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  • July 13, 2014
    Lethal proposal for people with depression unable to work

    People in the UK unable to work because of depression may have their benefits stopped if they do not undergo cognitive behavioural therapy, which it is assumed will cure them, a newspaper has reported. If this plan goes ahead, sizeable numbers of mentally ill people are likely to die.

  • July 11, 2014
    Counting the cost of the WCA

    People campaigning for the abolition of the Work Capability Assessment have often quoted figures from the Department for Work and Pensions which state that between January 2011 and November 2011, 10,600 sick and disabled people died within six weeks of their benefit claim ending.

  • July 6, 2014
    Disabled people: a New Approach is essential

    As the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions insists that all is well at the DWP, Universal Credit is on track, and attitudes towards disabled people have improved, an independent report this week delivered a damning verdict on how the DWP itself treats sick and disabled people.

  • June 20, 2014
    Is harshness to sick, disabled and poor people increasing ‘welfare’ costs?

    Successive UK governments have made it harder for people in need to get social security, at a devastating human cost. Public services have also been cut, supposedly to save money. Might this have ended up costing taxpayers more?

  • June 19, 2014
    Labour, young people, and welfare.

    I often speak to people in their seventies and eighties about what life was like when they were young. These are working-class men and women, from a Northern industrial town, who all left school when they were 14 or 15, with very basic qualifications. They had no opportunity to take their education further, though many would have liked to.

  • June 16, 2014
    When is a scandal not a scandal?

    When is a scandal not a scandal? Perhaps when politicians and the media simply think it’s not important, because it affects only a powerless minority.

  • April 20, 2014
    If Britain was 'Christian' we would stop the war on welfare

    In Holy Week, as the Prime Minister grew ever more vocal about his personal faith and the importance of Christian values, the Daily Express brought us the glad tidings that the PM’s colleague Iain Duncan Smith is ‘Winning the War on Benefits’. That’s a war on financial assistance to people who are old, sick, disabled, unemployed or working but paid too little to make ends meet.

  • April 15, 2014
    The media argument over welfare reform

    The Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC), meeting in Dundee from 14-16 April 2014), has passed an extensive motion on welfare reform and the effects of poverty in the UK.

  • April 10, 2014
    Listen to disabled people, says Baroness Lister

    One of Britain's leading academic and policy experts on poverty and disadvantage, and how to combat them, has commended the new Spartacus Network Report, Beyond the Barriers which was produced wholly by disabled and sick people, and co-published by Ekklesia yesterday (9 April 2014).

  • April 9, 2014
    Disabled and sick people call for an overhaul of failing jobs support system

    A key new report highlights the failure of the government's employment support and sanctions system for disabled people and spells out the alternative approach.