Curran's pick'n'mix on cuts

With disabled people seeing benefit cuts and welfare reform as an attack on life and independence, Sunil Peck suggests to Margaret Curran that the Labour Party is being both selective and equivocal in its opposition

The anger that many feel towards the coalition Government has been compounded by the failure of Labour to oppose cuts to welfare and services that disabled people rely on.

But it was Labour that abolished Incapacity Benefit and replaced it with the Employment and Support Allowance, Labour too that flirted with abolishing DLA – Disability Living Allowance.

So although the shadow minister for disabled people Margaret Curran has opposed the plan to cut the mobility component of DLA for people in residential care, it’s not that surprising that she supports Government moves to reform the welfare system.

That said, she says that she can understand why disabled people are scared.

“I think they have a right to be scared. It’s the scale of the changes from cuts in local government to reforms of the benefit system. It’s the gamut of things that explains the depth of peoples’ concerns.”

Curran was elected to Westminster in 2010 but had previously spent 12 years in the Scottish parliament where she was involved in disability issues.

One change in Labour’s rhetoric since Curran took office is the acceptance that welfare reform can only work if there are genuine job opportunities for disabled people. When Labour was in power, DWP ministers tended to highlight the importance of pressing ahead with welfare reform even though there was scant evidence that such opportunities existed.

Would welfare cuts have been so drastic under Labour? “I’m not psychic but I wouldn’t have thought that a Labour chancellor would be announcing cuts to disability benefits in the context of tackling the deficit: that’s not the right way to do things.”

Labour has criticised the removal of housing benefit for those claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance for more than a year, as well as the one-year limit for people in the work-related group claiming Employment and Support Allowance. But what else might Labour have done differently?

“We would’ve taken a different approach to the deficit and we would’ve had a strategy to create economic growth. We would also have been able to address some of the concerns flagged up with the Work Capability Assessment in the Harrington report. We didn’t abolish the Independent Living Allowance or DLA. There may be an argument for reform but the way the Government’s going about it is wrong. You carry out reform with people rather than by imposing it on them.”

Although nobody could accuse Labour of exploiting disabled people’s anger with the coalition Government to score cheap political points, some have claimed that the Opposition is not doing enough to represent disabled people.

“I know, from being in opposition in Scotland for a couple of years, that you can say things that people never hear. One of the biggest campaigns we’ve been involved with is against the removal of the mobility element of DLA for people in residential care because there are some cuts that go just too far.”

Rather than setting out her own policies, Curran clearly sees her immediate role as scrutinising what the Government is doing. She illustrates the point with the example of the plan to simplify the benefit system.

“We agree with Iain Duncan Smith when he says he wants to simplify the benefit system and reduce the penalties for people working. But the Govern­ment’s doing it the wrong way because you can’t deliver that step change in welfare if your motivation is cuts. There’s a tension between what the Treasury is trying to do and what Iain Duncan Smith wants to do.”