‘How dare you’: an open letter over callous DWP PIP cuts to Stephen Timms

The following is an open letter to Minister of State for Social Security and Disability Stephen Timms from reader Shane Brown about the Labour Party government’s DWP PIP and health-based benefit cuts.

DWP PIP cuts: Labour’s war on disabled people

As the Canary has previously reported, the Labour Party government has now laid down its plans for cuts to Personal Independence (PIP) and the health-based part of Universal Credit. Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Liz Kendall launched its Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working green paper on 18 March.

The paper included a suite of regressive reforms to make it harder for people to claim disability benefits like 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. Moreover, disabled people who need help with things like cutting up food, supervision, prompting, or assistance to wash, dress, or monitor their health condition, will no longer be eligible.

Specifically, it’s increasing the number of points a person will need to score in their DWP PIP assessment to access the daily living component of the benefit. This will now require people to score four points or more in a daily living category to claim it.

Alongside this, there’ll be cuts to out-of-work benefits like the LCWRA health-related component of Universal Credit. Once again, Labour additionally want to make this harder to claim, and all as it ramps up reassessments and conditionality requirements for doing so.

Now, Canary reader Shane Brown has penned a scathing letter. And notably, he has addressed it to the minister supposedly responsible for standing up for disabled people, East Ham MP Stephen Timms – who so far has done anything but.

An open letter to Stephen Timms on PIP cuts

Dear Mr. Timms,

Following the furore over Darren Jones and Rachel Reeves’s comparison of the forthcoming disability benefit cuts to “pocket money”, it is with astonishment that I see that you have referred to being unable to cut up food, needing assistance to wash or shower, and needing supervision to use the toilet as “low level functional” problems that can be dealt with by “small interventions” on April 7 in your reply to a question by Richard Burgon MP. At the same time, you defended the decision to change the eligibility for the daily living element of DWP PIP to require four points in at least one category.

The problem with the approach to disability benefits that you, your department, the chancellor, and the prime minister are taking, is that you appear to be wilfully using provocative language, misinformation, and downright lies in order to persuade the public at large that those of us with problems that are spread over a wide range of daily tasks, are somehow not disabled enough to be worthy of a benefit.

With this in mind, I have to ask the question of why you have only come to this conclusion since you have been in the party of government. After all, on 8 June 2016, you voted against reductions in disability benefits when you were in opposition. Perhaps you would be good enough to tell us what has changed your mind?

Those ‘low level’ inconveniences: essential to daily living

But let us return to those “low level” problems, those tiny inconveniences, of not being able to wash, cut food, or go to the toilet. I am sure that I don’t have to remind you that the dozen questions on the DWP PIP form are there for the purpose of deciding whether we should get the benefit or not. Those questions, and the answers we give to them, are not the sum of the problems we have to deal with on a daily basis.

If we need help with those basic things, it is highly likely that it is because of pain, discomfort, and restricted movement. That does not start and end with dressing and washing. It is there for every moment of every day, from the time we get up in the morning until the time we go to bed at night. What’s more, you appear to ignore the costs associated with these “low level” problems.

Let us look at just one example. If we can only use a microwave to prepare meals, one would assume that means eating ready meals. Two ready meals a day is around £8-10. We know that cooking from scratch is considerably cheaper than that. So, yes, using the microwave is a “small intervention”, but it costs anyone who does that every day probably 50% more to eat than those who don’t have to.

That’s an extra £28 a week for that “small intervention” alone. But you don’t want PIP to cover that? Why? THAT is what DWP PIP is there for – to pay for the things that cost us more because we are disabled.

Benefit cuts will not make people ‘miraculously fit and able to go to work’

I might have some respect for your position if I thought that it was one that you actually believe in, but your previous voting record suggest that it isn’t. I have psoriatic arthritis. I am in pain from the moment I get up in the morning until the moment I go to bed. I suffer from fatigue, as many do who have inflammatory conditions of this kind.

Beyond that, I’m taking extra strong codeine three or four times a day that makes my brain foggy and makes me generally tired. And you want me – and others like me – to go to work. My biologic medication costs the NHS £650 every four weeks. Do you really think I would be given it if my condition wasn’t severe?

I’ve been told I shouldn’t work. But you say I should and, either way, you’re going to take my DWP PIP away from me because I’m just not disabled enough. Oh, and when you take that, you’re also going to take my LCWRA element of Universal Credit (UC) when the Work Capability Assessment is scrapped, because it’s somehow going to cause a “behavioural change” (according to Keir Starmer), and I’ll be miraculously fit and able to go to work.

What’s more, you are not even allowing those of us with mobility element of PIP to get that higher element of UC. Are you REALLY of the belief that those who can’t walk more than one metre are not disabled enough to get the health element of UC?

Labour’s DWP PIP plans are downright ‘patronising, pathetic, and puerile’

What you are suggesting is diabolical. These DWP PIP changes have no basis in reality. The disabled community knows this. The medical profession know this. And the worst of it all is that YOU know this. So does Liz Kendall, and Darren Jones, and Rachel Reeves, and Keir Starmer, and every member of your party who doesn’t have the guts to stand up for those of us that need their help right now.

What you are suggesting isn’t just diabolical, it’s insulting. It is patronising, pathetic, and puerile, and it is trivialising what we, the disabled community, have to go through every day of our lives, and through no fault of our own.

How dare you tell us that what we have are merely “multiple low-level functioning needs” that need a “small intervention”, just because your government has decided that we are collateral damage for your budgetary failures.

Your position is no better than that of Boris Johnson who thought that Covid was “nature’s way of dealing with old people”. In the future, people will look back and view what you are doing as the Labour government’s way of ‘dealing with the disabled’. The results will be the same. People will die.

I look forward to your reply.

Yours faithfully,

S L Brown.

Featured image via the Canary