Why is our welfare always someone else's business?
- Cerys Jones
- Mar 10, 2025
- 3 min read
More of a commentary than a lived experience piece, Cerys' blog explores how benefit restrictions undermine independence and dignity, highlighting the issues of harmful stereotyping, constant surveillance, and inadequate support. Cerys calls for genuine empowerment over dehumanisation.
"Disabled people’s lives are a proving ground, where rather than military weapons being tested, we are being tested."
I don’t mean ‘someone else’s business’ in just the nosy sense of someone snooping through my belongings, my diary, or my trinkets. I mean ‘business’ in its most raw, capitalistic, surveillance-culture form.
I mean ‘business’ where you constantly have to validate your disability. Business that requires a form to prove whether you’re ‘fit’ or ‘sick’. Business that means your benefits are constantly under review. Business that means your welfare is scattered between the community, institutions, and private practice. Business that means your support and adjustments are determined by a company that is trying to cut costs. Business that means your PIP is under review after two years even though you were awarded it for five.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?
But it’s not, and it’s disabled people’s reality. We only have to look at the ITV footage from Saturday to see that the government is planning to save £6 billion from welfare savings because the welfare system ‘is broken’. I don’t think there are many disabled people who would argue with this statement at face value. But what we are arguing is that removing benefits, reducing benefits, and making it harder to receive benefits is not the way in which you ‘fix’ a broken system.
Disabled people have fought for the right to work for decades, to have the same opportunity to work as any non-disabled person. But what this shouldn’t mean is that disabled people who cannot work, who cannot work as many hours, or who require more support to work are under constant scrutiny. What this should not mean is that the Disability Price Tag falls on the shoulders of the disabled individual, becoming their problem and someone else’s business. Businesses will continue to make money off of our higher cost of living.
But let's not forget the snooping, invasive kind of 'business' too.
Constant surveillance of disabled people’s lives is not abating, and instead, it worsens as our welfare increasingly becomes someone else’s business. PIP is the one benefit for disabled people that is not means-tested and is instead a payment that facilitates independence, choice, control, and agency of the individual. However, this is increasingly becoming someone else’s business.
Removing and restricting benefits does not promote the agency of disabled people. Not only does it restrict agency, but our citizenship, our right to participate fully and equally in society, and our access to support is increasingly at risk. Our independence should be facilitated, including financially. Alongside this, we must also acknowledge that interdependence is what makes us fundamentally human.
Disabled people’s lives are a proving ground, where rather than military weapons being tested, we are tested. Our bodies are evaluated, our minds are assessed, our words are questioned, and we are assumed to be lying, regarded as fraudsters and lazy. It will become even harder to receive non-means-tested welfare because why should you receive money to improve your quality of life if it cannot be measured, quantified, and used for someone else’s gain?
People want us in the workforce, but then they don’t want to offer us the necessary support to work. They want to take our benefit entitlements but then share heartbreaking stories about disabled people dying in absolute poverty. They want to watch ‘inspiration porn’ about us, but they don’t want to make sports and leisure spaces accessible, and God forbid we cry on TV because we face inhumane obstacles and barriers. They don’t want us to ask for help because they think we will have an ‘unfair advantage’ over them.
These false narratives about disabled people are more than false: they are harmful. Let us not forget that only last year, the (2016) UK Government faced the UN for systematic violations of disabled people’s rights. This issue goes beyond the workplace, the hospital, and the school playground – the issue of stigmatizing disabled people is systemic.
If you are to strip people of their welfare, making it your business, you must also make it your business to provide essential employability programmes, effectively fund community-based care, uphold the right to citizenship and agency, and create disability-friendly community spaces. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
If you are going to make our welfare your business, at least pay us for our involvement. Preferably through your ‘soon-to-be-fixed’ welfare system. But in the meantime, don’t continue to prod, poke, assess, and survey every aspect of our lives.
Just a few links in case you were interested in checking these out further:
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