TUC shuns government’s disability organisation

The TUC’s Disabled Workers’ Committee has decided not to accept an invitation from the government to join its new Disability Action Alliance (DAA).

It was decided that joining the DAA — an organisation recently set up by the Office for Disability Issues to encourage groups representing disabled people to work together — would restrict the TUC’s ability to campaign against government policies that are affecting disabled people.

Chair of the TUC Disabled Workers’ Committee Seán McGovern said: “The government has been attacking the living standards of disabled people for almost three years now and things are getting worse.

“Unions are working with disabled people against these brutal and inhumane cuts, and are campaigning against the government’s unnecessary and damaging austerity drive.”

He said that work capability assessments, the closure of the Independent Living Fund, the switch from Disability Living Allowance to the Personal Independent Payment, as well as the bedroom tax were all punishing and impoverishing disabled people and their families.

“Joining this government-inspired alliance now would be to pretend that none of this is happening. We want to see all disabled people and the organisations that represent them continuing to oppose government policy and not conned into becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution,” he concluded.