Labour’s savage benefit cuts are about to hit older disabled people the hardest — with more than a third of those potentially affected aged 50 or over, according to new figures obtained by The Lead.
The health element of Universal Credit is paid to working age people on low incomes — usually but not always unemployed — who are assessed as too sick or disabled either to work or prepare for a return to the workplace, writes Chaminda Jayanetti.
Last year MPs voted to slash it by nearly 50 percent for most new claimants from this April, cutting it from £423.26 to £217.26 a month and freezing its cash value until 2030 – effectively a further cut due to annual inflation.
The DWP forecast that around 730,000 disabled people would lose an average of £3,000 a year by 2029/30 due to the cuts to Universal Credit health payments.
Today, figures obtained by The Lead from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) under the Freedom of Information Act show that between January 2024 and November 2025, 36 percent – more than a third – of all new claimants of the Universal Credit health element were aged 50 or over.
Pre-existing claimants, and new claimants who got their applications in before 6th April this year, aren’t affected by the cuts (unless their claim stops and they later reapply). As a result, no data is yet available on exactly who is being hit.
But data on previous applicants shows the kind of people who are likely to be affected now the cuts have taken effect, given there is unlikely to be a sudden change in the type of people who become too sick or disabled to work.
While the government claimed the benefit cuts would create an incentive for disabled people to find paid work, older disabled people face three barriers to employment – their own health, discriminatory policies and attitudes towards disabled people, and employers’ reluctance to hire older workers. But regardless of this, most new claimants over 50 will now lose out on thousands of pounds a year due to Labour’s benefit cuts.
The FOI data shows that out of the 582,115 new applicants in 2024 and 2025 who were found to have limited capacity for work and work-related activity (LCWRA), qualifying them for the Universal Credit health element, 212,129 were aged 50 or over.
Of the 11 age bands in the DWP data, running from 16-19 all the way up to 65+, the three most common were 60-64, 55-59 and 50-54, together accounting for 33 percent of all new LCWRA claims.
“Unreachable” waiting lists
“Who can survive on 50-odd pound a week? It’s absolutely terrible,” Michelle Cardno, founder of benefits advice service Fightback4Justice, told The Lead.
“The majority of the demographics of our clients, most of them are over 50,” Cardno said. “Many of them have had to give up work, and that’s the only reason they’ve claimed.”
A lot of Cardno’s clients have arthritis, back problems or fibromyalgia, with many requiring hip or knee replacements.
“The waiting lists are so long now for some of the replacements – we’ve got clients that are on them for years,” she said. “A lot of manual workers we get. I’ve got a lot of decorators, a lot of builders – people that have worked all their lives, they’ve had their hands in the air, they’ve lent on their knees. They’ve done manual jobs that have basically worn the joints away.”
She added that the shock of no longer being able to work can then lead to mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.
Last year’s proposed disability benefit cuts saw the largest revolt among Labour MPs since the general election, with the Labour government forced to ditch cuts to the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), the non-means-tested disability benefit.
Far less attention was paid to the cuts to the Universal Credit health element, which were voted through with relatively little opposition from Labour MPs.
The government claimed that cutting the Universal Credit health element, so it provides a much smaller income boost compared to the amount paid to non-disabled claimants, will act as an “incentive” to people to find work.
Last November Pat McFadden - Kendall’s successor as welfare secretary - told the House of Commons work and pensions committee that under the old system, while non-disabled claimants had to undertake weekly job search activity, ”you go through the other door [as an LCWRA claimant] and you do not have any of that and you get double the money”.
Ministerial rhetoric targeted young claimants not entering the workplace. This has been criticised as demonising younger disabled people, who like all claimants can only receive the Universal Credit health element if they have been assessed as too sick, disabled or mentally unwell to undertake any work-related activity.
But in any case, The Lead’s FOI data shows just 16 percent of new Universal Credit health element claims went to people aged 16-24 between January 2024 and November 2025.
The barriers older people face
The cuts will hit far more older people, who face high barriers to re-entering the workplace. Academic studies have found significant hiring discrimination against older applicants in Western Europe, while a British survey found 42 percent of human resources managers had faced pressure to hire younger workers, with one in seven job candidates over 50 having faced rejection explicitly due to their age.
