires bricks and mortar.

The Trussell Trust state that disabled people are already three times more likely to need to use a food bank on a regular basis. Even the Citizens’ Advice have condemned the proposed cuts. Rather than the Pathways to Work Green Paper, they refer to the report as, “Pathways to Poverty”.

DWP’s own statistics show that £40 million is wasted by DWP errors, I can personally vouch for some of these. The DWP spend more on preventing claims at tribunal, etc., than the cost of payments to claimants, with over 80% of court claims actually upheld. According to HOC libraries, there are 16 million disabled people, whilst about 3 million are claiming PIP. Most of them are receiving the lower award of PIP. There is 0% fraud, besides it being incredibly difficult to claim. So somehow the figures don’t add up and somewhere, someone, is not telling the truth.

Disabled people are entitled to this support in order to live and continue to contribute to their communities. The fact that some people simply cannot work at all should be good enough for this government.

A compassionate system would be accepting of this. It would offer everyone real security without forcing people to prove themselves through more suffering. It would value citizens for who they are, not what they can offer in the workplace. And it certainly wouldn’t pit disabled people against each other or against able-bodied people by imposing arbitrary limits on how many could claim based on some minister’s ideology, guesswork, or instinct.

Disability isn’t just about budgets or benefit bills, it’s about the real lives of real people. Assessments need to be based on real needs not rigged to fail people due to fiscal targets set by the Treasury. It may be dressed up as political policy but it translates as downright cruelty disguised as economic efficiency. It’s inhumane and fails every one of us, especially those who need it the most.

Sadly, people will never truly understand something until it happens to them.

None of the government’s plans speak to me of meaningful change. They seem set to cause misery and mayhem for disabled people. They seem punitive and judgemental. I didn’t respond to the consultation personally, because I dare say they will use our own words against us.

Either way, the whole system looks set to come crashing down.

The bill needs burning. If only we still had that chimney.