Employment and support allowance, the ‘summer budget’ and less eligible disabled people

In the first UK budget by a Conservative Government for 18 years, £13 billion per annum savings in social security spending by 2020/21 were announced. Of these, 4.9% (£640 million per annum, and up to £900 million in the years after 2020) is to come from the withdrawal from April 2017 of the work-related component of the Employment and Support Allowance. This means that new claimants will be worse off by £29.05 per week (2015/16 figures) than would have been the case had the measure not been introduced. This brief commentary critically analyses this development as the extension of an ideological assault upon the out-of-work benefits for disabled people which has been gathering momentum for about a decade in the hope of forcing such people into competing for wage work in the open market