Joseph Roundtree Foundation, From disability to destitution, 2022, Clark & Matejic

Joseph Roundtree Foundation, "From disability to destitution", 2022, Tom Clark and Peter Matejic

"The official story on poverty among disabled people is bad enough. But new JRF analysis reveals that when it comes to the real essentials of life, like heating and food, the problem is far worse than acknowledged in Whitehall.

Illness is not an indulgence for which people should have to pay, the costs of which should be shared by the community. That is the logic that has supported the NHS since its inception, and – you might think – a close corollary would be that the community should also collectively ensure that neither the costs nor the obstacles to earning a wage that disabilities impose should force anyone into penury. Indeed, from the early 1970s, a dedicated system of benefits evolved with precisely this aim in mind.

More recently, however, amid such retrenchments as the hacking back of the old Disability Living Allowance into the more stringent Personal Independence Payment, policy has again come to approach long-term health conditions almost as ‘an indulgence’. The inevitable result is evident in, as JRF reported in UK Poverty 2022, “a gap of around 12 percentage points in poverty rates between disabled and non-disabled people” in our last pre-pandemic analysis, covering financial year 2019/20.

Full article = https://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/disability-destitution