Ripe for investment

It’s all very well for government to talk about promoting disabled people’s rights, says Andy Rickell, but big words need backing up with big money

Having challenged key sectors of society about disablist tendencies, I now challenge government itself. This is a challenge to “government” generally, not the current government particularly, which has promoted disabled people’s legal rights well.

But no human right is real until it is resourced.

The right to choose and control one’s support, to participate in society or get a job can only be exercised when the resources required for that right are funded and provided appropriately.

No government has yet agreed that resourcing such rights is a right in itself. Politicians are not yet ready to persuade voters that additional state funding for disabled people is justified on moral grounds, let alone economic grounds. 

To view disabled people’s support as a state burden is prejudiced: hence the Treasury is being disablist. 

The Treasury has overseen economic policy failures that include worsening disability poverty and inequality without addressing the state weaknesses that have caused them.

It has also ignored multi-billion pound bureaucratic waste caused by costly and cumbersome assessment procedures.

At the same time, the Treasury has overseen piecemeal welfare reform which labelled disabled people sick-note scroungers and is now the driving force behind the reform of social care reform for cost reasons.

The Treasury should view disabled people as equally worthy of state investment as non-disabled people. It accepts that for non-disabled people, the costs of maintenance, education and skills training are more than recovered through the tax paid during people’s working lives, with enough left to pay for pensions and support in old age. 

But this “invest to save” approach is not the model adopted for disabled people and their families. And so while disabled people get some resources to acquire education and skills, this is often not enough to gain paid or voluntary work and to contribute economically.

Similarly, working-age, unpaid family “carers” have their access to paid work undermined by inadequate state support for disabled relatives, and child “carers” are denied full development opportunities. These failures waste human potential, are economically unsound and deny human rights to many disabled and non-disabled people.

The powerful Treasury should be “kicking butt” across all tiers of government about the bureaucratic mess generated by piecemeal development of disabled people’s state support. And that doesn’t mean getting rid of disability living allowance to pay for “social care”! If anything, it should be the other way round!

Currently, the Treasury is not represented on the ministerial group (chaired by the minister for disabled people) that oversees implementation of the
Life Chances report.

Given the Treasury’s power within government and the need to justify disabled people’s rights to appropriate resources, the Treasury should be sitting
at this ministerial table.

Most importantly, disablist attitudes within government circles about disabled people being a “burden” on the state must change. Our lack of equal citizenship in socio-economic terms is society’s lost asset. We are ripe for investment.

• Andy Rickell is an executive director at Scope