“I fear for my life,” says Lucy Watts, speaking of the cuts in care packages that are forcing disabled adults into nursing homes (‘I could be taken from my home and stripped of my life’, G2, 27 March). She is right to do so. I am someone to whom this has already happened and now exist, brain intact but body useless, isolated among very old people with dementia. But it does not end there, for the end of the Independent Living Fund means I now face further humiliation and loss of a real life.
I am 63 and have cerebral palsy. This is something that happens at birth. It is incurable and only gets worse as you get older. I have spent my life in a wheelchair and was for a while an academic researcher, but contractures, weakness and pain mean I can no longer manage even simple tasks.
But the DWP is questioning my rights to benefits. I have just finished its 40-page form. It was such a degrading process. I felt less than human at the end of it. The deadline for return was so tight, with supporting medical documents demanded, that I had to struggle with it for days as nobody at the nursing home where I live felt able to help. Is it really worth surviving this? I just don’t know.
In recent dealings with DWP, I feel that we are back to the bad old days of the Poor Law and the notion of weeding out the “undeserving poor”, that I am not being asked to prove a reasonable entitlement to benefit but rather to demonstrate why I should not lose entitlement to it.
Apart from being left with a sense of not being valued by society as a person with a disability, the sad consequence of this is that I now feel I have neither the capacity nor the compassion to help others.
I feel completely without a voice and hope you will allow me one.
John Winfield
Bristol
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