OPINION: Labour Is Violating Human Rights with Disability Benefits Cuts

BY: Greta Mauch, Riley Reed, Rick Burgess - Amnesty Disabled People's Human Rights Network

Disabled people have and always will exist in every society. Disability is a significant, unavoidable part of the human experience; one that is not a problem to be solved, but one with beauty in its diversity of bodies and minds. Disabled people’s lives have innate value, and the quality of our lives is greatly affected by the ways in which we are seen and supported by our communities and governments. 

In a capitalist society, we all require income to access our rights to food, to housing, to a family life, to recreation. Access to those rights is more expensive when you are Disabled, whether you work or not. Further cuts to Disabled people’s incomes and the explanations behind them tell us that this government thinks Disability shouldn’t exist in the first place, or that Disabled people shouldn’t exist anymore. 

The Labour government has proposed changing our social security system with the intent to significantly reduce Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for Disabled people and remove the health element of Universal Credit. These cuts amount to £5 billion. The PIP cuts will strip 1.3 million Disabled people of their income and reduce income for an additional 2.3 million. Removing the health element of Universal Credit will further reduce the income of 2.25 million Disabled people. 

Our current system causes 4.7 million Disabled people to live in poverty, and this proposal is set to add 350,000 more. 

What this legislation communicates is that the government is not only allowing Disabled people to live in poverty, but taking action to enforce it.

“Poverty is a deprivation of rights. It is a choice,” attested Rick Burgess, Outreach and Development lead at Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People and committee member at Amnesty UK’s Disabled People’s Human Rights Network. “It's not an economic necessity. It's not a law of nature. It's a political choice.”

Labour is justifying sending Disabled people into poverty by claiming that there is an unsustainable increase in disability benefits, saying, “We simply can’t justify spending this much.”

“That is a straight-out lie,” Burgess continued, clarifying that welfare accounts for roughly 11% of the GDP of the UK. “And it's 11% of [the] GDP every goddamn year. It's not growing unsustainably. Of that 11%, disability benefits, [as a] proportion of that, is increasing. But overall, the total is not.” 

This is correct. While disability benefits claims have risen from 1.2% to 2.1% of the GDP, welfare spending was 10.9% in 2023, 10.8% in 2024, and 10.6% in 2025. 

In addition to forcing Disabled people into poverty, the MPs behind the green paper demonstrate either a fundamental misunderstanding of Disabled people’s lives in the UK or an overt animosity towards them.

The green paper claims that speeding up NHS waitlists would allow people to return to work more quickly, enabling less to be spent on PIP.

There are three big issues with this. The first is that PIP is not a replacement for a labour-based income. 

“PIP is not based on your employment status,” Burgess explained. “You can get PIP if you're employed or not. [Labour MPs] seem to think it's somehow directly tied to employment. It isn't.”

Rather than being a replacement for labour-based income, PIP is meant to cover the cost of disability, which is about £1,000 per month. This is how the government is meant to support the unavoidable nature of Disability.

The second big issue with the assertion that speeding up NHS waitlists will justify PIP cuts is obvious: Disabled people are not on PIP because we are unemployed, waiting for a cure. The NHS is not suddenly going to be making Disabled people’s conditions disappear so we can work the way the government wants us to.

“This goes back to the … demonisation of … the non-labouring person. That's one of the lowest kinds of life as far as capitalism is concerned. Unless you're producing surplus value, then you’re no use to the capitalist machine,” says Burgess. “It’s infected everything. They see work as a health outcome.”

Human rights — such as living above the poverty line — are not conditional on one’s ability to work. It should not be a surprising or outrageous declaration that a political party cannot simultaneously propose human rights violations while claiming to be benevolent or even the lesser of two evils in any election. 

“[Labour] should [be], and says it is, more concerned with the conditions of the working class. Very clearly the working class, not working people,” Burgess asserts. “They refashioned that into … only [being] interested working people. [If] you don't work, they don't want to know about you.”

It is clear that Labour believes we all must work to earn the rights that were supposed to be inviolable. 

The third big issue is that taking away PIP money from Disabled people is estimated to cost the NHS and other social services an additional £1.2 billion in handling the illness and care needs that these cuts would cause. 

Essentially, Labour is proposing using Disabled people’s stolen livelihoods to cover the cost of taking them away in the first place. It is brutality with no further cause than a punishment for the diversity of our bodies and minds and a communication that we are not welcome or valued in their society.

These cuts and the horrifying conditions that Disabled people will be forced to live under highlight how little Disabled lives are valued and how pervasive the UK’s violations of Disabled people’s human rights are.

“[Disability rights activists] got the United Nations to investigate Britain in 2016 with the final report in 2017. That found grave and systemic human rights abuses of Disabled people,” Burgess recalled. “Then they did a follow up report in 2024, which found grave and systemic abuses of disabled people. No significant progress and, in some aspects, regression. To get that kind of condemnation shows you how bad things are.” 

We may ask ourselves how we as a country have reached this level of systemic ableism. The answer is simple: Labour has made a direct plan to weed Disabled people out of their society. Their actions show this repeatedly. 

“[The UN report was] based on the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of Disabled People, which [the UK has] ratified, but we haven't made into domestic law,” Burgess continued. “And Labour deliberately dropped that commitment from their manifesto two years ago, which was our first tip off to be really cautious about what was coming.”

Labour, on a very basic level, does not believe Disability or Disabled people should exist. The green paper states, “One in every 10 working-age people in Britain is now claiming at least one type of health or disability benefit.” They speak of this as an inconvenience to be corrected, rather than a fact of humanity.

“Any society, if they've got a developed system of recognizing and supporting Disability, would have to have a system that acknowledges you've got a proportion of the population Disabled and you need to put something aside to level that playing field,” says Rick Burgess. “So when you've got politicians complaining [about the cost of PIP], it is naked disablism. We should be proud that we support our fellow citizens so that their disabling barriers are reduced. A healthy country would be proud about doing that.”

Combined with the implications of the medical assistance in dying bill, these cuts undeniably show Labour telling Disabled people that we do not deserve to live. Labour is radically violating Disabled people’s right to life, and communicating that we have no place in a government or country they run.

Amnesty UK’s Disabled People’s Human Rights Network firmly opposes “Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Papers” as a violation of Disabled people’s human rights. We believe these green papers effectively violate Articles 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 8.2, 10, 11, 14.1, 14.2, 16.1, 16.4, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28.1, 28.2, 29, and 33 of the UN Convention for the Rights of People with Disabilities, as well as Articles 1, 3, 4, 7, 17, 23, 24, and 25 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We urge everyone to sign this petition against the green paper and join us for a protest at Westminster for the second reading of the bill, scheduled for 1st July.

We are also calling on all MPs to reject this proposal. Your constituents will remember your cruelty.