‘Why are they picking on disabled people, the vulnerable and the poor?’

A friend of mine has autism, ADHD and mental health problems and recently had a reassessment for PIP.

Her partner was in tears on the phone to me afterwards. Basically, she’s lost £700 a month.

She self-harmed for the first time in years, based on the decision of the assessment. And that is real life for so many. That is what we are up against.

I'm really scared that people who aren't obviously in a wheelchair, like myself, will get scapegoated, and are going to have the rug pulled from them.

It can end up with self-harming or worse. People are genuinely scared and there's many, many stories, anecdotally, of people who have taken their lives.

I’m old school Labour and I feel ashamed about what Labour is doing. As an organisation we were nervously excited about a Labour government after 14 years of the Tories, but everyone feels completely betrayed.

The initial Tory idea was to cut £3 billion from welfare. Labour have gone up to £5 billion. And people I work with cannot believe it. They cannot believe that a Labour government has taken this decision. It's immoral.

DPAC is now producing merchandise saying ‘Labour Cuts Kill’, something I never thought I would see.

We thought we had an ally in Labour, certainly at a local level. Clive Lewis is a good MP. He is fighting our battle. He's going against the front benches and saying it's wrong. 

We need more Labour MPs to rebel. And we need a judicial review. We need a legal challenge to this.

Why are they picking on disabled people, vulnerable people and the poor? I don't understand their rationale.

Disabled people want to be in work, and many of them do work.

I myself work. But on a wider scale, where are these jobs? Where are these socially minded employers, who are all going to take on disabled people?

I'm all for disabled people working but there has to be an infrastructure in place to enable that to happen.

It costs a lot of money to work as a disabled person. If I want to start work at 8.30am, I can't rely on a care agency to get me up because they won't be there till 9.30am.

I have to pay extra money out of my PIP to enable me to employ someone to get me up. 

Then I need to get a taxi to get to my place of work. That comes out of my PIP if I'm at work during the day, and also the Access to Work scheme, although these days that is non-existent. 

When at work, I need assistance to go to the loo. So what do I do? I use PIP for it.

If they take PIP away, the mechanism to enable people to pay to go to work out of that money – which after all is there for disability purposes – is gone.

If you cut the benefit of disabled people, you cut their ability to contribute to society, their chance at giving work a go. 

I would like the government to admit it has made a mistake, and for the cuts to be reversed.

It’s going to end up costing them more anyway, because ultimately, people who are currently in work will have to give up work.

And this idea that if you are on PIP you are faking… if you're on PIP, believe me, the forms take about eight hours to fill in. 

You can't make it up. You can’t fake an assessment.

The ones they should be worried about are the people who don't claim the benefits because they're not mentally well enough to go out and get it – they're the ones who are dying. 

The only thing I welcome is that they are no longer going to assess people like me. I have cerebral palsy and am a full-time wheelchair user.

It was an incredible waste of money doing those reassessments. I had doctors come out to see me and ask, 'Can you just lift your leg up please?' One of them said to me, ‘Why am I doing this?’ 

It was ridiculous and it costed thousands of pounds.

But they’re not going after people like me.

What they want to do is cut the million people out with mental health problems. That's who they're going for. And the way to do that is to narrow the eligibility so that in the future, those people won't be able to apply. 

Most of those people who are currently receiving PIP as ambulant disabled people with mental health problems have got a genuine right to that benefit. 

I think there are wider issues at play here. It might sound a bit crazy, but if you look at benefit cuts, and you look at assisted dying, even at Covid and the way disabled people were looked after, I do feel that successive governments are looking at people who haven't got an economic role to play in society, and they're saying, “We can kill these people off.”

They could do the wealth tax if they wanted to. But they don't want to. They want to attack disabled people. 

Keith Roads is a member of campaign group Disabled People Against Cuts. He also works in an advisory role as a person with lived experience for BASW and the University of East Anglia. Read more about DPAC here