The UK must change for disabled people in 2025 – so we can live the lives we deserve

To understand the year that was for disabled people in the UK, you need just three statistics.

1. More than one in three children and a quarter of adults are living in poverty.
2. On average, disabled households need an additional £1,010 a month to have the same standard of living as non-disabled households.
3. Just over a third (34%) of universal credit recipients couldn’t afford to keep their house warm, and 24% used a food bank last year.

Every year, on 3 December, the world comes together for the International Day of People with Disabilities (IDPD). It might also be worth noting that even the title of IDPD doesn’t reflect the social model of disability that many disabled people politically identify with. That being said, the day is an important one – more than an awareness day, this is a time for us all to reflect on the rights, equality, equity and wellbeing of disabled people in all areas of life. This year, perhaps more than most, we reflect on how little progress has been made for the at least 16 million disabled people in the UK.

This IDPD, we are faced starkly with the fact that doesn’t work for us, something many of us have known our entire lives. We disproportionately live in poverty, achieve poorer outcomes in education and are more likely to be unemployed or earn less.

IDPD is often a chance to look back at the year that just went by. In some ways, the year might be remembered for more frivolous things: Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey‘s almost-masochistic election campaign, which potentially included the first-ever election bungee jump, the performance of athletes in Paris, or a now-former prime minister forgetting his umbrella.

Perhaps what the disabled community will remember most from this year was not an election landslide for the Labour Party in July, but the United Nations report confirming that the UK has ‘serious and grave’ violations of our human rights. As Rick Burgess, the co-founder of Manchester Disabled People Against Cuts, told me when we spoke at the start of 2024, the UN found that “the history of the last 15 years has been of systemic human rights abuses of disabled people. This has resulted in thousands of excess deaths and in disabled people dying during Covid at three times the rate of non-disabled people […] 60% of food bank users being disabled people.”

The IDPD’s theme this year is “employment and livelihood”, but as we look forward to a New Year, it really feels like even though the teams in Westminster have changed, disabled people continue to be on the losing side. This year was one of the continued declines of our living standards and a repeated government focus on cutting social security spending, no matter if their ties were red or blue.

Next year won’t have the grotesque policy suggestions that Rishi Sunak tried to shoehorn in at the end of his car crash of a government, but Labour ministers have done little to calm fears that deep cuts are coming. Despite the small positives in the recent ‘Get Britain Working’ white paper, the government has committed to £3bn in cuts to health/disability benefits. We may no longer see PIP become a voucher system, but we will still suffer from the same anxiety and fear of tribunals, appeals and sanctions that we always have.

Dr Abi O’Connor explained to me that the new year will bring the continuation of a social security system underpinned by threats and conditionality, with the system’s point being “a mechanism with which to get people back into any type of work in the quickest way possible”.

It is quite astounding that the government continues to be obsessed with pushing disabled people into work, no matter their circumstances, especially when the disability pay gap has hit a staggering level of 17.2% in 2024, according to analysis from the Trade Union Congress (TUC).

Dr O’Connor made it clear that this means that the quality of work and the quality of someone’s life are not even considered part of building a functioning and thriving society, let alone the foundation of it.

“History shows us that this short-term thinking pushes people into further precarity both in terms of their health and their employment and in the long-term will cost the government more,” Dr O’Connor clarified.

And Dr O’Connor isn’t the only person who thinks this. The Stigma Free Futures Design team, who are working with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on an anti-stigma approach to tackling poverty, told me that “there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that threats and tightening of conditionality doesn’t work and can have harmful effects on disabled people. Human worth needs to be decoupled from work.”

But there are lots of options out there. Maybe we should find hope in the hard work being put in on the ground across the country by powerful, caring and diligent organisers pushing their local authorities to support people to live well and work well. One example is the ‘Living Income‘ campaign in Greater Manchester, which would allow for a social security system that works for everyone, not putting ‘sanctions’ above our health.

Or we can look to the brave actions of disabled activists and trailblazers such as Ellen Clifford, Paula Peters and John McArdle, who are coordinating campaigns to fight back against cuts to social security in 2025, ending this year taking legal action against the DWP and sitting in protest in Whitehall.

We hope 2025 is a year of real change and the moment we rebuild our system on foundations of respect, dignity and support. That finally, the social security system enables us to live the lives we deserve, providing things like a Guaranteed Decent Income – based on 50% of the minimum wage – and we finally shut the door on punitive sanctions, benefit caps, bedroom tax, conditionality, five-week wait for the first payment, and the two-child limit.

This IDPD we can all agree it is finally time to create a world where everyone has chances and is valued and treated as equals.

Mikey Erhardt is a campaigns and policy officer at Disability Rights UK.

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