Disability rights campaigner has to quit her job – because the DWP cut her support

Whilst Keir Starmer’s government is professing that they just want to help the poor disableds back into work, their actions are saying otherwise – most notably right now is whatever the fuck is going on with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Access To Work scheme.

As the Canary revealed a few weeks ago, the DWP is sneaking out changes to the Access To Work grant that helps support disabled people in work by paying for support workers and specialist equipment. We don’t know when, but at some point very soon Access To Work may stop funding most support workers and have harsher criteria for gaining access to the grant in the first place.

However, the ever increasing rigidness and lack of humanity in Access To Work is already affecting disabled people who are trying to do their jobs – as Jess Thom found out.

Jess Thom: hit by DWP cuts to Access To Work

The co-founder and co-artistic director of Touretteshero sadly announced last week that she’d had to make the heartbreaking decision to step down from her role – because Access To Work had cut her funding by over 60%.

That’s right. The reason a disabled person who has given so much to the community can no longer do her job because the DWP is refusing to support her to do it.

Jess told the Canary that she’s been a claimant of Access To Work since 2010 and that the fund is:

The reason I can work, and now ironically the reason I could work in the first place is the reason I have to give my job that I love up.

Due to Jess’s condition which causes daily involuntary seizures and worsens the severity of her tics, she requires 24-hour care and support to keep her safe. This includes both at home and at work. The DWP Access To Work scheme funds her full-time support worker, accessible travel, and specialised equipment related to her work – including her wheelchair.

She previously was fully funded for this support at work by Access To Work, but at the beginning of May she found out the DWP would cut her funding by 61%, meaning that if she was to continue to have support the PAs would be expected to earn below living wage.

Deliberate callousness

This is something Jess was so shocked about that she went back to Access To Work to make sure they were aware that this is illegal:

We specifically asked them, Is rate the way inclusive of all employment costs? And they were like, “that is the gross amount. That’s all an all inclusive amount”. We clarified that with them, because initially I was like, 50% this is just incompetence, 50% deliberate. It became increasingly clear that it was deliberate and they were standing by their decision.

Jess said the DWP has given her no guidance on how to now pay for her support worker and its “unclear” how they expect her to pay for such a vital part of her team. Whilst there were parts of the award that could’ve been workable, such as there not being any changes to equipment, she couldn’t accept any of it:

There’s a part on the Access to Work award letter that essentially seems to suggest that if you claim against that award in any capacity, then you are accepting the terms and conditions of that award, and you are accepting that award, so it became increasingly clear that I had to stop working. Because It’s not a workable award.

Jess said her team has spent “83 hours just in the last week challenging [the DWP] on this decision”. That’s a huge amount of time that they could’ve been running other projects, whilst also navigating everyday disabling barriers:

Loads of that is because Access To Work put us in that position by not making the decision quickly, by how they communicated that decision, by the lack of explanation. It has made that incredibly stressful, emotive and challenging bit of time to navigate.

The broader impact of these cuts

This decision doesn’t just affect Jess’s team because they’ll be losing one of their leaders. Touretteshero is a disabled-led organisation and many of the other employees also can only work because they get Access To Work. With the new changes, Jess fears the whole organisation will be forced to close:

And it’s like the the idea that I can’t work, not because of anything to do within my employer or anything to do with me, but because of an arbitrary decision. When nothing has like nothing has changed in me or my work, or even formally in Access To Work Zone guidelines and policies.

Jess and I spoke about how the DWP has no clear proposals to actually help support disabled people into work. She told me:

No amount of reasonable adjustments are going to replace my need to have someone physically support me to move around or to to keep me safe in a meeting when I have a seizure, it’s like those things, like no sort of job coaching or AI tool is going to replace that with that support. I can’t work without it. I can’t.

Jess and her team are fighting against the decision. However, they don’t know how long it could take. The wait just for it to go to mandatory reconsideration is 17 weeks.

She wanted to highlight the incredible support Tourretteshero have had to complete the reconsideration process by Decode, who more than anything have helped Jess to understand – because the DWP didn’t supply her with any easy read or accessible guidance.

The DWP do not care about disabled people

Jess has previously been very vocal about her support for Access To Work. After all, it’s what enabled her to work in the first place:

It’s been transformative for us as a company, because it’s enabled, and for me, it’s enabled to lead on a key part of my job in a way I had not been able to since my pain and energy changed.

Whilst Jess is worried for her own career, she recognises that she’s privileged to be a “high profile” disabled person and is surrounded by a team (both her own and external support) who can fight for her. She is worried that many others won’t be able to do this:

Whatever happens around my support my biggest worry is, is what this means for younger disabled people, disabled people working, disabled people in less inclusive working environments and less able to advocate for themselves.

Starmer and Reeves keep making big statements about how many young people are out of work but this will either force young disabled people out of the workforce or into places where they’re scared to speak up and get support.

The fact this is, Labour are justifying cuts to DWP benefits like Universal Credit that will have a devastating affect on disabled people’s lives, by saying they want to support disabled people into work. But by quietly cutting Access To Work whilst also proposing to cut vital benefits, they are only showing that they do not care about disabled people’s survival.

Featured image supplied