EHRC report finds what disabled people already know the government is failing us
If you’re a disabled person in the UK, you’ll probably already know how little the government does for us. Hard to qualify for benefits, lack of funding makes living on the whole inaccessible and that ever-present sneer that we’re all fakers and benefit fraudsters.
Now, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, agreed with us (to an extent). A new report from the EHRC evaluates the progress made by the UK government on the recommendations set out in the 2016 UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This original report alleged that the government violated disabled people’s rights.
You’re probably as shocked as me to find out the government has made little or no progress on most of the 11 recommendations that they were given seven years ago. Back in 2016 life was great for disabled people but I don’t think we were aware how much worse it could get. But flash forward to now and you have a community decimated by a pandemic with millions more joining us. Though the pandemic wasn’t the government’s fault, the lack of preparedness and action to protect the most vulnerable hugely put the disproportionately disabled death toll -6 in 10- at their door.
The report explains “There continues to be a disproportionate number of disabled people living on a low income or in poverty, disabled people experience long waiting periods for benefits eligibility decisions and are more likely to use resources such as food banks.” In my opinion, how tough it is for disabled people to qualify for benefits and the gruelling assessment periods then the stressfully long waiting periods explain why there is a “disproportionate” amount of disabled people living in poverty.
Instead of supporting disabled and low-income people, we have a welfare system that tries its best to prove how much we don’t need support. The interesting part of the report for me was the section on tackling discrimination from the public and media. The original recommendation said the government must “take appropriate measures to combat any negative and discriminatory stereotypes or prejudice against persons with disabilities in public and the media, including the assertion that dependency on benefits is in itself a disincentive to seeking employment”. Well I think we all know how that worked out don’t we?
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This year especially we’ve seen a resurgence in columnists writing about whether certain disabilities are real and tv and radio talk shows asking if those who don’t work should have their benefits scrapped, This has been buffetted by the government “crackdown on benefit fraud” which in my opinion aims to stir up public hatred even more. Meanwhile, the press authority IPSO is standing firmly in the belief that we don’t need guidelines on disability for the media, despite myself and hundreds of others complaining in droves.
The report agrees more needs to be done to tackle this and links it to the rise in disability hate crime, after all it all trickles down. In other areas, the commission saw no progress in cumulative impact assessment, access to justice and only limited progress in considering disabled people at risk in the implementation of policies and programmes. After all, why would you actually think of us when creating policies about and for us?
The report concluded that there had been “gaps in meaningful engagement between governments and disabled people across many parts of the UK.” You only have to look at the way the government have repeatedly appealed that the National Disability Strategy included disabled people whilst going up against disabled organisations to get the strategy pushed through to see this.
Today’s report only solidified what disabled people have been trying to say for a long time now, this government is not doing enough to protect us and when it fails to protect its most vulnerable citizens, we die. But I’ve often thought the Tories’ lives would be much easier if us pesky disabled people didn’t exist.
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