A quarter of Britons now disabled
A quarter of Britons are now disabled, with two million more people than before the pandemic saying they struggle to function because of poor mental health.
In the face of growing Labour unrest, ministers are trying to stand firm on cuts to disability benefits that will slash claimants’ income by £4.8 billion.
On Thursday, more MPs pledged to vote against the cuts, vowing the “mother of all rebellions” against plans, detailed in the spring statement by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, that will leave three million people worse off.
Only about a dozen backbenchers have, so far, expressed outright opposition. Ministers are launching a charm offensive to persuade those unhappy with the changes not to rebel.
The government also faces discontent from more than 150,000 people who will lose their carer’s allowance as a result of the person they look after no longer qualifying for personal independence payments under the reforms. Official impact assessments show this will save £500 million.
Steve Darling, the Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman, called it “the biggest cuts to carer’s allowance for decades”, causing some families to lose a total of £12,000 a year.
The Labour MP Rachael Maskell urged ministers to “withdraw this policy”. Carers UK, a charity, said that claimants were “shocked, worried and scared”, warning that “families will effectively lose two main strands of financial income at once”.
But Sir Stephen Timms, the disability minister, said “we do have to make some reductions” to control the soaring cost of sickness benefits, arguing that the reforms were being done “in a compassionate way”.
Even after the latest cuts, spending on disability benefits will rise from £36 billion last year to £59 billion by the end of the decade.
Both sides are likely to point to findings from an official survey, released on Thursday, that showed 16.8 million people in the UK now say they have a disability. The number has risen by 40 per cent in the past decade and 700,000 in the past year.
For the first time, 25 per cent of people say they have a disability that has “substantial” and “long-term” effects on their ability to function in daily life. The rise is sharpest among those of working age, with 24 per cent in this cohort saying they have a disability, up from 19 per cent pre-Covid and 16 per cent a decade ago.
There are now more than ten million people of working age reporting a disability, including about a million under 25. This is addition to 1.2 million children under 15 reporting a disability.
About 5.8 million people reported they have a mental health problem so severe it counts as a disability, up 400,000 in a year and two million on 2018-19 levels. Mental illness is cited by 48 per cent of working age people with a disability, up from up from 39 per cent in 2018, making it the single biggest problem.
While Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has said there is “overdiagnosis” of mental health problems, Minesh Patel of the charity Mind said there were “very real reasons why mental health problems are increasing”. He cited “seismic events like the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis that have had a significant impact on people’s mental health”.
Patel urged ministers to focus on improving the NHS mental health service, saying: “This would put more people in a position to enter and remain in work, as opposed to a short-sighted approach of slashing support from the benefits system.”
Dave Finch of the Health Foundation, a think tank, said that “healthcare is not always the right answer” to problems that often had social causes, but urged ministers to give “more consideration of what’s driving those underlying trends and trying to tackle those issues, rather than trying to ration resources in the face of rising need”.
The findings, from a long-running government survey which questioned 36,000 people in 2023-24, comes amid mounting unease on the Labour benches about cuts to disability benefits.
At least two new Labour MPs said they would vote against the cuts. Dr Simon Opher, the Stroud MP who is also a GP, said “I did not come into politics to make life harder for those already struggling” and told ministers: “We must not balance the books on the backs of the poorest.”
Connor Naismith, the MP for Crewe and Nantwich, said Labour should be “pursuing measures which risk plunging vulnerable people into poverty”.
In the Commons, Josh Fenton-Glynn, the Calder Valley MP, told ministers there was a “real sense of fear” among his constituents, while Paul Waugh said that his, in Rochdale, were “deeply worried” about assessments showing the cuts would push 50,000 children into poverty.
Vocal opposition is still largely confined to confirmed critics. Neil Duncan-Jordan, the MP for Poole, pledged to vote against “the largest disability cuts in a generation”, saying ministers “should be asking the wealthiest to pay their share — not targeting the poorest”.
Richard Burgon, the veteran left-winger, predicted “the mother of all rebellions”, insisting the cuts were not a “moral approach” and “not a Labour approach”. He told Times Radio that discontent was not confined to the left, saying that “there are many more MPs than people think who are really concerned about this”.
Reeves said she was “absolutely certain” the reforms would reduce poverty once back-to-work schemes were taken into account.
Separate figures published on Thursday showed 4.5 million children were living in relative poverty, a record high and the third consecutive annual rise. About 44 per cent of them are in families in which someone is disabled.
Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC, which is normally loyal to the government, said: “Cuts to disability benefits are already forecast to push many more families into poverty. Ministers should rethink these plans.”
