The same day the Labour Party government launched its plans for a sweep of devastating welfare cuts, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) published a piece of research quantifying the cost of chronically ill and disabled people to society. Or, in effect, the Labour-led DWP was putting a price-tag on chronically ill and disabled people’s lives – just as it readies to strip some of their benefits, and drastically cut them for others.
All aboard for the disabled people-are-benefit-scroungers-and-burdens-to-society government gravy train to wherever the fuck ministers want to make their killer corporate salaries next.
DWP cuts: Kendall on a welfare spend warpath
On Tuesday 18 March, DWP boss Liz Kendall laid out the government’s broad catalogue of plans to ‘reform’ disability and health-related income-based benefits. Broadly, the green paper made for a callous cocktail of catastrophic cuts and changes that will harm chronically ill and disabled claimants.
Notably, the paper included a suite of regressive reforms to make it harder for people to claim disability benefits like Personal Independence Payment (PIP). As expected, the changes it’s proposing will target certain claimants in particular, namely young, neurodivergent, learning disabled, and those with mental health disorders. Alongside this, there’ll be cuts to out-of-work benefits like the LCWRA health-related component of Universal Credit. Once again, it additionally wants to make this harder to claim, and all as it ramps up reassessments and conditions for doing so.
The government is now consulting on the majority of these plans until 30 June. You can respond to this here.
In tandem with its wide-scale assault on chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants, it published a separate statistical report. And the intent was obvious – to vilify sick/disabled people further and back Kendall’s case for this cruel new wave of cuts.
Chronically ill and disabled people: an economic burden
In particular, the DWP publication looked at what it considered the “cost to the economy” of “ill health or disabilities” that stop working age people from being able to engage with employment. In short, that is, it was quantifying the economic expense of chronically ill and disabled people unable to work.
It looked at a number of areas in which it determined they would lose the economy money, including:
- Their so-called long-term or temporary “economic inactivity” and sickness absence meaning “lost production” for employers.
- Care-giving responsibilities resulting in “lost production”.
- Costs to the NHS.
- Lost tax and National Insurance returns.
- Social security benefits.
The basic thrust for all was: chronically ill and disabled people unable to work cost the Treasury, the DWP, the taxpayer, and employers. It estimated all this on revenue loss for 2022.
Firstly, apparently, through lost “output per worker” the 2.7 million chronically ill and disabled people outside the workforce lose the economy anywhere between £132bn to £188bn.
Meanwhile, for sickness absence, it’s purportedly between £38bn and £56bn.
Then, informal care supposedly accounts for somewhere in the region of £37bn.
On top of this, the analysis says they rack up a £2bn cost to the NHS, and an expense of £57bn to the exchequer in lost tax and National Insurance.
More disability benefit-bashing
And it wasn’t going to leave DWP benefits out either, naturally. It put this between £36bn and £47bn.
To calculate that, it added together the cost of claims for a number of disability and ill health-related benefits. However, the already shoddy research doesn’t even solely focus on benefits like PIP and the UC LCWRA. What it actually does is take a picture of ALL the benefits chronically ill and disabled people out of work are claiming. So, this includes social security like the UC basic rate, the UC housing element, and housing benefit.
Setting aside for a moment that the housing-based benefits go into the pockets of landlords anyway, including income-based benefits might almost imply that only people in work should be entitled to them… We hear you, subsidise poverty-paying employers, but no income for the “workless” that those same profiteering pricks can’t squeeze for capital generation, amiright?
Additionally, it seemed to forget throughout the whole analysis of course that chronically ill and disabled people not working ALSO spend this money in the ECONOMY. What’s more, as other analyses have shown, these DWP benefits are actually also good for the economy in terms of the wellbeing returns they bring.
Never mind in the first place that they deserve the financial support to live regardless.
Overall then, it tallies these all up to say that chronically ill and disabled people out of work cost between £240-330bn in 2022. The bottom line then (because that’s all they seem to care about)? Chronically ill and disabled people are a burden to society.
