Crippen Cartoons cartoons at the cutting edge of disability

Well, there you have it. This government place so much value on us Crips that they’ve decided to increase spending on services for disabled people by an incredible … 29.5p per person!

Launched on the back of the government’s new National Disability Strategy – which promises to bring about “practical and lasting change” – analysis by Disability News Service (DNS) has shown the government has pledged just £4.13 million of new funding in the strategy, despite claims by prime minister Boris Johnson that the document is the “down payment” on his promise to “build back better and fairer, for all our disabled people”.

Although ministers claimed last month that the commitments in the strategy were “supported by £1.6bn of funding”, more than a billion pounds of that was announced in last year’s spending review as part of a rise in spending on special educational needs, much of it allocated to supporting segregated schools. The government has yet to explain where the other £500 million funding has been allocated, but it is not thought to be new money.

But when divided among the 14.1 million disabled people the strategy says there are in the UK, this total of £4.13 million amounts to just 29.5p per person.

Mark Harrison, a member of the steering group of the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (ROFA), said the new funding of just 29.5p per disabled person was “an insult”. He described the strategy as “smoke and mirrors”, and he added: “It puts all the responsibility on disabled people to overcome the barriers, rather than removing the barriers. It’s a list of announcements, it’s not a strategy.”

Fazilet Hadi, head of policy for Disability Rights UK and speaking on behalf of the new DPO Forum England, a network of many of the country’s leading organisations of disabled people, pointed out that even the small amount of new funding had been taken from existing budgets. She said: “The £1.6 billion spend announced as part of the National Disability Strategy was money already allocated to departmental budgets from previous spending reviews.”

Tracey Lazard, chief executive of Inclusion London, said the apparent new funding of just £4.13 million showed that the “so called strategy is really nothing more than a cynical re-packaging of current polices and current budgets, all of which have failed to get our rights and equality back on track”.

Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software

Boris Johnson is standing holding a copy of the National Disability Strategy and is being confronted by a small group of angry disabled people. Each of the disabled people is holding a cheque for 29.5p printed on it with a red cross across the amount. At their feet is a copy of Disability News Service which carries the headline ‘ DNS calculate new spending only worth 29.5p per disabled person’. Boris is saying to them: “Because it costs more to actually allocate this money to you all, we’re going to have to deduct it from your benefits!”