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6 hours ago
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Cutting benefits for disabled people will push more people into poverty and make it harder for them to get into work, the chief executive of Citizens Advice (CAB) has warned.
In a rare intervention, Clare Moriarty criticised the Labour government’s proposals as a “short-term action which has very serious long-term consequences” that risk leaving an intergenerational effect.
“Changing eligibility criteria and reassessing people, reducing the amount of money they get is a quick fix to the problem,” Moriarty said. “The real risk is, as the short-term changes happen, lots of people are pushed into poverty with all the negative consequences of being in poverty, it doesn’t help them get into work.
“By the time the employment support has caught up, they will be so far from being able to work as they will have worse health conditions which mean they still can’t work.”
Moriarty, a former top civil servant, stressed that once people lost benefits, they would fall into debt and their personal circumstances would make it harder for them to get a job.
“We know that poverty is highly associated with poor mental health and poor physical health. If people lose benefits, then that is very, very likely to result in mental health issues, but also physical health issues because if you’re in poor accommodation, if you’re skipping meals, that has a negative impact on your health.
“We know that people who live in areas of deprivation have two health conditions on average 10 years earlier than people in the least deprived areas. So you’re just creating the conditions where people are going to have all the health conditions that mean they can’t work, whether or not the DWP thinks they can.”
The Department for Work and Pensions said it had “bolstered” employment support by deploying 1,000 work coaches to specifically help disabled and sick people back into work.
However, Moriarty said “it’s not on the scale that will be needed to deal with the people who are going to need it”, once the benefit cuts happen.
“The 1,000 work coaches will help 85,000 people; far more people than that will be affected by these changes,” she added.
She said it was not that employment support would not help people. “There’s a problem with the sequencing,” she said. “It’s a long and hard road to put really good employment support in place. People need broader and holistic support that helps them, for example, with their housing problems, not just to focus narrowly on the sorts of jobs they might apply for. This takes time and investment.”
The charity boss expressed her shock at learning Labour was keen to push the proposals.
“If you look at the commitments the government came in with – raising living standards for everyone – if you’re cutting benefits without a clear path to how people can receive income through other means, that’s not going to be raising their living standards or tackling poverty.”
She urged ministers to take a step back and look at the root causes of the rise in health conditions that are causing people to be on those benefits in the first place.
“We’ve been in a kind of austerity and poverty scenario for a long time now that is having a negative impact on people’s health.”
Moriarty cited the importance of mental health services for young people as a “big-picture piece” of prevention that could reduce the overall bill. She also said everyone needed access to a holistic employment service, otherwise people who were not in good health with dependents risked causing harm to their children as they would grow up in families experiencing poverty.
Prof Sir Michael Marmot, one of the country’s leading public health experts and author of the seminal 2010 Marmot review into health inequality, said he hoped the benefit cuts formed part of a wider health strategy and were not just a cost-cutting exercise.
“And it would mean, right at the beginning, you would not institute cuts to benefits unless you were clear that it was part of a general strategy to improve equity of health and wellbeing,” he said. “I hope that’s what we’ll hear [next week].”
He raised concerns about the increase of low-paid, insecure work and said that, for many people, “work is not the way out of poverty”. “To me the challenge is not ‘can we cut the benefit bill?’ but ‘how do we take the societal actions that will help people come off benefits and into work?” he said.
It followed a study from CAB which found more than 7.5 million people said they would have to skip meals if bills rose by just £20.
Some groups are particularly exposed – with half of single parents and half of disabled people saying a £20 bill increase would push them into crisis.
