The great DLA swindle

Jim Elder-Woodward warns that the government’s social care reforms could mean that disability living allowance is not as safe as we think

Back in the early 1970s, I was driving around in one of those three-wheeler invalid tricycles: one of the few left on the road. I received a letter from the then government saying that if I handed back my tricycle I would be entitled to the new mobility allowance – FOR LIFE.

Now, some 35 years later, amid the hullabaloo of slogans being trumpeted by advocates of the new social care reforms, like individual “choice” and “control”, the Treasury is quietly trying to do away with the successor to my mobility allowance, the disability living allowance (DLA), and its cousin, the attendance allowance (AA). The Treasury wants local authorities to be gatekeepers to DLA monies by including such resources in the disabled person’s “personalised budget”.

A “personalised budget” is the money that a local authority sets aside to meet the social and personal needs of a disabled person. The person can then decide for themselves how that money is to be spent: by themselves to meet those needs, through a third-party care provider or on the local authority’s own services. This means that people who hitherto shied away from stigmatised social services and struggled to maintain their independence using their meagre DLA will now need to undergo a means-tested community care assessment.

Previous governments have said that the DLA was meant to refund the “extra cost” of disability – that’s to say, help overcome the social barriers that impede disabled people’s equal participation in society, such as the “extra costs” of transport, heating, laundry, shopping: the list goes on.

What’s not on the list is social care. Yet increasingly, local authorities and even the Independent Living Fund itself have swindled this money from disabled people to underpin their under-resourced care budgets. It is fair to say that many of those who are penalised for using care services by having their DLA taken from them fail to meet their increased living costs and consequently live a more impoverished lifestyle.

(This raises a question for those who, like myself, live under either the devolved governments of Wales or Scotland. In view of the Treasury’s institutionalisation of the surreptitious local authority policy of using DLA for “care costs”, do Welsh and Scottish politicians and officials agree with this shift of policy and responsibility to the local level? And where is the accountability between the UK welfare benefit system and the devolved social care system?)

If every disabled person now has to undergo a debasing means-tested community care assessment to get what was previously and universally theirs by right of having a disability alone, more of us will experience a future of poverty and deprivation. So much for my 1970s naïve trust in the government.