Incapacitated
Disability benefits have been broken
Frances Ryan
OPINIONS
If you need an insight into the moral fibre of a country, you need look no further than how it treats its disabled citizens.
The all-party work and pensions select committee has just released a scathing report into Britain’s disability benefit system.
It detailed an assessment process all too familiar to the hundreds of thousands of disabled and chronically ill people pushed through it in recent years—one riddled with dire misuse of medical evidence and incompetent assessors.
This came only a few days after the committee released a preview report detailing the experiences of disabled people themselves (an unprecedented number of submissions led MPs to release a separate report just to fit them in). A person with Down’s syndrome was asked when they “caught it.” A woman reporting frequent suicidal thoughts was asked why she had not yet killed herself. It’s hard to imagine how any state could run a system such as this—and yet it is happening in Britain in 2018.