Meanwhile, separate research found that wheelchair users in the UK were 15 percent less likely to receive a “callback” from applications for accountancy roles. The Centre for Ageing Better reported last year that “the disability employment gap rises with age” – around two-thirds of disabled people aged 25-34 are in work, compared to less than half of disabled people aged 50-65.
But despite these intersecting barriers and prejudices faced by older disabled people, Labour’s benefit cuts assume that most of them can replace their lost income with paid work.
“A lot of our clients have got osteoarthritis, things like that,” said Cardno. “And they just literally are at the point where they’re at breaking point. They wouldn’t possibly be able to take on extra hours. They’ve cut their hours because they can’t do it.”
Lin Connor started claiming the Universal Credit health element a couple of years ago in her mid-50s, meaning she’s not affected by the latest cuts. Her claim is based on a range of mental health issues and neurodiversity, exacerbated by bad experiences as a peer support worker at the crisis-ridden Norfolk and Suffolk NHS mental health trust, while ongoing mental health challenges and life traumas culminated in her attempting to end her life. Unable to secure adequate support from her employer, she subsequently resigned from her job.
She told The Lead the only way she could ever return to work would be through part-time self-employment. “I could go back to work, I could go and apply for a nine to five job,” she said. “[But] my neurodiversity, my burnout, my residual mental health – because there’s an impact there – the trauma, means that I have a limit of time, effort, energy, ability. At a point in time I would just break again.”
The safety net that isn’t
The supposed safeguards against the Universal Credit cuts are the severe conditions criteria – any new claimants covered by these criteria will get the old, higher rate of the Universal Credit health element, protecting them from the cuts.
But the criteria are tight. Under section 40A of the Universal Credit regulations, a claimant must be assessed as LCWRA and meet all the following in order to qualify as having a severe condition:
have a life-long condition diagnosed by, or accepted by, the NHS
one of the “descriptors” used in the disability benefit assessment must constantly apply to the claimant for the rest of their life
the claimant will have the disability or illness that gives rise to their benefit claim for the rest of their life
Published DWP guidance shows how it intends these criteria to be applied. It provides an explicitly non-exhaustive list of conditions that “might” meet the criteria – motor neurone disease, severe autism, Parkinson’s, all dementias, all chromosomal conditions, Huntington’s, severe irreversible cardiorespiratory failure, and severe acquired brain injury.
The guidance then sets out examples of conditions that “might not” meet the criteria:
“Conditions which might be severe at times, but recovery of function might be present for substantial periods, such as the early stages of multiple sclerosis or some people with less severe mental health conditions with periods of reasonable function”
“Conditions which might be cured by transplant / surgery / treatments or conditions which might resolve”, based on currently available treatment on the NHS
“A person within the first 12 months following a significant stroke who may recover function during rehabilitation, so whilst the condition is lifelong, function might improve”
“Some pain syndromes might not be fully understood or investigated. Unexplained symptoms might later be found to be part of a treatable condition”
The severe conditions criteria actually pre-date the Universal Credit cuts – they were used to decide which claimants would not need to be periodically reassessed to continue receiving benefits. The DWP guidance has not changed in response to the cuts.
This guidance didn’t say one of the descriptors must “constantly” apply to the claimant. That word only came in when the criteria were specifically defined in law for the first time to coincide with the cuts – section 40A of the Universal Credit regulations was only introduced in April this year.
This led to concerns that the severe conditions criteria would not protect people with fluctuating conditions, as these do not have a “constant” impact.
What “constantly” really means
Work and pensions minister Baroness Sherlock refuted these claims when the cuts were debated in the House of Lords last summer: “The assessment includes provisions to ensure consideration of how someone’s condition might fluctuate, hence the use of the terms ‘reliably’ and ‘repeatedly’ in some of the descriptors. This Bill does not change that. The idea that we have somehow changed that through using the word ‘constantly’ is not the case … The bottom line is that, if a person cannot repeat an activity within a reasonable time, they should be considered unable to complete the task at all.”
