She’ll never support it: Therese Coffey’s record suggests she is not sympathetic to disabled benefit claimants.
It’s a good, solid, practical suggestion: with disabled people most at risk of financial loss during the coronavirus crisis, the government should suspend the penalties it has imposed on them in the last 10 years.
These include the benefit cap and the “two-child policy” for benefits relating to children.
Also suggested by the Disability Benefits Consortium (DBC) is conversion of the Universal Credit advance loan into a non-repayable grant.
In fact, the DBC requests the suspension of all debt repayment deductions from UC.
And the organisation calls on the government to suspend work-related conditionality and associated sanctions for those receiving benefits.
Other proposals include a call to give higher priority to resolving technical and capacity issues in the benefits system, as well as providing clear guidance for making both a digital and non-digital claim for UC. This is practical as the Department for Work and Pensions has been swamped with claims after the coronavirus lockdown began.
And there is absolutely no hope that the government will grant – or even seriously consider – any of these requests.
The Tories have turned the benefit system into a very efficient device with which to persecute people with disabilities.
They seem to see the coronavirus as a handy aid to this cause, with hospitals already being told to ration ventilators to those with a better chance of surviving – which is prejudicial against the disabled.
In fact it would be easy to see the crisis as providing the Tories with an opportunity simply to continue their hate campaign by other means.
When the final figures are summed up, it will be interesting to see what proportion of the dead happen to be disabled.
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