I haven't read it, but from looking at the reviews, I'm not surprised that it's about things in the UK since Britain seems to have an unusual fetish for pointing fingers at those who rely on assistance.
Yes, there will be some abusers (as there are anywhere and in any system where resources are given away), but we should not, for the sake of trying to eliminate abuse/fraud perpetuated by a few, make life difficult for the vast majority of those who genuinely require supports.
(P1)
Scapegoating.
For example, interestingly and in relation to your comment of fraudulence, '... prior to its demolition DLA was one of the most effectively targeted benefits with an estimated fraud rate of just 0.5 per cent' ➀ (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 19).
Nevertheless — before any internal studies were conducted, and before it was succeeded by PIP or universal credit — ministers propagated that a fifth (500,000) of all claimants would have this income withdrawn ➀ (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 20). On account of this, and despite individuals' conditions remaining the same or getting worse, mass reassessments and DLA reform engendered '... the widespread removal of disability support: official government figures show that by December 2017 nearly half of disabled people put through these reassessments ended up having their support either cut or stopped entirely' ➀ (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 19)
To understand this as part of a broader sociological phenomenon, studies referenced within the work found that a
condition of "
new destitution" was developing among the disabled—and that an "
epidemic of disability poverty" (historically and contemporaneously) exists within Britain.
For example:
All below quotes are cited from the aforementioned work, with the inclusion of contemporary supplementary statistics and findings from exterior sources (with references):
○ The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that in
2018 '...
4 million disabled adults are now living
below the breadline [which] accounts for
over a third of all adults in poverty in the country.'
○ Scope, a disability charity, discovered that in
2017 '...
one in five [...] are currently in
food poverty [...] and that
one in six' existed within a condition of
heating poverty.
Comparatively, in
2020 '... disabled households
allocate almost as twice as much of their expenditure in electricity, gas and fuels [...] and are
more than twice as likely to have a cold house and
three times as likely to
not have been
able to afford food' ➁ (Scope, 2022).
Furthermore, fuel poverty charity National Energy Action (NEA) warn that '... if average energy bills soar to £3,000 per annum as predicted
2.1 million households across the UK where one or more members are disabled, will be pushed into
fuel poverty' ➁ (Scope, 2022). Adjacent to this, in 2022, Scope found that '...
two-thirds of disabled adults have seen their
energy bills rise in the last three months [moreover] disabled adults have seen the
biggest increase in household costs for their
energy bills (67 per cent have seen an increase), food and non-alcoholic drinks (54 per cent have seen an increase) and petrol costs (48 per cent have seen an increase)' ➂ (Scope, 2022)
To further contextualise this, Ryan draws upon the concept of the "
disability poverty premium", which emphasises that '... while being
more likely to be on a low income, on a day-to-day basis, disabled people are faced with
extortionate outgoings. Research by Scope in
2018 found that life costs on
average £570 more a month in Britain if you’re disabled [...] for
one in five, it’s
over £1,000 extra per month. In a climate in which disabled people’s income has been gutted, it means that the
most basic human needs, like being warm and dry, are
widely becoming too expensive to meet.'
Additionally, '...
disabled households spend more than twice as much on energy each year than the average family [...] recently '... debt has ballooned in the UK with
8.3 million families in 2017 living with
problem debt, fuelled by anything from low wages, the increase in the gig economy’s erratic incomes, to council tax charges [...] hit those with disabilities and illness harder still:
disabled people are twice as likely than non-disabled people to have
unsecured debt totalling
more than half of their household income, according to a Scope survey in
2013.
Here are some (though not all) factors which account for said phenomenon:
➞ '...
half of disabled people use credit cards or loans to pay for everyday items like food and clothes' (Swinford, 2013) and [...]
over half of households referred for
emergency food parcels in Britain include a disabled person [...]
75 per cent are experiencing ill health.'
➞ '... The Living Wage Foundation (LWF) calculated that the figure needed to cover the
true cost of living was
£9.00 per hour (£10.55 in London) in
2018–19 [...] however (a) classification of ESA (is) the
equivalent of £2.55 an hour [...] a sum so meagre that researchers at the Disability Benefits Consortium in 2015 found it was leaving a
third of recipients struggling to afford to eat.'
➞ '... chronicling the proportion of disabled people who are classed as living in what is termed ‘
severe material deprivation’ the New Policy Institute (NPI) in
2016 discovered that '[...]
one in five of
working-age disabled people now
meet this criterion [...]
three times as many as non-disabled people [...] to be ‘merely’ poor would be an improvement.' Heriot-Watt University in
2018 further established that '...
1.5 million people in Britain are so far below the poverty line that they are officially destitute [...] their weekly income is not enough to buy even basic essentials nor can they meet their core material needs ‘for basic physiological functioning.' Proportionally,
650,000 of said "
designated destitute" are classified as
disabled. (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 15)
➞ Ryan expounds that the 2010 coalition initiated '...
£28 billion worth of cuts to disabled people’s
income, [alongside] the introduction of the bedroom tax, cuts to council tax support [...] and the tightening of benefit sanction rules [...] by
2017–18,
3.7 million disabled people would experience a
reduction in income. Hundreds of thousands of them would be subject to up to six cuts simultaneously* [...] by 2018, disabled people would on
average be
losing over £4,400 per person per annum. For
severely disabled people, that goes up to almost
£9,000 [and for tens of thousands]
between £15,000 and £18,000 in income through a
combination of cuts. (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 17)
[...] The EHRC calculate that '... by 2022, the combined tax, social security and public spending policies carried out since 2010 will put a particular burden on disabled people. Families with a disabled adult as well as a disabled child will shoulder
annual cash losses of just over
£6,500 as a result of tax and benefit changes (or about
14 per cent of their net income) [...] people with the most serious disabilities actually stand to lose the most.' (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 15)
➞ '... almost
six in ten families that include a disabled person are currently
living without even basic necessities, such as food or shelter. That’s
twice as many as the total population [of which are] likely
underestimates' (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 13)
➞ Another factor is that of the '...
epidemic levels of unemployment [...]
under half of disabled people aged sixteen to sixty-four are in work, compared to over 80 per cent of non-disabled people, as of
2017 (
fewer than
five out of ten disabled people have a job compared with eight in ten non-disabled people) [...] by disability and it gets worse: just
16 per cent of people with
autism are in full-time paid work, while
less than 6 per cent of learning-disabled people are in full-time employment.' (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 35)
'... fundamental to
perpetuating a disabled underclass.' (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 36) this mass 'scale of unemployment' is exacerbated and perpetuated by employers. Scope research in
2017 deliberated that '... disabled people have to
apply for
60 per cent more jobs than non-disabled people before being hired [...] in
2019, Leonard Cheshire found that nearly a
quarter of employers in Britain admit they’d be
less likely to hire a disabled person.' (Ryan. F, 2019. p. 36)
