Phil Wayland, 41, who lives with his elderly mother in Rochford, Essex, is one of four claimants taking the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to court this week to challenge the government's decision not to extend the £20-a-week uplift to people on legacy benefits such as Employment Support Allowance and Jobseeker's Allowance during the Covid-19 pandemic.
If successful, the claimants and nearly two million people in the UK could receive up to £1,500 in backdated payments.
Here, Phil explains why he felt compelled to speak out and challenge the DWP after campaign groups argued the government's decision disproportionally affected disabled and vulnerable people.
I felt it was blatantly discriminatory to deliberately choose to not give the most vulnerable citizens any increase in a once-in-a-generation pandemic. It was frankly inhumane.
But what pushed me to take the DWP to court was that it was an accumulation of the poor treatment of sick and disabled people, since 2010. It's out of my comfort zone to do something - you don't expect to have to take your own government to court. But I just felt that this has got to stop.
The people who are on Employment Support Allowance, Jobseeker's and Income Support - all the ones on legacy benefits - have missed out because the DWP has been doing a managed migration to Universal Credit. There are a couple of million people left who haven't been switched over. And though the government say you can switch over if you want to, that wasn't the case for a year of the pandemic, that only came in January 2021.
So for the first 11 months it wasn't possible for us to switch over. Plus there's a reason why people haven't voluntarily switched over, and that's because it's the most difficult cases that are left. The people in these situations feel that basically, the Universal Credit isn't fit for purpose for dealing with people who are the most vulnerable.
Morally we're bang to rights on this - whether we can argue that legally is a different matter.
I get Employment Support Allowance and I've missed out on around £1,500 throughout the pandemic, which would have helped a lot. It's also a case of people who can't work, who are sick and disabled of working age, are the ones who had their benefits frozen for all those years before, so it's been an accumulation of relentlessly being hit hardest.
All the distributional analysis shows that the sick and disabled have been hit hardest, in every budget for the last decade. At that point it's not a coincidental consequence of policy, it is policy. And that is inhumane.
To deliberately do that to the most vulnerable people in society is just sadistic, frankly, and the fact they've got away with it for all these years, I'm astonished there's not been more of an outcry. And that's without all the work capability assessments, the torturous process, all the suicides connected to it, and people who are dying literally spending their last days on earth having to fight the DWP for as little as £10 a day. It's barbaric.
Meanwhile, living costs have risen for everyone. I live with my mum, who's 77, and she had to shield throughout the first year. We had to get online shopping, which costs an extra £4 for every delivery. And our electricity bill, which was £49 a month at the beginning of the pandemic, soared to £89 nine months in. Three weeks ago I got an email saying it's now going up to £124, so in less than two years our bill has nearly tripled, and I'm still on a fixed income.
I think we've got a better chance to win this than not, but I've learned to not get my hopes up too much. It'll take four to six weeks to get a decision, then there's the possibility that the government will seek an appeal if we win. There's still a trek to go.
