WE FACE unprecedented financial cutbacks and have been warned cuts to welfare and public services will change “our whole way of life”. Everyone will be affected, but disabled people disproportionately so. Of all low income groups, they are particularly vulnerable to reduced services and benefits.

Reassessment of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) alone, anticipated by the Government to drive a 20 per cent reduction in costs, will have a massive impact on many of the UK’s seven million disabled people. DLA is not an unemployment benefit as such, it’s a payment to disabled people in recognition of their additional costs of living such as personal care, healthcare and medical equipment and transport costs.

Consequently, to treat DLA as an out-of-work benefit is to misrepresent many recipients and expose them to “scrounger” stereotypes. Furthermore, reassessing recipients with new medical tests may perversely result in an increase in appeals, tribunals and associated costs, not drive down spending as the Government hopes.

Another anticipated effect of the proposed changes, to incentivise work, is similarly flawed. As part of the move towards the new “universal credit” system, reassessment of DLA is likely to increase disability poverty.

Ginnie Shaw, York Green Party health and social care spokesperson, St Olave’s Road, Bootham, York.