Next week’s disability cuts will make people destitute – and you might not understand how bad they are until it’s too late | Frances Ryan

Look at the front pages or open a news app in the coming days and you’ll supposedly see the big events facing Britain. But here’s one that is likely to slip quietly under the radar: from next week, almost three-quarters of a million of the most severely ill and disabled people in the country could end up having a lifeline benefit cut in half.
Cast your mind back to last summer. As the nation sweated through a heatwave and Oasis reunited, ministers were trying to push through “welfare reform” – a nice euphemism for £5bn worth of cuts to disability benefits. A backbench rebellion meant that Keir Starmer was forced to halt his overhaul of personal independence payments (Pip), but MPs voted through a brutal universal credit cut. Ministers justified reducing support for people too disabled or ill to work by arguing it would remove the “perverse incentives” that discourage employment and trap people on long-term benefits, as if a twentysomething who is bedbound with ME just needs “incentivising” to get back to the building site.
Nine months later, that change will now come into effect. On paper, it’s the epitome of bureaucratic jargon: new claimants whose disability means they can’t work or prepare for a job will see their additional universal credit support, known as “the health element”, halved to £50 per week and then frozen. That’s unless they meet strict – in many ways, flawed – criteria for being terminally ill or having a condition that is “severe” and “lifelong”. But wade through the dense small print and the human cost is unmistakable: people who are enduring daily debilitating symptoms and often already struggling to pay the bills are going to have their lives made even harder, all while having no real prospect of getting a job.
Charities and disabled people’s organisations have told me they fear the change will push people into deep financial hardship and, in some cases, destitution. As Samuel Thomas, from the anti-poverty charity Z2K, starkly warned the Guardian this week: “Families losing out on this vital income could face eviction, go without food and heating, and lose access to the care they depend on.”
Here’s the extra rub: because the cut applies to new claimants but not current ones, if you apply for help next Monday, you’ll be on average £3,000 a year worse off by the end of the decade than if you’d applied this week. Worried about paying your mortgage while you’re off sick? You really should have timed that stroke better.
Disability benefit cuts, understandably, often seem as if they’re a concern for “other” people. While NHS waiting lists or crumbling school buildings feel as if they affect everyone, few of us scroll to find the latest news of out-of-work sickness benefits on our morning commute. Human beings, naturally, don’t tend to spend their lives worrying when and how bad luck might hit. But that the universal credit change will only affect “new” claimants says the quiet part out loud: anyone can become disabled or chronically ill at any point. And every time successive governments slash the safety net, we can’t know if it will be us, a loved one, or a stranger who will fall through it.
Now try reading this column’s first paragraph again: nearly three-quarters of a million of the most severely ill and disabled people in the country could “end up” having their benefits cut. This isn’t instant penury as the clocks strike midnight on Sunday. We don’t even know yet who the axe is going to fall on. That’s because – to quote the government’s own data – an estimated 730,000 “future recipients” of universal credit will miss out on the higher benefit rate by 2029-30. That’s a delivery driver who has not yet had the car crash that will paralyse him, a trainee teacher who’ll go on to get a bipolar diagnosis, a nurse who’s just caught that bad cough that will sadly develop into long Covid. Other “future” recipients will be people who are already ill or disabled now but haven’t yet claimed benefits (contrary to the rightwing workshy myth, most disabled people continue working through painful symptoms for as long as they can).
At the same time as disabled and sick people too unwell to work have part of their universal credit reduced, the standard allowance – the bit of universal credit that all claimants get, including healthy people able to hold down a job – will rightly increase. That is a not exactly subtle message from the government of who counts and who doesn’t.
Labour is hardly alone in this. It was not a coincidence that while plans to cut Pip saw a fierce backlash last summer, partly because many recipients use the benefit to help themselves access a job, cuts to universal credit out-of-work sickness benefits barely got a whisper. As with most minority groups, to the political and media class there are “good” disabled people and “bad” ones, typically defined as those who “contribute” to the Treasury and those who “take”.
Expect a similar shrug from much of the press and MPs this week. As the predicted energy hike puts household budgets under more pressure and unemployment looks set to rise to its highest levels since the Covid lockdowns, there are few political points to be won by defending people who can’t earn a wage. As we speak, ministers are reportedly weighing up whether disabled people under 24 should have to try to get a job before being eligible for disability benefits. That’s on top of considering whether all under-22s should be blocked from receiving the health element of universal credit entirely. First, they ration social security based on when someone falls ill. Next, it might be based on when we’re born.
Two things can be true at once: the benefits bill is rising (that notably includes pensions), and people whose health means they’re unable to work deserve help from the state to have a decent quality of life. Britain can cut the money disabled people need to eat regular meals and pay the rent. Or we can have an adult conversation about how an increasingly sick and ageing population is squared with the costs – and responsibilities – that come with it.
The latter requires far-reaching changes, from investing in mental health services and preventive healthcare and fixing the Access to Work scheme, to putting more onus on employers to improve workers’ health and, yes, introducing wealth taxes to address gaping inequality. No one should pretend any of this is easy. But it is necessary to ensure there will still be a safety net in the years to come. The unspoken truth is that’s something any of us could need.
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Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and the author of Who Wants Normal? Life Lessons from Disabled Women