Evidence library

Through engagement alongside Disability Equality Scotland with disabled people, people living with long term conditions, and unpaid carers via polls and events, this ALLIANCE report highlights some of the difficulties arising from sharply increasing costs.

KEY CONCLUSIONS The cost of living crisis is deepening poverty and inequality across the UK. For disabled people, people living with long term conditions, and unpaid carers in particular, many were already living in poverty and excluded from society before the current crisis, which has only made their circumstances worse.

Participants at the ALLIANCE and DES hosted event during Challenge Poverty Week shared their own, often harrowing, experiences, including being unable to charge powered wheelchairs and thus being stuck at home, finding the costs of showering and bathing unaffordable, not having enough to eat, and poor mental health. Poverty is not simply a crisis of income, but of dignity and human rights.

Amongst the recommendations the report makes are:

• Emergency cost of living payments should be a priority for the Scottish Government, with £400 lump sum payments to anyone receiving disability payments, and to anyone receiving either Winter Heating Payment or Carer’s Allowance. This is costed at approximately £372 million.
• The UK Government should uprate reserved social security payments in line with inflation.
• Both Governments take actions to address the root causes of the crisis by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and poverty reduction measures, and funding these from additional windfall taxes.
• In the longer term, the approach to budgeting and the economy should put wellbeing and human rights at the centre, not GDP and profit.