Starmer’s move to cut disabiltiy benefits is indefensible and will mean disaster for thousands, argues Steph Pike

If refusing to abolish the benefit cap, the two child limit, and withdrawing the winter fuel payment from millions of pensioners wasn’t bad enough, and despite the United Nations warning that the UK government is infringing human rights by failing to tackle the ongoing poverty crisis, Starmer’s government has just announced a staggering £6 billion cut to welfare benefits.

This level of cuts would be brutal at any time. Coming after more than a decade of austerity, where the real-term value of benefits has already fallen by 7.5%, with 700,000 more children are living in poverty compared to ten years ago and around 3 million people a year are relying on foodbanks to make ends meet, they are barbaric.

But possibly the most shocking thing about the proposed cuts is that they are targeted at the poorest and most vulnerable people in society; the sick and disabled.

The details of the cuts have not yet been announced but it is expected that the government will make it harder to qualify for Personal Independence Payment (a benefit that is there to help people with the additional costs of their disability), freeze PIP payments next year so they don’t rise in line with inflation  and cut the basic rate of Universal Credit for people who are too ill to work, a move which will be tantamount to starving disabled people into looking for work that they are not well enough to do. It will also put people who are sick and disabled at much more risk of being sanctioned.

In a cynical attempt to justify the indefensible, Starmer and Liz Kendall (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) have gone into full-on victim blaming mode with a media blitz claiming  that it is improbable that there can be so many people on sickness benefits (the insinuation being that benefit claimants are work-shy and manipulating the system), that the welfare bill is bankrupting the country, that it is too easy to claim sickness and disability benefits and that work is the route out of poverty. And like a classic perpetrator of violence, Kendall tries to turn herself into the victim, wringing her hands and telling us how the difficult decisions she is making are keeping her awake at night. She should try being kept awake every night, as thousands of disabled people are, worrying about where her next meal is coming from, how to heat her home, and whether her meagre benefits will be cut or stopped by a hostile benefits system.

As a welfare benefits adviser representing people at benefits appeal tribunals, I know that Starmer’s narrative about welfare benefits is a deliberate distortion of reality. Benefits have been cut so much over the last decade that people no longer have enough money for their basic needs. This is why the use of food banks has exploded. It is not easy to qualify for sickness or disability benefits, with people having to pass tough and often humiliating health assessments (a GPs sick note does not qualify you for sickness benefits). Recent government statistics show that successful Personal Independence Payment claims fell from 70% in 2016 to 55% in 2024 and that there has been a 20% increase in benefit appeals in the last 12 months. The benefits system is a hostile environment for all benefits claimants, but especially for people who are sick or disabled. Starmer’s cuts and the rhetoric that surrounds them will only create more poverty and an increasingly hostile environment for the most vulnerable people in society.

Starmer’s assertion that work is the route out of poverty is a deliberate lie to cover up the fact that these brutal cuts are going to bring only further hardship and misery to hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in society. It is a lie that work automatically lifts people out of poverty – 70% of children living in poverty have one or more parents in work. 

It is an economy based on low pay and insecure work that keeps people trapped on benefits, not the benefits system itself.  It is not worklessness that causes poverty – it is the choices made by politicians that causes poverty, but rather it is poverty that causes worklessness. 

In an attempt to justify the cuts, the government has deliberately exaggerated the statistics, claiming that the number of people on sickness benefits has increased by 340%. In fact, the figure is actually closer to 40%. That there are more people on sickness benefits than a decade ago is true. The reason for this is that over a decade of cuts has damaged people’s health. The way to get people back into work is not to cut benefits and demonise people who are ill and out of work, but to create the conditions where people’s health improves and where people can thrive; increasing the value of benefits and lifting people out of poverty, creating secure well-paid jobs, restoring the NHS and public services and providing good quality, affordable housing. But that would require investment. All Starmer is interested in is saving money to fund a huge increase in arms spending, despite the fact that the real threat to UK citizens is austerity which over the last decade has killed up to 400,000 people. 

The proposed welfare cuts have been widely condemned by the TUC, anti-poverty organisations and groups representing disabled people. Even Labour MPs including those in the cabinet are said to be very uneasy and there are now rumours that the government will do a U-turn on cutting Personal Independence Payment. However, it still plans to bring in £6 billion of cuts to welfare benefits. 

It is clear Starmers’s government, like the Tories before them, are ruling not in the interests of ordinary people but in the interests of bankers and big business. 

Wherever the cuts fall, we must oppose them. We must build a mass, united anti-austerity movement to campaign against Starmer’s brutal cuts. We must provide an alternative to the politics of division and hate from Reform and the far-right, who are trying to capitalise on the abject failure of Starmer’s government to materially improve the lives of ordinary people. We must build for and join the People’s Assembly national demonstration on 7th June.