Personal Independence Payments, welfare reform and the shrinking disability category

Abstract

The question of who counts and how we construct just who can ‘be disabled’ is central to our concerns in disability studies. As Stone makes clear, disability is exactly what a state deems it to be; the very malleable nature of the category has been exploited to widen or more commonly to narrow just who counts as disabled. This article will apply and adapt Stone’s thesis to current plans to revise the Personal Independence Payment extra costs benefit. Using official and disabled people’s narratives, the article will make clear the force with which new definitions of disability are being put forward. This process arguably risks doing state violence to a number of disabled people. These reforms have also used the language of independence in a way that fundamentally distorts the origins and potential of the term in an enabling society.

Keywords:

• disability category
• benefits
• PiP
• shrinking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. An exception to this was of course evident in the response to mental health system survivors leaving long-stay hospitals in the 1980s, facing considerable stigma, often becoming ‘revolving door patients’, being seen as a threat to social order – the reality was that there was often nowhere to go and no real community to rely on (Beresford and Wallcraft in Barnes and Mercer 1997, 7).