DWP's impact assessment refusal exposed as a sham by EHRC and Treasury

The refusal of the Department for Work and Pensions to try to assess the impact on disabled people of all of its welfare reforms has been exposed as a sham after new research was announced by the equality watchdog.


The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is working with the Treasury and other "key" 
departments to develop a way of assessing the cumulative impact of government spending decisions.

In its work plan for 2014-15, published this week, the commission said the project would promote "equality 
and fair financial decision-making" in next year's spending review.

The project will build on EHRC's "formal assessment" of the 2010 spending review - which concluded, in May 2012, that the Treasury may have failed in its legal duty to consider how some cuts would impact on disabled people - with the aim of ensuring that "the potential of future spending decisions to exacerbate or 
close equality gaps is given proper consideration".

In February, members of the WOW petition forced MPs to debate the need for a cumulative impact assessment (CIA) of all of the government cuts and reforms affecting disabled people, after securing backing 
from more than 100,000 people.

The WOW petition welcomed the EHRC announcement and its "recognition that any assessment of the equality considerations flowing out of official spending reviews must consider the cumulative impact of these 
spending decisions on people sharing protected characteristics".

Ian Jones, a co-founder of the campaign, said today (4 April): "Yet another organisation has called for a CIA 
of the effects of welfare reform on ill and disabled people.

"This government appears to be blind to the impact that its welfare reforms are having on ill and disabled people and the WOW petition will not accept without challenge their reckless willingness to pass into law welfare reforms when they have very little idea of what the cumulative actual effects of these reforms will be 
on people that share protected characteristics."

John McDonnell, the Labour MP who led February's debate and has backed the WOW campaign, added: "Overwhelmingly, the evidence demonstrates the scale of suffering of disabled people as a result of the cuts 
to welfare budget.

"The government must now address the widespread concerns expressed by religious leaders, voluntary organisations and numerous experts in implementing a full cumulative impact assessment of the impact of 
changes in the welfare system on sick and disabled people."

The disabled Labour MP Dame Anne Begg, who chairs the work and pensions select committee, told that debate in February that a CIA was vital because "no one knows precisely the full force of everything that 
may be falling on individual families and individual households".

She added: "Unless we do that cumulative impact assessment, we will never know, and in the meantime those families and households are struggling to makes ends meet, falling into debt and having to make the 
choice between eating and heating."

She said that disabled people had been hardest hit by social care cuts, the bedroom tax, and changes to council tax relief and housing benefit, as well as employment and support allowance reforms, and cuts 
introduced through the new personal independence payment.

The commission's suggestion that a CIA can and should be carried out will be severely embarrassing to Conservative work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who has consistently refused to order such research

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