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UK News

Plans to cut benefits for disabled people will backfire, warns Christian charity

Mike Townsend, a trustee with Torch, an organisation supporting people with sight loss, is welcoming a decision by the House of Lords to reject the plans.

The Lords voted by 283 to 198 to turn down a clause of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill which would see people in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) category for the Employment Support Allowance (ESA) losing out on £30 a week, from next year.

Speaking on Premier's News Hour, Mike Townsend said: "This £30 is vital to keep people going and enabling them to go on that journey to employment. It's going to leave these people unable to ...get really engaged with the job-seeking process and ...really getting on with life.

"Cutting their money is not going to get them into work. It just leaves them further and further abandoned. What we need to do is spend a bit and more imaginatively use the subsidies and courses that they've got on offer to specifically meet the needs of disabled people.

"It takes a lot of work to think about some of the ways of engaging with disabled people to get them into work. You need to think about adaptions in the employment workplace. You need to think about ways of training people, upskilling people."

As members of the House of Lords debated the proposed changes, Tory former health secretary Lord Lansley defended them, saying: "The bigger the gap between income in work and income through benefits, the greater the likelihood for people seeking work and finding it.

"It is effectively a kind of economic law of gravity. We should be assisting people into work."

Meanwhile, crossbencher Lord Low of Dalston warned the cutting ESA from £103 to £73 a week would have a "catastrophic" impact on disabled people and increase poverty levels.

The peer added: "It will exacerbate poverty among the disabled - a third of working age disabled adults live in poverty already compared with only a fifth of those who are not disabled.

"The Government's proposals would push many further towards, or actually into, poverty."

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