Dominic Milne, Parliamentary Co-Chair of the Disability Benefits Consortium and Legal Rights Officer at RINB, says: 
“Rishi Sunak’s words today were another example of expedient and damaging rhetoric designed to lay the blame for the government’s failures on disabled people.

Rather than addressing the cost-of-living crisis continuing to affect millions of disabled people or the barriers disabled people face in employment, the Prime Minister’s announcement is a blatant attempt to vilify sick and disabled people.

The Prime Minister’s plan to “put work at the heart of welfare” through continued tightening of work-seeking conditionality for claimants and imposing evermore heavy sanctions has had no discernible effect in helping disabled people back to work and has only served to create severe financial hardship, fear and anxiety. Making it harder to get sickness certification will exacerbate this problem.

We anxiously await the forthcoming consultation on Personal Independence Payment reforms, announced today – a benefit which has already been shown statistically to be inadequate in dealing with the extra costs of disability. Based on the Prime Minister’s statement, we are concerned it will seek to reduce eligibility, leaving more ill and disabled people without a safety net. 

What is required – which the Disability Benefits Consortium have stated and repeated many times – is the provision of appropriately tailored employment support for disabled people, to be sold on its merits, not through coercion and risk of sanctions. As well as significantly more support and funding for employers to enable realistic and sustainable employment. Finally, the government urgently needs to address the inadequacy of benefit rates to ensure the welfare systems meets the additional costs disabled people face.”