Government Plans to Abolish DLA - Your Support is Needed!
Radar - the disability rights people, 6 July 2011
The Government is planning to cut 20% in the DLA which will have an enormous and highly negative affect on the lives of many, many disabled people living in our country.
The Disability Alliance is working extremely hard in representing the views of over 200 disability organisations and thousands more disabled people to ensure the Government listens to our concerns and is fully aware of the true nature of the impact these planned cuts would have.
As part of this work, the Disability Alliance are asking everyone to pledge their support and give their views towards these plans so they can begin legal action to make the Government listen and take note of what disabled people, their friends, colleagues, carers and supporters are saying.
Please click here to complete a quick survey from the Disability Alliance to show your support.
It is so important that disabled people are heard and listened too before any changes to the DLA are implemented. Please circulate this to everyone you know and encourage them to complete the survey too, let's ensure our voices are loud and clear!
PIP legal challenge
The Government is planning to end DLA for disabled people 16-64 years of age. A new benefit called the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) will replace some support for some people currently receiving DLA. But low rate care DLA payments will not be replicated in the PIP. The budget for PIP will be over £2 billion less than for DLA.
Disability Alliance does not believe the Government can demonstrate that it has considered all the issues involved fully in making these plans. We believe the impact on disabled people and their families' equality of opportunity will be substantially undermined – including higher experience of ill-health, avoidable use of some public services, and higher rates of debt and poverty for example. We have asked DWP to address these concerns but have sadly not had responses to the issues raised.
We are now considering taking legal action against DWP to ensure our concerns are addressed before plans are progressed further. But we want our members to be aware of our potential decision. Based on the outline of our concerns: