Turning pain to gain

Although disabled people are likely to be worst hit by the recession, Andy Rickell argues that there can be the light of opportunity in the gloom

When things get bad, the rich and powerful protect themselves, “trickle down” fails, and those who are neither rich nor powerful, including most disabled people, lose out.

In particular, employment opportunities, poverty, and access to support to enable equality, may all worsen.

Disabled people seeking work are experiencing much greater competition – there are fewer jobs, and more good applicants looking – 100 applicants per job is common. Historic barriers to education and employment experienced by disabled people in their lives mean their CVs lose out in the recruitment process.

Even assuming fair redundancy procedures, disabled people are generally over-represented in non-core business, temporary and low-skilled jobs which are more likely to be shed.

Improving Government employment schemes should help with work-ready skills, but disabled people cannot apply for jobs that don’t exist. The additional requirements on benefit claimants, whilst not generally onerous, definitely threaten people with fluctuating conditions or those unfairly assessed as work-ready.

Disabled people who rely on benefits will experience worsening poverty, as whilst benefits increase by the retail prices index, the real rate of inflation for people on lower incomes is higher. Disabled people on benefits got poorer even in the “good times” of the last decade.

I say this to state an obvious truth that needs stating – recession hurts most those who already experience social and economic discrimination. The issue is – can the recession be used to improve things in the longer term ?

Some thoughts. When times are tough, society more readily accepts government intervention and social change, in part because such change is hidden amongst the negative changes associated with recession. Rather than take the natural reactionary approach, panicking and battening down the hatches, we need cool, clear-thinking leadership to speed up policies for addressing inequality.

Government should advance the personalisation of public services agenda for all, creating individual budgets which bring together every central Government funding stream including benefits, and drastically reducing the assessment processes to access the full support package. The money saved by this streamlining should be used to improve social support. Disabled people’s organisations and their allies should have a clear role in advocating access for disabled people to this single funding package.

Artificial barriers that separate, for instance, older people’s from adult’s services, social care from employment services, physical/sensory from learning difficulty/mental health services, and adults’ from children’s services, should be removed to create a holistic public service for “people who receive social support on grounds of disability/impairment”, suitably named!

Disabled and all disadvantaged people could gain from recessionary pain.