Rachel Reeves has only been Chancellor of the Exchequer since Labour came to power last summer, and her short tenure in control of the public purse strings has been the subject of daily scrutiny by the media. The ongoing furore over her acceptance o free tickets to a Sabrina Carpenter concert is telling of a media landscape obsessed with celebrity - popstars in skimpy outfits clearly get more clicks than campaigners against cuts to disability allowances.
The Chancellor’s ‘this-is-definitely-not-a-budget’ spring statement on Wednesday announced a reform of the Personal Independence Payments (PIP) scheme - effectively reducing access to money intended to help people living with disadvantages such as a disability or mental health issues.
The Government’s own figures, published in a response to the spring statement by the Department of Work and Pensions, estimate that an additional 250,000 people will be pushed into relative poverty as a result of restricting the criteria that need to be met in order to qualify for PIP.
In total, welfare cuts amounted to £4.8 billion and around 3 million households stand to lose out. Helen Barnard, the director of policy at the food bank charity Trussell, told the Guardian:
“The insistence by the Treasury on driving through record cuts to disabled people’s social security to balance the books is both shocking and appalling. People at food banks are telling us they are terrified how they’ll survive.”
The Innate Needs project has never felt more vital or timely. Our attempt to map out the UK services aimed at supporting people in poverty is launching just as the numbers of people in need of those services looks set to increase.
There is nothing available in the UK that does what our map does, and we think it will be useful to organisations offering support, to cash-strapped councils looking to signpost help in the community, and to people living in poverty unsure of where to turn when the support they had previously relied on is suddenly withdrawn…
