Let’s talk numbers. Do you know what benefit scroungers – sorry, Disabled people, have to live on, if they are only in receipt of bare bones benefits? Do you know how they are funding their flatscreen TVs, and chip dinner takeaways, and other mythical life of Reilly perks?
£74.70. That’s the current weekly rate of Employment and Support Allowance for somebody aged 25 or older who has a limited capacity for work. Because people younger than this are a bit physically smaller, the rate drops to £59.20. Presumably because they need less cans of best value supermarket beans to fill them up.
Things are much better for people over the age of 25 who moved from legacy benefits to Universal Credit. They are 26p per week better off. That’s a whole extra tin of tomatoes.
ESA and Universal Credit are there to cover the most basic costs of living. But are they anywhere close?
How much are your bills each week? I’ve done a little tally of the most meagre costs of living I can find.
Water: £15 per month
Household fuel (if you have your heating on for an hour a day and your water on for 30 minutes every other day): £50 per month
Food: £80 per month
Phone: £10 per month
Broadband: £20 per month
Easy, right? That’s £175 a month, out of £300. And yes, broadband is a necessity these days, because despite the fact that not all Disabled people can use the internet, it’s where all the forms and hoops Disabled people need to jump through to get support tend to be.
But hang on, because financial support for housing doesn’t keep pace with the cost of rents. For example, my local council has a housing benefit cap around the £700 mark. But properties start from around the £900 mark. And my area isn’t even at the high end of benefits vs rent differentials. And what if I am paying bedroom tax? Because I need to stay in my adapted home due to a national shortage of accessible accommodation, and it has an extra room? I cannot remotely afford my rent.
And the cost of fuel is about to jump by 50% from next month, and possibly by 100% from now by the winter. And my phone is on the blink, and I need a new one, but can’t afford one. And TV licence? What TV licence? And food prices are increasing – I’ve noticed a 20% increase in the most basic foodstuffs – bread, pasta, butter, frozen peas, since Christmas. So where does that leave my £125 going spare from my subsistence level budget? In arrears. Heavy, unaffordable arrears.
And with arrears comes fear. A pit of the stomach gnawing which I know so many Disabled people feel, the need to retch to relieve the sensation, only to realise it’s not going away. Along with the bone chill from that hour of warmth a day which doesn’t ease muscles tense from physical pain, physical cold, and the constant nagging stress of oh my god how the hell am I going to pay for these, my most basic of needs, this month?
We haven’t covered clothing, or toiletries, or medicines which aren’t covered by the NHS, or adaptive aids which need to be self funded. Nor transport.
Abraham Maslow was a theorist in the 1940s who came up with a hierarchy of needs. At the bottom are the things we need to physically live: shelter/housing, food, water, warmth, rest. Without these, the rest of the pyramid has no foundation. The rest of the pyramid goes through needs about social connection, emotional and mental health needs, with fulfilling one’s potential at the top.
For so many people, for so many Disabled people, there is no foundation to this pyramid. And the upper layers are merely pipe dreams.
This is not living. It is punitive, to a standard about which the Government appears oblivious. When looking at budgets for inflation busting increases to benefits, departments pore over spreadsheets of global figures, pound signs before figures of billions, millions, catching up all the little people in the bubbles of zeroes floating across their screens. Failing to pop each one to see that each big figure contains a multitude of lives living in silent screams of desperation. Failing to rubber stamp an increase to benefits to relieve the intolerable stress that so many Disabled people are forced to live with.
The Spring Budget is due imminently. It will be set by a man whose familial worth out-earns the Queen’s.
I wonder – has Rishi Sunak ever spent any meaningful time with people who live on tens of pounds a week? Have his mandarins at Whitehall done so? Because I don’t see who gets it – who truly, deeply, understands the living hell which is a life lived in poverty. On £70 a week, or less, with not just our bank balances, but our very souls, depleted down to the dregs.