Cruelty seems the only way to describe what’s about to be done to the Sanford family – the sort of cruelty that happens to come by the hand of government policy, dressed up in the bow of “welfare reform”.
“It’s all well and good diddling disabled people out of their cars to get the deficit down,” says Peter Sanford from his home in Redditch, in the West Midlands. “But there’s a cruelty to it.”
It’s just the two of them – Peter and his five-year-old son, Gabriel. Gabriel (or “a handful and a joy” as Peter calls him) is autistic, and Peter, at only 48, has what his doctors describe as the arthritis of an 80-year-old. Ask Peter how they’re doing and he’ll tell you all about Gabriel (“He can put sentences together now,” he says proudly), but Peter is struggling to move: he needs a double knee replacement, and a double hip one, too – but a heart defect means surgery isn’t an option. The front room is now a makeshift bedroom because it’s painful for Peter to get himself up the stairs.
In a climate of cuts to disability benefits and services, families like the Sanfords are collateral damage. Over the past three months, both dad and son have been summoned for medical assessment: tested for personal independence payments (PIP) by private firms in the pay of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), to see if they are still classed as disabled enough for help. “Full of lies and invention,” Peter says of his own assessment. “Horrible people.”
Gabriel was “lucky”: he kept his benefits. But Peter was downgraded to the “standard rate” – essentially judged as healthier than when he was last awarded PIP’s predecessor, disability living allowance, two years ago – despite the fact, to use Peter’s words, disabilities like his “only go one way”.
Terms like “standard rate” are clouded in DWP bureaucracy-speak, but the impact is stark enough: Peter is now barred from the Motability scheme that swaps benefits for an accessible vehicle. In two weeks, the family car will be removed.
For five years, the Sanfords’ car has been a lifeline: to get to hospital appointments, Gabriel’s therapy and support groups (the same ones that have helped him talk), or to pick up Peter’s pain medication. Peter can’t walk to a bus stop and, with no sense of danger, Gabriel tries to “play” in roads.
“Without the car, we’ll be prisoners in our home,” Peter says, pausing. “It doesn’t make sense.”
When it comes to the treatment of disabled people, this country abandoned sense – or plain decency – some time ago. A pregnant, mentally ill woman is forced to walk two miles to a food bank after having her benefit sanctioned. A vulnerable adult starves to death after being declared “fit for work” and having his benefits cut off. Gutted social care packages leave malnourished disabled people to sleep fully clothed in their wheelchairs. Removing the “lifeline” of the disabled parent of an autistic little boy is not a lone case – or the fallout of one faulty policy – but a reflection of a system that has decided the disabled are fair game.
Britain can afford tax cuts for the wealthy, but a decent life for disabled people, somehow, is a cost we can’t afford. Worse, it is a cost the public is told it should not have to pay. The Conservatives have spent six years peddling the lie that the benefit system is riddled with fraud – swaths of fake disabled swindlers milking taxpayer cash and the perks of free cars. “People think they turn up with a Rolls-Royce,” Peter says.
Myths have consequences. Between 400 and 500 adapted cars, powered wheelchairs, and scooters are being taken away from disabled people every week. I wonder if there’s a single politician who can think of that and feel proud.
The architects of austerity – George Osborne, David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith – may have moved on, but it would be remiss to think anything is about to change for the disabled people left behind. Peter tells me he watched Theresa May make her speech on inequality when she became prime minister and, hopeful, wrote to her twice “begging” for help. “I’ve heard nothing back,” he says.
When it is your own government doing this to you, it is difficult to know where to turn. Peter has rung the DWP to ask for help. He explained that he and Gabriel need their car because it hurts him to walk more than a few feet. “Well, actually, you were able to walk across the car park to the assessment centre,” was the reply he received, he says.
In three months time, Peter has been told he can go to a tribunal to appeal against the decision. “They’re taking our car this month,” he points out. “We won’t have transport to get there.”
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