The UK’s War Against Disabled People Part 1: ‘Scroungers’
How the Tories and New Labour turned the welfare state against society’s most vulnerable
As the UK’s Conservative government, currently on its fifth Prime Minister of its 12-year tenure, prepares for Austerity 2.0, disability charities are sounding the alarm bells.
The first round of Austerity, a supposed answer to the global economic crash of 2008, was a disaster. Not that you’ll hear the Conservatives admit that in any real way. As is often the case with failed economic policies, it was women, minorities, and those on the margins of society that lost out most.
Some of the worst hit were those with disability — people with mental health issues, chronic illness, and either a physical or learning disability (disability is a larger category than just those who use a wheelchair, as is often the stereotype conjured by the term).
One of the worst aspects of the last round of Tory Austerity was so-called ‘welfare reform’ — shorthand for cutting benefits and limiting claims, ostensibly to save money in government budgets.
The Conservatives are rightly criticized for the impact of their attacks on the welfare state. No wonder, given there were around 330,000 excess deaths between 2012 and 2019 as a result of Austerity cuts. Many of those excess deaths were disabled and elderly people — the most vulnerable.
However, many might be surprised to learn that the systematic dismantling of the welfare state started long before the current Conservative administration.
In this series, I’ll be covering the UK’s decades-long war on disabled people waged by both the Conservative and New Labour governments. Starting with the introduction of disability unemployment benefits in the 1970s, I’ll be charting how we ended up with the harmful and dehumanizing welfare system the UK find’s itself with today.
Along the way I’ll highlight the key changes in both policy and rhetoric towards disabled benefit claimants, as well as the insidious involvement of both the private healthcare industry and US insurance giants, leading to the commodification of suffering inherent in the modern British welfare state.
Where it all began
Invalidity Benefit was first established by Edward Heath’s Conservative government in the 1970s, aimed at providing financial support for those forced to leave a trade or occupation due to disability or illness. It was the first ‘income replacement benefit for long-term illness in the UK, expanding the limited support provided by the Statutory Sick Pay available to workers experiencing short-term illness.
From the very start, the Invalidity Benefit was tied to work — generally, you had to have been working previously to claim it (for those who had never been able to work due to disability, ‘additional cost’ benefits such as Attendance Allowance were available to help pay for care).
By 1983 the requirement for a doctor’s note — the now infamous ‘sick note’ still in use today — was introduced as the first barrier to claiming IB. The introduction of the benefit nonetheless marked an improvement in income for those too sick or disabled to work.
“The 1970s and 1980s were in general periods of expansion and improvement in the coverage of earnings-replacement benefits.”
- Tania Burchardt (1999) — The Evolution of Disability Benefits in the UK: Re-weighting the basket
Major shift
A huge change in both access to IB and the rhetoric around those claiming the benefit came in the early 1990s under John Major’s Conservative government, in response to the idea that the number of benefit claimants had apparently risen greatly.
Peter Lilley, Secretary of Social Security under John Major, first introduced the rhetoric of “scroungers” with reference to the increased number of people claiming Invalidity Benefit in a speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1992. Implying that many were claiming the benefit fraudulently or ‘faking it, Lilley further stated his intention to clamp down on what he termed the “something for nothing society” and the cost of welfare to the taxpayer.
Prime Minister John Major himself went on to state in parliament that:
“We have a duty to consider whether all that taxpayers’ money is being wisely spent.. … Frankly, it beggars belief that so many more people have suddenly become invalids, especially at a time when the health of the population has improved. I make no apologies for looking at this area of expenditure.”
- John Major in a 1993 Parliamentary speech
This rhetoric marks the start of an ideological war on disability welfare claimants and the welfare state; much of the rhetoric introduced in this initial attack is still used to justify welfare reforms today, a testament to the lasting impact which the narrative espoused by the Major government has had on political and social attitudes to welfare.
Ideology vs reality
Despite Lilley’s assertions, the government’s own research highlighted that the rise in people claiming Incapacity Benefit was due to several factors, none of which pointed to any change in the threshold for being judged ‘fit for work’ over the years.
Importantly, rather than an increase in those making new claims, it was the fact that existing claimants were staying on the benefit — something which would be expected with a benefit for long-term sickness and disability — which was primarily leading to an overall growth in claimants:
“The explanation for the increasing cost of IVB lies in the economy as a whole, and in the hiring and firing practices of employers, rather than in a change in the behaviour of individual claimants or their doctors.”
- 1994 Parliamentary Research Report on the Social Security (Incapacity for Work) Bill
Even though it was clear that the rise in the number of people on Incapacity Benefits was down to wider socio-structural issues and the nature of the long-term disability, the government nonetheless chose to portray the problem as an individual one. This marks the beginning of neoliberal ideology’s influence on British welfare policy.
Thus, the burden of social issues faced by disabled people, such as ableism limiting access to employment, was ignored by the government in favor of locating the problem with the behavior of disabled individuals themselves. The demonizing rhetoric of ‘scroungers’ and ‘something for nothing served as the public justification for such policies, even if it had no real basis in reality.
On point
Ultimately this ideological, individualist approach and a desire to reduce government benefit expenditure led to the replacement of Invalidity Benefit with Incapacity Benefit through the 1994 Social Security Act.
From the very start, it was clear that the policy around benefits for those too ill or disabled to work had shifted away from providing a social safety net in the form of income replacement based on the need, to a focus on reducing the number of claimants and thus benefit expenditure.
This intent was laid bare when a government draft letter on welfare reform was accidentally faxed to the press association. In it Peter Lilley stated that he wanted to simultaneously make benefits less generous and reduce claims by 10 to 20%, reducing the number of people on the benefit by around 30,000 to 60,000.
To achieve this, Incapacity Benefit would introduce a new barrier to claiming benefits: the points-based system of disability assessments we still see in operation today — a move which was explicitly designed to restrict access to benefits by removing sole responsibility from a claimant’s GP and making eligibility more strict.
The new points-based assessment system was criticized from the start for being too narrow and subjective (though that was essentially a feature aimed at limiting claims, rather than a bug) and for its assumption that functional ability in the home would transfer to the workplace.
Introducing an assessment as a test of eligibility rather than eligibility being decided by an individual’s GP, introduced a system which essentially sought to redefine the sick and disabled into the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’ — a cynical return to a Victorian attitude to illness and work.
Indicating their awareness of the potential for harm in this approach, the government had itself rejected a points-based system of assessment for another disability benefit (Disability Living Allowance, intended to provide for the additional cost of support needs for those with a disability) on the grounds that assessments were humiliating and intrusive for claimants.
Further concerns were raised over ministerial approval for the outsourcing of health assessments, known as Personal Capability Assessments, to private firms. In effect, privatizing the assessments allowed the government to outsource risk and harm reduction, thus distancing itself from responsibility for any negative outcomes or criticisms arising from the nature of the assessments (of which there would be many).
By outsourcing benefit assessments to the private sector, the problematic and contentious field of ‘disability assessment medicine’ was born.
Laying the groundwork
All of this marks the start of what would amount to monumental changes to the welfare state in the UK, laying the ideological and rhetorical groundwork for what was to come under New Labour. I’ll be covering this period of the UK’s war on disabled people in part 2 of this series.
This series has largely been made possible by the Deaths by Welfare Project and the timeline put together by some amazing folks over at Healing Justice London, Litany for Survival, and Disability News Service, which I have used as a jumping-off point for much of my research into this issue. A huge thank you to them for all their hard work.