DISEÑO DE LA CAPACITACIÓN

Young and disabled people under the coalition government

One could argue that today more than ever research needs to consider the material oppression in young disabled people’s lives. I outline here just a few examples of how welfare reforms are hitting young and disabled people:

1. It has been calculated that “disabled people and their carers have seen their

income collectively cut by £500m in the past two years” (Butler, 2012b). A figure that is only going to increase as welfare cuts deepen.

2. “Six per cent of doctors have experienced a patient who has attempted - or committed - suicide as a result of “undergoing, or fear of undergoing” the Government's fitness to work test” (Clark, 2012).

3. At the beginning of the 2011-2012 financial year children’s services faced cuts of £819 million and disability services £4.4 billion. With school’s funding ring- fenced, effects of children’s service cuts were arguably felt most greatly by young people (Butler, 2011).

4. Since the change of government, young people have faced the end of Educational Maintenance Allowance, rising tuition fees in higher education, mass

unemployment and the threat of loss of housing benefit for under 25s.

5. The shift from Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) means “almost a third of working age disabled people will no longer qualify for the enhanced mobility component of DLA that currently enables them to lease a car under the Motability charity scheme” (Butler, 2012a).

56 For all young people, but especially disabled youth, those taunting signifiers of

adulthood independence and financial self-sufficiency are ever more illusionary under The Coalition.

Massive figures grab headlines, sound, and are frightening, but when numbers are so large what they mean is hard to fathom. What is clear is that it is the poorest suffering most. At the time of the budget 2012, a report from The Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that those hardest hit by The Coalition’s austerity programme were families with children; those least well off, losing out most of all (Elliott, 2012). Families with disabled children, it has been consistently shown, are proportionally more likely to live in poverty than those without (Every Disabled Child Matters, 2007, 2011a; Sharma, 2002). Recent research highlighted that one in seven working families with disabled children and one in four without work are missing meals. One in six working and one in three non-working families are left unable to heat their homes (Every Disabled Child Matters, 2012). Cuts such as these, along with a 50% cut in disabled children’s benefits and less available finance leaving short breaks vulnerable to reductions, means disabled children, young people and their families are being hit hard (Every Disabled Child Matters, 2011a).

As the stories become more personal, the situation becomes easier to comprehend. It was announced in April 2011 that housing benefit for working aged people would be linked to property size. BBC News (2011) told the story of wheelchair-user Sandra Ruddicks. Since Sandra’s family have now grown-up and moved out, she lives alone in the

specially adapted two-bed social housing property which she brought her children up in. Under the reform Sandra, along with an estimated 108,000 other disabled people could be forced to leave their homes, as they are considered to be taking up unnecessary space. At the end of the broadcast, Lord Freud2, Minister for Welfare Reform, legitimised the move, arguing the importance of people living in houses that are the “right size for them”, in order for it to be fair on the “ordinary person who does not depend on

benefits”. Nobody asked Lord Freud how many bedrooms his house has, or suggested he

2

As Lord Freud will become a bigger player in this chapter, it seems only fair to fill you in with more details. Former advisor to the Labour Party, Freud drew up plans to revise the welfare system, publishing the 2008 Welfare to Work Green Paper which called for measures to get more disabled people and lone parents into work. Although many Labour backbenchers opposed Freud’s proposals, it was music to the ears of Tory ministers. In February 2009 Freud controversially joined the Conservative Party as Shadow Minister for Welfare and was given life peerage in the House of Lords. As Minister for Welfare, Freud is the architect of The Welfare Reform Act 2012, the implications of which are critiqued in this chapter. Conversely, he is the grandson of Sigmund Freud.

57 should downsize, to make it fair for the “ordinary person”. A friend of mine accessing DLA made the effects of coalition policies all too clear when he said, “I feel like they’ll take away my money if there’s any chance I’m having any fun, or even leaving my flat for that matter”.

Above are just a few examples of how the cuts may affect poor people, young people and disabled people. There are, of course, many more intersections of identities to consider. Women more likely to be employed in low-paying public sector jobs more greatly affected than men (Veale, 2011). The end of specialised services aimed at LGBT and BME communities (Bawden et al., 2011). The slashing of funding to law firms offering specialist advice to asylum seekers (BBC News, 2010). All exemplify the

disproportionate and potentially devastating impacts. Those facing unemployment/the loss of vital service provision are further subject to an entourage demonising rhetoric. The claim: that any increased hardship is a result of individual laziness and failure (Garthwaite, 2011; Hughes, 2001). Disabled people have shown their anger towards public service cuts by demonstrating under the slogan The Hardest Hit. In concurrence with the choice of slogan, my analysis above hints that disabled people will be one of the hardest hit groups. Having briefly outlined the very real, material oppression in the lives of those affected by the cuts I turn to consider the resultant media positioning of disabled people (young and old). An (unreal) discursive positioning that I will show has very real consequences. I will feed this analysis back into my work around youth in the final section of this chapter.