Liberal Democrat
Disability Association

Tanni Grey-Thompson: Disability benefit cuts hurting and threatening memory of Paralympics

11 Jul 2013

Lady Grey-Thompson said there was no sign the new welfare system was easier to use or that technology was going to save money

Speech: Tanni Grey-ThompsonSpeech: Tanni Grey-Thompson

PA

The Government's disability benefits reforms have been blasted by British Paralympic hero Tanni Grey-Thompson..

The 11-time gold medal winner said the shake-up threatened to "blight" the memory of last year's London games.

She said former Paralympic athletes were among the hundreds of thousands who had lost their benefits as a result of the changes introduced by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

From April people receiving the Disability Living Allowance have had to reapply for the tougher Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

She said: "The people who were going to be affected, weren't all the benefits scroungers, watching daytime telly on their plasma screens: it was real disabled people. Making it about Paralympians brought it home.

"We don't know how many will be effected, but I am sure that with 600,000 not making the transition, there are likely to be one or two Paralympians in there," Baroness Grey-Thompson added in the Jack Ashley Memorial Lecture in Parliament yesterday.

She added: "I have received many letters from people who have told me that people they don't know have stopped them in the street and asked them if they are on DLA."

She went to quote Tony Parsons' recent column in the Daily Mirror, in which he said "disabled people were going from Heroes to Scroungers in the space of a year."

"We are almost a year on from the Games, about the right time for the challenging stories to appear, that won't blight our memory of an amazing Games," she said.

Lady Grey-Thompson said there was no sign the new welfare system was easier to use or that technology was going to save money.

"Three million disabled people do not have access to the internet, so how is moving everything online really going to help them?" she said.

The Department for Work and Pensions said 450,000 people rather than 600,000 were not moving from DLA to PIP.

A spokesman said: "We are world-leaders in support for disabled people and continue to spend around £50billion a year on disabled people and their services.

"Our welfare reforms are designed to ensure this support is better targeted at those who need it most - those facing the greatest barriers to living independent lives."

* Read Tanni Grey-Thompson's full speech here



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