Minister versus disabled people

It was gloves on for another round at the inaugural conference organised by the newly formed alliance Disability Rights UK and, as Sunil Peck reports, as at any good fight, cuts were very much part of the action

There’s the minister for disabled people Maria Miller, people from Atos, officials from the Department for Work and Pensions and disabled activists, all in one room.

This isn’t the set-up for a joke, by the way, but the line-up at a recent disability poverty conference.

Given the backdrop – fury at the loss of benefits and services, and the fear of being forced into a labour market with no jobs – the day was always more likely to contain flare-ups than frivolity.  

The conference, organised by Disability Alliance, the National Centre for Independent Living and RADAR – newly united as Disability Rights UK – progressed without fuss until Maria Miller arrived in the afternoon and lit the touch paper by trotting out the tired line about the need to stamp out fraud in the benefits system.  

After a speech affirming the Government’s commitment to promoting greater equality, Miller was asked by Linda Burnip from Disabled People Against Cuts what right she had to push disabled people into a life of fear by taking away benefits and care funding.

Miller replied that she was acutely aware of the fear of change and added: “The message that I would send out very strongly is that much of that fear is I think founded on a lack of information. I would say very strongly to you that, at the heart of everything that we’re trying to do as a government, is to make sure that we have a benefits system with the sort of integrity which will help disabled people get the support they need.”

She continued: “When I open the newspaper and I see yet another case of somebody defrauding the benefits system, all I think is that that probably doesn’t help disabled people feel confident that the money is getting to where it’s needed and also that they can with full confidence say that it’s a support system that has integrity around it.”  

In an answer to a later question, the minister said that she had concerns about the negative way in which the mainstream media portrayed disabled people and the “unacceptable” language used.

But she provoked shouts of derision when she said: “What can I do about it? I can help [to create] a benefits system which doesn’t leave us all open to people defrauding it.”  

She departed a couple of minutes later to heckles from one delegate of “murderer” and “Nazi”.

Earlier, during a session with officials from the DWP, when the mood in the room had been calmer, Robert Droy, from the Southampton Centre for Independent Living, raised concerns about the bureaucracy associated with Access to Work, which he said had got worse over the last few months.

In one week, he said, he had spent ten hours dealing with one person’s package. As he put it: “I’m a disabled person. I’ve got to the stage where I’m thinking I don’t want to employ people who need Access to Work. If I’m getting to the end of my tether, how on earth are you going to convince other private companies to take on disabled people?”  

Other delegates raised concerns relating to the unfairness of the fit-for-work tests and the high number of decisions that are being overturned after appeals. Delegates listened to the Atos representatives politely, but as one delegate told me later, there was no sense that they appreciated the widespread fear the tests were causing among disabled people.  

It was worrying to discern a split between the conference organisers and disabled people.

This centred on the decision to charge an entry fee and the location of the venue, which some thought excluded disabled people because of the lack of accessible parking and stations nearby.  

The fees were £10 for unemployed people, £40 for members of the three organizations and £70 for non-members.

But as Neil Coyle, director of policy at Disability Alliance, also points out, although the venue was donated for free, signers, speakers’ expenses, the production of accessible documentation and staff time all cost a lot of money that the organizations lack.  

He also said that a new system of charging was being discussed by the organ­izations for Disability Rights UK’s next conference. He felt it was paramount that disabled people and organizations like Disability Rights UK stand together to fight ongoing cuts as a united front.

So it’s to be hoped that the difference of opinion over pricing and location does not turn out to be divisive.