11: Realities of welfare reform under COVID-19 lockdown
What disabled and older people actually experience
Since the first lockdown I have spent my days as a welfare rights worker on the phone supporting people to claim the benefits they are entitled to, or if their claim has been rejected, helping them to appeal against this.
Although understandably the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a focus on health and public health policy, income maintenance policy is no less important. In the UK for example, numerous policies have been introduced since lockdown to deal with the two big interrelated problems any such pandemic poses – making people ill and damaging the economy. Fear of spreading infection has resulted in more and more people being temporarily unable to work, furloughed, losing their jobs, or being made redundant as well, as self-employed people losing their income and often their businesses. In such cases in the UK, people may claim universal credit. If they become sick, they may claim employer or statutory sick pay, although as we shall see, the small print gets more complicated.
This means that there has predictably been a massive increase in the numbers of people reliant on UK state benefits. Historically when that happens, for example, during the last World War, with the blitz injuring and making people homeless, or in times of depression and massive unemployment, it often leads to improvements in benefits policies as many more people discover for themselves that living on welfare is far from the easy option that the right-wing media often portray it as.
COVID-19 has happened following just such a moral panic with the harshest of ‘welfare reform’ policies in operation now in the UK for more than a decade.
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