Demonised,impoverished and now forced into isolation: the fate of disabled people under austerity

Disability Living Allowance (DLA) was introduced in the United Kingdom explicitly to help offset the extra costs of disability. The scrapping of DLA and its replacement with the so-called Personal Independence Payment is causing massive concern across the United Kingdom, not least because it comes in the wake of a large number of other cuts, all of which impact disproportionately on disabled people. These changes reflect the retraction of ‘welfare’ across many European countries. As the government has refused to perform a cumulative impact assessment to date, it has been left to grassroots organisations such as DPAC to assess the damage and put the bigger picture together. An article in the New Statesman reports research showing that by 2018 disabled people are set to lose an astonishing £28.3 billion worth of financial support. These changes are going to affect up to 3.7 million disabled people in total.