Disability is an expensive business – but those who can afford it should not receive the same benefits as those who can’t
I’ve felt mildly queasy about non-means-tested benefits ever since I went in to withdraw 20 weeks of £15.75s, my little nest egg, and the lady in the building society quipped: “Child benefit comes in handy, doesn’t it?”
Guilt sent me scuttling away. In the early 2000s child benefit still was, as it always had been, a lifeline for millions of families for food and school shoes. Ours was destined for a skiing holiday.
And here was a textbook example of how one century’s solution to national need had become the next century’s middle-class perk. Beveridge’s five shillings a week for every child in 1946 survived as a universal benefit until 2013, when George Osborne withdrew it from higher-rate taxpayers.
Yummy mummies joked about their lost wine allowance, much as today's well-off pensioners gripe about the loss of their spring holiday down payment, the winter fuel allowance.
Universal benefit, regarded as pocket money by the affluent, has become a slightly obscene anachronism. Labour is wobbling over the winter fuel payment, but welfare reform is moral and essential. So much of the protest by campaigners and MPs is performative. Privately, everyone knows that current spending is unsustainable; that there has been extensive mission creep; that money has to be refocused where it is most effective, turning around young lives.
Today’s well-off pensioners gripe about the loss of their holiday down payment, the winter fuel allowance
Hottest to handle, of course, are disability benefits.
Like many people, I expected to cruise through life under my own steam until I reached my pension – one universal benefit which I was sure wouldn’t make me feel guilty. But in my 50s, derailed, I found myself watching a dedicated hospital social worker racing with cool certainty through reams of forms for me. She reassured me the DWP didn’t quibble about broken spines.
Which is how, rather startled, I ended up with a life award for the highest rate disability living allowance (DLA), a non-means-tested, non-taxable, non-contributory benefit. Its origins, in benevolence to those incapacitated by sickness, war or industrial injury, were deeply honourable. Over the years its scope has expanded to learning disabilities and visual impairments and more latterly, rebadged as Personal Independence Payments (PIP), to mental health disabilities.
My highest rate award is, from any perspective, generous: about £750 a month (£300 you don’t see; it goes on the Motability car loan). That’s a shed-load of money. As it should be, because severe disability is extraordinarily expensive. For many without alternative income, that sum won’t touch the sides.
Severely disabled people often have no choice but to pay others to wash, dress, feed, move and drive them. Their life is spent in supplication. Suitable housing is scarce, they use more electricity, their cars are specialist.
But the moral question is this: if people are able to return to a good job, as I was, or receive huge compensation awards, should they receive full benefits? I’m not talking about the majority, unable to work, trapped in real hardship. But the better-off minority? Over 15 years my allowance has gone on improved wheelchairs, 4WD on my van, improved accommodation. Buying some precious freedom. And it’s always made me feel… uneasily privileged.
There is a strong argument that the era of universal benefit, of non-means-testing, must end. Soaring demand decrees it. Worsening mental health among young people has seen the number of PIP awards double between July 2021 and July 2022 (IFS figures). Currently 2.8 million PIP claimants receive £15b a year. Awards for Attendance Allowance, needs-based help for the old (higher rate about £480 a month), have also steadily increased to 1.8 million.
Rationally, morally, the age of all such non-means-tested welfare has passed. Ending it is the only way to protect the most vulnerable.
Photograph by Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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