By Kieran Lewis
Rights & Migration Policy Manager at NSUN
In the wake of its ‘Pathways to Work’ Green Paper, announced last month, the Government has faced heavy criticism from Disabled People’s Organisations of its proposed changes to the welfare system. Many are particularly worried about the Government’s unwillingness to seek the public’s opinion on some of the most controversial proposals set out in the document.
While a Green Paper should signal the start of a dialogue between politicians and those they claim to represent about a set of proposals, the Government is simply not consulting on plans to restrict Personal Independence Payment (PIP), scrap the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) and create a single assessment for PIP and the health element of Universal Credit, among others.
With this in mind, I signed up for the first in-person consultation event put on by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in London – the first of nine in-person events across the country until late June – hoping against the odds to be pleasantly surprised.
I arrived at a small, unremarkable building in Central London with no external signage. After an ID check, I was led into a room with seven round tables and a noticeable echo. At each of these tables sat a volunteer notetaker and a volunteer facilitator from the DWP, along with two to three members of the public. With fewer than twenty attendees at one of only nine in-person consultation events – and a large, empty room next door being used only for tea and biscuits – the Department’s commitment to genuine public engagement already seemed dubious.
As the attendees sat down at our tables, we were told that the Department would ‘not stop [us]’ from sharing our opinions on changes that are not being consulted on – such as the tightening of PIP eligibility criteria – but that the focus of the event would be elsewhere. We were also told that the DWP facilitators at each table, whose job it was to ask questions and guide discussions, were ‘not necessarily policy experts in all areas of the Green Paper’.
As promised, the discussion that followed was largely dictated by the official consultation questions. At my table, however, largely thanks to the efforts of attendees speaking from lived experience of a punitive welfare system, the DWP representatives were confronted with the life-altering consequences that the proposals set out in the Green Paper would have if implemented.
While it was heartening to see people calling out leading questions like ‘What support do you think we could provide for those who will lose their Personal Independence Payment entitlement..?’, and questioning the baseline assumption that we should be spending less on welfare, the discussion was yet another stark reminder that the DWP’s position is fundamentally at odds with Disabled people’s knowledge and experience.
That our table’s facilitator and note-taker – however well-meaning they might have been – seemed genuinely surprised by much of what they were hearing from attendees only added to the frustration I felt at a system so clearly devoid of meaningful participation from those it supposedly exists to support.
This consultation event reinforced much of what we already knew about NSUN’s position in relation to the DWP and its proposed changes to the welfare system: while the Department may want some degree of public engagement on the Green Paper, that engagement must take place within the limits it has set. Had it actually wanted to base any of its proposals for welfare reform on what would work best for Disabled people, not only would it have made its consultation events larger and better organised, it would have opened up the conversation long before the Green Paper was even written.
Despite the fact that engaging with the DWP on its own terms will never be enough, by itself, to bring about true and lasting justice for Disabled people, NSUN will be responding to the consultation on the ‘Pathways to Work’ Green Paper and supporting members to do the same if they wish. What NSUN will not be doing, however, is responding exclusively to the proposals that the Department wants to consult on.
The NSUN policy team is planning a Zoom drop in for early June, which will give members the chance to feed into NSUN’s response to the consultation, as well as asking questions about responses they may wish to submit themselves. The deadline for consultation responses is the 30th of June. Further details of NSUN’s drop-in will be available next week, shared on our website, in our members’ bulletin (sign up here) and on our social media channels.
Read more on this topic: