UK: disability benefit cuts condemned by Minority Rights Group and DPAC

Minority Rights Group (MRG) and Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) strongly condemn welfare cuts currently proposed by the UK government. Minority communities will be disproportionately impacted by these cuts to benefits, which support those on low incomes and with disabilities or health conditions. There is a real risk that these cuts will lead to deaths.

‘This is without doubt an attack on the communities who already suffer from the worst forms of structural discrimination in the UK, cutting vital resources to those who are fighting to afford basic necessities and battling the isolation they experience in almost every aspect of public life’, emphasizes Lauren Avery, MRG’s Disability Programme Coordinator. ‘It’s vital that disability organizations, organizations representing ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, including the Deaf community, and the general public come together to oppose these inhumane cuts.’

As the sixth largest economy in the world, the UK must do more to realize the human rights of affected groups instead of pursuing measures that will deepen deprivation. MRG calls on the British government to scrap the proposed cuts and ensure its benefits system meaningfully supports those in need.

The present government was elected with a manifesto that promised to ‘tackle the social determinants of health’ amongst broader commitments to equality, including racial inequality. MRG emphasizes that the proposed cuts would violate these goals and amount to a serious step backwards for equality in the UK.

‘The government’s public consultation on the changes asks leading questions and avoids key topics. It is not a meaningful consultation. The government must work with disabled people’s and minority organizations in line with the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’ in the co-creation of solutions that ensure dignity for everyone, irrespective of their identity’, continues Avery.

‘The government say they want to help disabled people into work yet at the same time they plan to cut those social security payments that currently facilitate disabled people to work, so it is very difficult to believe that their motives are truthful. Evidence linking benefit cuts with decreased unemployment is limited but we know that these cuts will harm thousands’, says Linda Burnip, co-founder of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC).

MRG is gravely concerned that the UK government is doubling down on ‘anti-poor’ policies that in 2019 were described by Mr. Philip Alston, the (then) UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, as a recipe ‘designed to exacerbate inequality and poverty and to undermine the life prospects of many millions’.

Belonging to a minority community, being on a low-income and being disabled* are all strongly interlinked. Some minority communities are simultaneously those with the lowest income and those with the highest prevalence of disability, while MRG is further troubled by the intersectional impact on older women from religious minority backgrounds, who tend to have higher support needs, as well as the LGBTQI+ community, whose members are two times more likely to be disabled. These cuts are expected to impact 1.2 million people, cause catastrophic physical and mental harm to disabled and D/deaf people and could force an estimated further 700,000 disabled households into poverty.

As it aims to axe £5 billion from its social welfare budget, the UK government is proposing cuts to already grossly insufficient schemes that support those on low incomes or who have disabilities and health conditions – namely, Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payments (PIP). On 18 March 2025, the UK government released the ‘Pathways to Work’ Green Paper, outlining its proposed reforms to disability and health benefits. The package is expected to save over £5 billion by 2029–30, which would make it the biggest cut to welfare since 2015.

Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) are a UK based disabled people’s organisation formed in 2010 to protest cuts to the UK’s benefit’s system and their impact on disabled people.

*Note on language: MRG strives to use the language preferred by the communities in the contexts where it works. This statement uses the term ‘disabled people’ in line with the preferences of most disability activists in the UK. However, in other texts MRG uses ‘people with disabilities’ in line with the preferences of disability activists in other contexts and with international law.

Featured image: A protest organised by DPAC and other disabilty groups assembles outside the British Parliament as Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivers her spring statement. Credit: Guy Bell/Alamy Live News