Disability plans will haunt ConDems

Disability campaigners are entitled to ask what's happened to all the Lib Dem moderating influence on excessive Conservative zeal to dismantle the welfare state - especially as warnings sound that thousands of claimants could be left with little or no financial support. The trouble is that they already know the answer.

About 3.2 million disabled people, including children, currently receive the existing Disability Living Allowance. However, findings provided by Scope, a major charity that champions disability issues, says a proposed test of claimants' need is flawed because it concentrates on disability alone and fails to take important issues such as the cost & availability of housing and transport into account. Many families risk losing essential payments as a result.

This is not a one-off situation. Earlier this year, we blogged about a series of protests aimed at the DWP and contractors Atos over the flawed work capability assessment and the bizarre methods used by agency staff.

Claimants are asked if they watch EastEnders or Coronation Street on the basis that a positive response means they can sit and concentrate for 30 minutes whilst a woman with mental health problems had been found ineligible for the benefit because she "did not appear to be trembling . . . sweating . . . or make rocking movements".

Around the same time, the Guardian highlighted serious credibility gaps in Cameron’s declared intention to attack the “sicknote culture”. In August this year, research by the Papworth Trust flagged up concerns that 85% of claimants would have to cut back on basics if plans to replace Disability Living Allowance left them worse off.

The Disability Wales conference in Newport yesterday heard that a "pincer movement" of cuts to benefits and social care would leave disabled people in Wales bearing the brunt of the government debt reduction plans. Simon Duffy, director of the Centre for Welfare Reform, told delegates the cuts were “not because the government hates disabled people. I don’t think the government thinks about disabled people, they think about voters, they think about staying in power.”

ConDem ministers will be expecting more similarly negative headlines as charities and campaigners line up to condemn the changes. But whilst disabled peoples minister Maria Miller remains resolute on the way forward, the sting as ever could well be felt in local ballot boxes next year.

As one disabled campaigner forcibly puts it on his campaign blog, “Forget tuition fees, this is a far worse betrayal....The reason that people have turned their backs on Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems is because he turned his back on us the moment he walked into Downing Street. If we can’t vote the deceitful bastards out of Westminster until 2015 we can at least vote them out of our townhalls in 2012.”

No grey area there.