Expendable human capital is all we’ll ever be to the DWP
As if all that weren’t utterly atrocious enough – the DWP only went and put a price on workers’ heads. For this, it introduced some nifty neolib chicanery titled ‘Gross Value Added (GVA)’ to work out each person’s “average (mean) value”. It described that this:
can be thought of as the individual’s job contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Yes, you read that right. We’re all just expendable ‘human capital’ to these neoliberal narcissists in Lord Alli white collar. Worse still, here’s the quiet part out loud:
The GVA output per worker was £68,818 for the UK in 2022. This analysis also estimated a GVA figure for disabled people that may be more appropriate to apply to individuals with known ill-health. The GVA for a disabled worker is estimated for this analysis through multiplying mean GVA for all workers, by the ratio of median hourly pay of disabled workers to mean hourly pay for all workers (excluding overtime). Using this, the estimated median annual GVA for a disabled person was £46,513 in 2022.
That is, on some completely bullshit metrics you can’t convince me it didn’t dream up on the back of a fag packet, my chronically ill and disabled ass is worth less to the economy than a non-disabled worker’s. Could have probably saved the DWP some effort and told it that one if it’d asked. Hellooo, ardent anti-capitalist trying to capsize the corporate-captured charlatans at Whitehall, working for the Canary here.
If DWP timing is everything…
Then there’s the timing of the publication – the very day of the DWP’s green paper. Coincidence? About as much as these political pigs in shit schmoozing it up at an ex-Labour staffer’s lobby firm gala. Throw in BlackRock, a smattering of bankers and City billionaires, and we have ourselves the new, new Labour Party – and an apt comparison for how hella unlikely it is this wasn’t entirely intentional.
It was only too deliberate. Both in Parliament and in the green paper, Kendall was banging on about the claim rates. She opined in the foreword how:
One in every 10 working-age people in Britain is now claiming at least one type of health or disability benefit.
And this quickly led on to a tirade tying in the cost to the Treasury, and the NHS:
Total spending on incapacity and disability benefits for working-age adults has soared by £20 billion since the pandemic, an increase of almost two-thirds. In 5 years’ time, we expect to spend over £70 billion. That is more than a third of our current NHS budget and more than 3 times what we currently spend on policing and keeping our communities safe.
Now, I’d almost bet my DWP PIP bottom daily living allowance dollar that Kendall has never delivered a disgusting diatribe with as much unconcealed zeal as she did with her new pet punching down on disabled people project to Parliament this week.
At the end of the day though, the clear issue here is that it sounds a lot like she’s leaning into the research above. And that wouldn’t be at all surprising. The green paper itself is filled with a veritable manufactured outrage-fest of ableist, demonising tropes. These especially scapegoat chronically ill and disabled people unable to work.
Nothing new then from this “taking the mickey” IDS clone in blood red new Labour ministerial garb.
Nothing new under a Labour in bed with the Sun
So there you have it. Chronically ill and disabled people unable to work are a drain on the economy. We’re skivers, burdens, “useless eaters”, blah blah blah, take your pick. There’s really no shortage of stigmatising synonyms the shitrag press like shameless Labour’s favourite new soapbox the Sun, won’t continue to churn out with giddy, grotesque glee, and immoral abandon. At the same time however, the DWP has estimated that we also have less economic value in the workplace than our non-disabled peers.
Incidentally, the analysis didn’t think to look at the costs of removing society’s disabling barriers, and tackling rampant institutional ableism. But then why would it? Chronically ill and disabled people are worth a third less to the economy by its own cold-hard capitalist calculations.
Therefore, if you’re wondering why the Labour Party government is pushing to force us into work by slashing and stripping away our benefits, but won’t put its money where its mouth is and actually implement genuine support for us to do so, look no further.
And that’s before you even consider the costs that are truly on the line here. Namely how coercing chronically ill and disabled people into low-wage, inaccessible, and toxic work environments will come at an expense alright – and it’s their very lives. Far from the DWP-manufactured propaganda about work being good for people’s mental health, for many it will be anything but. For still yet more, it will be actively harmful and dangerous to their physical health as well.
Even more disgusting in the context of the assisted dying bill
It’s truly appalling that it even needs spelling out, but people’s value should never be tied to their ability to work.
However, that’s precisely what the DWP is doing here. It ascribes a value based on the government’s fucked up framing of dignity as something people have by means of their function inside the exploitative capitalist extortion racket. Where have we heard that one before? (Clue: a certain fascistic ideological stain on the conscience of 20th century Europe). Now, in 21st century Britain, your worth is contingent on your financial contribution to society. Nothing changes.
Kendall’s cuts are one thing, but this is all against the backdrop of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill that’s making its way through Parliament as well. In this climate, the concerted attempt to paint chronically ill and disabled people as a burden should be seen for what it is. In short: a gross and hostile attack on our right to even exist.
Featured image via the Canary
