‘We Must Resist’: UK Welfare Cuts Will Harm Disabled Artists

I am writing this from my bed. My arms ache in waves; my fingertips tingle, numb. This is not new – it’s the cost of two meetings outside in one day. Normally, I’d be resting, but my priorities have shifted. I need to get these words out to you while there’s still time.

Last week, the UK government announced changes to the welfare system, aiming to save GB£5 billion annually by 2030 and, in the words of a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) press release on 18 March, ‘to get more people off welfare and into work’. These proposals will make it harder to claim Personal Independence Payment (PIP), a vital benefit for more than 3.6 million disabled people. PIP has two components: daily living and mobility. The government plans to tighten assessments for the former, meaning many will lose support. According to a 23 March Financial Times report, a third of current PIP recipients are expected to lose it, some facing a cut of up to 64 percent of their total income. 

In the past few days, I’ve spoken to my crip peers – friends and strangers alike. We all had hope for a Labour government, but their rhetoric is framing disabled people as unproductive burdens, echoing the darkest days of the austerity measures implemented in 2010 by former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne. It was during this time that artist Bella Milroy had her PIP revoked for the first time. ‘It was like being made redundant from a job, except that job was my life’, she told me. Now, she finds herself waiting for reassessment once again. 

I keep thinking about Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory (2016), written in allyship with Black Lives Matter, about bodies that can’t be out protesting. It’s not just the risk of physically being there that poses a threat to our health: PIP also surveils our bodies, and any moment of perceived wellness can be used as evidence to withdraw support. Numerous people I spoke to shared horror stories of how their social media was scanned to prove they could leave the house, or their art practice used as evidence of their capability.

I called the artist Ángela de la Cruz. The first thing she said was, ‘I am useful to society! I employ six people. I pay a huge amount of taxes.’ The absurdity: disabled people forced to prove their worth economically. De la Cruz, a hugely successful international artist with a 30-year career, relies on assistance for every task. Still, she goes to her studio daily, spending GB£400 a week on an adapted car and a trained driver. Mobility PIP covers, at most, GB£71 per week. In months without sales, she must cut studio days or lay off staff – many of whom are artists in precarious roles.

PIP acknowledges that being disabled is expensive – it’s there to help cover the cost of access adjustments regardless of your income. For disabled artists, PIP isn’t a luxury – it allows them to work. Frank R. Jagoe told me, ‘Being an artist in London usually means working several jobs on the side. I am physically and mentally disabled and not able to work more than one or two days a month outside my artistic practice. PIP has been a lifeline. Without it, I would lose GB£137 per week, my studio and likely my housing. The times I have attempted steady employment without benefits, such as lecturing, have severely damaged my health, including periods where I almost died. My ability to make art is in no way proof I can sustain other employment. Before I was on benefits, I could not imagine a future for myself – I have never been able to financially support myself in a sustained way. […]  PIP and LCWRA [Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity] mean I can make art instead of working a job until I become gravely ill. Without PIP, there isn’t really a backup plan.’

We are easy targets. The sick and exhausted, already traumatized by relentless self-advocacy and being forced to run the bureaucratic gauntlet required to access care

Writer Gabrielle de la Puente, from the duo The White Pube, tells me something similar. After five years of long Covid, she blames her worsening condition on not having the money to rest. ‘I was rejected for PIP in 2021, despite being housebound, so I struggled forward. I thought I was lucky that my artistic practice – writing – was something I could still do in bed. I carried on publishing through fatigue, pain, orthostatic headaches and cognitive difficulties because I had no choice. It’s easier to succeed as a writer than to get better – it’s like a Dorian Gray compromise. In 2025, I am as sick as I was in 2021 […] Because I don’t have money propping me up, I have to go out and get it. Now, at the start of year five, I have finally secured a life-changing GB£28.70 per week from the DWP. I am just going to get sicker and sicker, and if this continues, soon I won’t even be able to write.’

We are easy targets. The sick and exhausted, already traumatized by relentless self-advocacy and being forced to run the bureaucratic gauntlet required to access care. All week, since the announcement, I have been watching artists burn out, crash, disappear. We began drafting an open letter documenting how PIP enables disabled artists to work, but people were too exhausted to contribute. Jamila Prowse, who originally intended to write this article, had to go offline to rest. The news triggered a domino effect, each of us toppling under its weight. Even gathering to fight back exacts an enormous personal cost.

Labour insists they want to help disabled people back into work. Yet, they are cutting the benefits that allow us to work – all while maintaining tax breaks for the wealthy. As Prowse puts it, ‘Many disabled people I know are actually facilitated in working by PIP. It allows us to prioritize flexible jobs, knowing we have a safety net when our bodies fail us. Without it, many of us will not survive.’

Made through a narrow, ableist and outdated lens of disability, PIP was never fit for purpose, remaining unable to account for fluctuating and invisible conditions – conditions that have only increased post-pandemic. But for many, these benefits are the difference between life and death. They cover care, basic survival and independence from coercive or controlling situations. And yet, disabled people are forced into hyper-vigilance, always justifying their existence to a system that sees them as an expense to be cut. If this is the direction in which we’re heading, what happens to disabled artists? Will the Arts Council cut funding to access support next? 

And the most frustrating part? That this is just a marketing campaign. According to a 16 March article by Anna Gross and Amy Borrett in the Financial Times, spending on non-pension welfare as a whole has remained steady at five percent of GDP since 2004. The increase in disability spending is only because other benefits have been slashed, forcing more people onto PIP.  

If the artistic community truly stands for equity, diversity and inclusion, the able-bodied must stand – with or without us – in support. PIP feels like work in itself: it is the payment for having to do the daily job of advocating for oneself. To be disabled in the UK is to fight, constantly; to know your survival is conditional, precarious. But it is also to believe that life should be more than that – that everyone has the right to security, joy, dignity. That work should not be the ultimate measure of a person’s worth. That we do not have to accept this erosion of care. That we can, and must, resist.

Disabled People Against Cuts has arranged a protest on Wednesday 26 March at 11am outside Downing Street 

^{Main image: Bella Milroy, It Feels Like This (detail), 2024. Courtesy: the artist and Shape Arts}