What impact will the benefit changes have on the wellbeing of disabled people?

Changes to benefits such as universal credit and PIP (personal independence payment) announced by the UK Government are likely to have a knock-on effect on all aspects of wellbeing for disabled people.

In the period around the new Labour government’s first Spring statement since coming to power almost a year ago, there has been a lot of discussion about disabled people. Although we at Carnegie UK look at wellbeing more broadly across all people in the UK and Ireland, we do have some insight to add to the debate.

We know from our first two years of analysing our annual Life in the UK data (which looks at wellbeing across the UK population on four domains; economic, environmental, social and democratic) that across all collective wellbeing measures disabled people have the lowest levels of wellbeing, an indication of deep inequalities.

Across the whole of the UK, disabled people have a collective wellbeing score of 55, compared to 64 amongst non-disabled people. This gap of 9 points is bad enough but, it becomes even worse when we dive deeper. Even before the decisions made on social security, disabled people had an economic wellbeing score of 63 compared to 74 amongst those without a disability, a staggering 11-point difference. Many disability rights organisations argue that social security reforms will disproportionately hit disabled people.

To determine economic wellbeing scores, questions on the Life in the UK survey ask if participants could afford an unexpected expense of £850, heat their homes and access satisfactory job opportunities in their area. It seems likely that without wider policy change, more disabled people are likely to report lower wellbeing scores.

While economic wellbeing scores for disabled people are bad, social wellbeing scores are worse still. Indeed, we see that on the social aspects of wellbeing the difference is even greater between disabled and non-disabled people, with a 13-point gap between the two groups (scores of 62 and 75 respectively). On democratic wellbeing the gap was 6 points (42 and 36) and on environment, the gap was 5 (63 vs 58). This shows broader issues of social exclusion and a lack of political influence, with disabled voices often underrepresented in policy discussions.

Economic stability and growth are the UK government’s number one priorities but it is difficult to see how this policy choice won’t worsen inequality for disabled people.

Our next Life in the UK survey goes into field on 8 May and these will be the first results we have under the current Labour government. We will be looking out for changes across the board but given the level of change happening to disabled people, this group will be one of the first we look at.