Disability cuts: ‘Thousands of us will become prisoners in our own homes’

Benefit reforms will force many disabled people to give up their cars, jobs and freedom – and have a damaging impact on the UK motor industry indeed.

“You may wonder what the car industry and wider economic growth have to do with welfare reform”
But as the latest closely argued report from the We Are Spartacus campaign points out, the government’s relentless quest to downsize the welfare budget will have potentially serious ramifications for motor manufacturers, from Luton to Longbridge.

Cuts to disability living allowance will take, over the next four years alone, a sizeable chunk out of the domestic car market, it argues: around 90,000 fewer cars sold, over 3,500 car industry jobs axed, £79m in lost taxes to the exchequer and a loss of £342m in GDP each year.

The cause of this pain to the UK’s fragile motor industry is the plannedswitch from Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in April 2013. Changes in eligibility criteria mean that under PIP around 280,000 disabled people – and almost a third of working age disabled people – will no longer qualify for the enhanced mobility component of DLA that currently enables them to lease a car under the Motability charity scheme.

Motability is a powerful player in the UK car industry. In 2009, its leasing scheme accounted for one in 10 of all new cars bought in the UK, sourced through nearly 5,000 dealerships. Some 17% of new vehicles were manufactured in the UK. There’s a thriving second hand market for motability cars, and PIP is likely to see this diminish too.

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