Charities: put up or shut up

With disabled people and our benefits under attack, says Professor Peter Beresford, it's now time for charities to take the Government on in support of and alliance with those they purport to represent

The coalition Government has made great play of the noxious term "vulnerable people" in setting out its policy stall. "Vulnerable people", much trumpeted, are identified as one of its key concerns.

So when it talks about making swingeing cuts in public expenditure to meet the current financial crisis, it adds that one group whom it will look after at all costs, and whose "frontline" services it will go the extra mile to safeguard, are "vulnerable people": notably, older people, disabled people and others on low income.

Yet it's on such "vulnerable people" that the hammer is set most clearly to fall. Access to disability benefits like Disability Living Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance is going to be even more fiercely policed, with ever-tightening medical checks creating a new UK equivalent of the Stasi. By throwing people off disability benefits big-time, welfare reform offers politicians a multi-billion-pound income-generation scheme.

In this way it neatly kills two birds with one stone, attacking the deficit and "dependency culture" at the same time. Or as disabled people's and service users' organisations are increasingly putting it, probably seeing off increasing numbers of disabled people through increasing poverty, social isolation and despair.

For the first time in modern political history, including even Mrs Thatcher's period in office, there is a consensus across all three main political parties about the desirability of attacking disabled people on benefits.

What this new policy thrust also sadly highlights is that benefits are still the key policy for disabled people, despite years of equality and anti-discrimination legislation.

This isn't just a crisis for disabled people, though: it's also crunch time for the big old disability charities that work for disabled people but aren't in fact run by disabled people. Many such organisations have tried to restyle themselves as disabled people's organisations (DPOs) or user-led groups. Will they now come out determinedly to support disabled people's rights and needs at this time of crisis, or will they be more concerned with their role as service providers and contractors, and with their own organisational interests, as so often has seemed to be the case?

It won't be enough just to sit on the fence and offer general platitudes about social justice and inclusion. Some very determined campaigning and lobbying is going to be needed. The charities must make the Government feel uncomfortable about its regressive policy. That in turn will mean the Government feeling much less comfortable with them.

It really is time for the charities to take the lead they've often taken from DPOs. They must put up or shut up. The assault on disabled people's rights is not an issue they can now duck or be allowed to duck.