By Peter Beresford, professor of social work at Brunel University and chair of service user organisation Shaping Our Lives
A disturbing new consensus seems to be emerging in UK social policy. For the first time in modern history, people in poverty and receiving benefits can expect no support from any of the three major political parties.
All favour the kind of radical welfare reform that has long been code for attacks on claimants and sought to arbitrarily force and keep people off benefits.
Proposals are now focused on people on sickness and disability benefits, like the new employment support allowance, incapacity benefits and disability living allowance. This most affects the very people that government says it wants to support, involve and empower as social care service users: disabled people and mental health service users.
Even in the worst days of new right attacks on a so-called "dependency" culture, people on benefits had the support of the Labour Party. Now they are friendless in parliament.
Once distinctions were drawn between the "deserving" and the "undeserving", with "able-bodied" claimants the focus of attack. Now everyone, from people with long-term conditions to those with life limiting illnesses, is under arbitrary investigation, as Citizens Advice highlighted recently.
Confrontational policies
Engineering the changes are two politicians associated with Labour, Lord Freud and Frank Field MP. Lord Freud was formerly a Labour government welfare adviser and is now minister for welfare reform. Frank Field, formerly director of the Child Poverty Action Group and an acolyte of Peter Townsend, advocate of more generous relative models of poverty, is born again as welfare reform tsar, charged with massively reducing welfare spend.
The coalition's hostile and confrontational welfare policies against disabled people and mental health service users can only be expected to spark a new response from service users and their organisations.
We are likely to see an end to years of trust-building through user involvement. It's difficult to see what future role such information-gathering exercises can have when the least powerful have become the prime target for spending cuts, rather than a key voice to be listened to.
Direct action
Service users and their organisations are already looking for new ways of making that voice heard. This could be through forming their own trade union, or a new political party. It may mean forging new coalitions with other progressive organisations.
Certainly it is likely to mean a move to the streets and very public protest. We can expect a renewed emphasis on campaigning, direct action and demonstrations. Having found a voice, service users will not readily let it be lost.
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