- Conference
- 2024 National Delegate Conference
- Date
- 16 February 2024
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes the Conservative government’s publication of “Transforming Support: The Health and Disability White Paper” in March 2023. This put forward new plans to make disability benefits dependent on eligibility for Personal Independent Payments (PIP) and removed rights of appeal against some benefit decisions. The government announced the implementation of these plans in the Chancellors Autumn Statement in November 2023.
The Conservative government claims these changes to welfare benefits will help more disabled people and people with health conditions to start, stay and succeed in work. However, conference believes the opposite is true and that the key changes will push disabled people further into financial hardship, at a time when we are already experiencing the sharp end of a cost of living crisis.
In his 2023 Autumn Statement the Conservative Chancellor claimed these changes would help more disabled people work from home. However, in reality these changes will penalise disabled people who are not able to do this, while pushing others into low paid, isolating jobs without access to reasonable adjustments. Conference believes that threatening disabled people with benefit cuts if they cannot work from home is no way to address the issues disabled workers face, including chronic lack of access to reasonable adjustments.
Conference notes that the Conservative government has presided over 14 years of policies that have punished disabled people through cutting disability premiums and introducing unfair work capability assessments, conditionality, and sanctions. Even for those disabled people in work, the disability pay gap is worse than it was a decade ago and in 2022 stood at a shocking 17.2 percent or £3,700 less a year than non-disabled workers. Added to this, the Conservative government’s National Disability Strategy was found to be unlawful and based on an unlawful consultation.
It is perhaps only to be expected that the white paper was mainly a collection of small-scale pilots and re-announcements, while its key proposals are about making more disabled people work longer hours, whatever the pay. This is dressed up as ending work capability assessments but in fact it will make matters worse, with individual job centre advisors now being able to decide whether you are entitled to benefits or whether you instead need to find work or work more hours than you currently do. The system is likely to be even more unfair than work capability assessments, with no appeal against discretionary decision making by job centre advisors.
Conference believes that making Personal Independence Payments (PIP), and Adult Disability Payment in Scotland, the qualifier to exempt you from looking for work and work related activity is just a ploy to force more disabled people into work whether or not they are ready for it, and to pay them less money in Universal Credit. In any case, we know that PIP is not a fair system and UNISON’s 2018 report “Punished for going to work” makes clear that it needs to be reformed.
Conference strongly believes making work coaches the sole decision maker on ability to work is a retrograde step. Work coaches are not disability specialists and the DWP should not be using them to make life-changing decisions about disabled people.
This new approach from government also changes the nature of PIP, so it is simply about covering the additional costs of being disabled and not about fostering independence. This is a crucial difference and suggests government are trying to get away with a lower cost service that is about disabled people simply surviving rather than thriving.
Conference believes these changes will drive disabled people further into poverty, compounding the ongoing impact of the cost of living crisis. Disabled people already live on lower incomes as we are more likely to work part-time or be in low paid jobs. With the added cost of increasingly expensive electricity for vital equipment such as dialysis machines, drip machines, oxygen, and medicine dispensers, as well as additional costs for dietary specific foods not easily found at a food bank, disabled people do not need further attacks on welfare benefits that help us to survive.
Conference notes that UNISON General Secretary Christina McAnea wrote to the Chancellor in November 2023, strongly objecting to these changes where she stated “If this government is serious about helping disabled people in the workplace, it needs to tackle the root cause of what makes working life so difficult for so many of them. Threatening benefit cuts or accusing disabled people of “not doing their duty” achieves nothing.”
Conference therefore instructs the National Executive Council to work with the National Disabled Members Committee to:
1)Seek appropriate opportunities to widely publicise these changes to the benefits system and their negative impact on disabled people’s income and independence;
2)Work through UNISON Labour Link to lobby the Labour party to develop a realistic and supportive plan to reform the welfare benefits system so that it puts the needs and independence of disabled people at its heart;
3)Seek to ensure the experience of disabled people is included in UNISON’s work on the cost of livings crisis, including through the Labour Link.