With Reeves’s disability cuts in the spring statement, Labour really has become the ‘nasty party’

Forget the economics: The chancellor’s cuts to welfare risk junking this government’s reputation – and legacy – for years to come, warns James Moore

So now we know: it is disabled Britons who will carry the burden of ensuring that Rachel Reeves can remain within her self-declared fiscal rules while the economy stumbles. Some £4.8bn of cuts to welfare benefits are planned.

First off, there’s Universal Credit, which provides a top-up payment for those with “limited capability for work and work-related activity” (LCWRA). The government is set to halve this health-based payment, after which it will be frozen for new claimants. People already have to have their ability to work assessed before they can claim.

Those assessments are neither pleasant nor easy: you have to be really quite disabled to get past first base. The hated Work Capability Assessment (WCA) is slated to be scrapped. Instead, only those who qualify for the daily living component of the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) will be eligible for the top-up.

To qualify, claimants must score points against a list of activities (difficulties with cooking, washing, etc). They must secure at least eight points across a range of different activities. Under the planned new rules, however, claimants will still need to hit that score but also be required to score four points in at least one activity. This one is a quietly ticking timebomb that could easily explode in the government’s face.

PIP, a benefit designed to help disabled people with the ruinous extra costs they face, has been the subject of a veritable tsunami of misreporting and ill-informed commentary. Reeves took another nasty sideswipe at something that many people rely on by claiming that “a thousand people a day” were qualifying for it. PIP has not previously been linked to work in any way.

On the flip side, plans were announced for a severe disability premium for people with very serious lifelong conditions who receive LCWRA. There, the repeated demeaning, expensive and pointless reassessments would be annulled. But there is little detail on how this might work in practice.

Experts have estimated that around a million people in England and Wales will lose their disability benefits (Alamy/PA)

The contribution-based Employment Support Allowance (ESA) is to be merged with Jobseeker’s Allowance into a new benefit called Unemployment Insurance, which will only last for a certain amount of time and be paid at a single rate.

A small concession is that Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for under-16s will, in future, cover those aged up to 18 – but this is like being given a packet of Haribo in exchange for an artificial leg.

While some of these changes are being consulted on, the changes to PIP will require legislation. This is something that could hit the government with the biggest rebellion it will face. Several MPs have already voiced their opposition, arguing that they did not expect to be dumping on disabled people while in government. More will likely follow once their constituency postbags start filling up.

Here’s where Labour – a party that is constantly banging on about inclusion and fairness – is showing an ignorance of the subject that is almost painful. The results of what it is doing are set to kick off a storm.

When Iain Duncan Smith replaced the old Disability Living Allowance (for adults) with PIP in 2013, the result was a steady stream of horror stories featuring often quite seriously disabled people who fell foul to the new points-based assessments and private sector assessors. One I particularly remember was a young man with cystic fibrosis, a debilitating condition that attacks the lungs. On a good day, he could walk fairly well, but on a bad day could barely get out of bed. Some conditions are like that. Disability is rarely simple. People frequently have good, bad and terrible days in which they can barely move.

The decision to hand the responsibility for assessing claims to sometimes poorly-trained contractors, with their employers having an obvious motivation to deliver results in alignment with the money-saving aims of their paymasters, created a storm.

The repeated media furores led to no end of embarrassment to the coalition government. The Conservatives may now hand the tag of “the nasty party” over to Labour. Just imagine the impact of a fresh series of stories like that. Tory MP Danny Kruger got the ball rolling last week when he asked Keir Starmer why he was “doing things to disabled people, and not with them” as regards PIP.

It’s a good point, and Kruger could make hay with it if he were so minded. Given his fierce and principled opposition to the appalling assisted dying bill, that wouldn’t surprise me.