But of the 16 descriptors by which applications for the Universal Credit health element are assessed, only one uses the word “repeatedly” in a way that opens the door to fluctuating conditions (by asking if applicants can “repeatedly mobilise 50 metres within a reasonable timescale”), and only one uses the word “reliably” at all. Two other descriptors also factor in fluctuations – the descriptor relating to incontinence specifies that this should occur “at least once a week”, while another stipulates that the applicant must be supervised “for the majority of the time” for safety reasons.
The other 12 descriptors do not factor in fluctuating conditions at all – some specifically exclude them with words such as “always” and “on a daily basis”.
The DWP’s severe conditions guidance was designed around their original purpose – deciding if claimants should be periodically reassessed, not whether they should face benefit cuts. It might be reasonable that someone with a condition that can be “cured” by surgery should be reassessed after recovering from that surgery to see if they still need benefits. But that is different to saying the same person should receive vastly lower benefits while they sit on an NHS waiting list, as an incentive to find work they are unable to do.
“Mental health is going to have a right chop.[...] It’s going to be chopped. Because somebody with schizophrenia, somebody might have spent 70, 80 per cent% of their life in a mental institution or in a home, and then they do get chucked out periodically,” said Cardno. “Somebody like that won’t qualify because obviously they’ve had very brief periods of lucidity, and they’re not on [the DWP guidance list]. So I think the list is unreachable, basically. And in all the years we’ve been doing this, we do not come across people with any of those conditions.”
Connor warned that cutting benefits would make it less likely that people return to work.
“Even if you cut a tenner off, you are saying to someone, if it’s so tight for them, they’re going to have to cut down on their food or their electric or something basic,” she said. “So their aim is to get people back to work – that makes that less doable, because you can’t find the coping, the managing, the ways to enable that when you’re financially insecure. It increases the sense of insecurity, which impacts your mental health, which makes you not able to engage, makes phone calls difficult.
“And I’d say it’s dangerous because people who push through, when we push through, we may do it for a little while, but then we will end up harming ourselves to the point where some of us will actually end our lives, we might end up harming someone else.”
Disability benefit cuts and rejected applications have been linked to numerous suicides over the last 20 years.
“That’s why you call it a disability”
Valerie (not her real name), from East London, taught English as a second language for 20 years before nearly dying of Covid in the first wave of the pandemic in early 2020. She returned to her job, but was eventually forced out by Long Covid in 2022.
Trying to stay in work made her health worse. “I desperately tried to stay at work,” she told The Lead. “I think possibly a bit of stigma about going on benefits and stuff, but also I genuinely did really like my job.”
Long Covid left her with exhaustion, brain fog, breathlessness, joint inflammation, a damaged immune system and – at the time she was forced to quit work – she could no longer walk, although she has since recovered that function.
She started claiming the Universal Credit health element aged 50. Were she to have applied now, she would likely not be protected from the cuts by the severe conditions criteria because her conditions fluctuate.
“My disability is not always straightforward and predictable. I have developed some mobility problems that are related, but I didn’t expect that to happen. You can get issues.”
She has tried applying for part-time roles – the closest she got was a teaching position requiring 90 minutes a week, but the interview was cancelled on the morning it was due to take place.
“Unless they come up with a cure I think full-time work is probably out of the picture for me,” she added. “I think quite a lot of the government’s attitude to the whole thing with benefits is being angry at people for not being able to do things. But people are not just being annoying – people have disabilities, that means they can’t do things. That’s what it means, that’s why you call it a disability.”
A DWP spokesperson said: “We’re committed to moving from a welfare state to a working state, so that work always pays and people can move into good, secure jobs, and out of poverty, including those aged 50 and over.
“That’s why we’ve deployed 1,000 Pathways to Work advisers who are supporting people left behind by the previous government, are helping sick or disabled people into jobs backed by £3.5bn by the end of the parliament and removing the sickness incentive in Universal Credit.
“Those with the most severe, life-long health conditions, who will never be able to work, will see their incomes protected.” ■
About the author: Chaminda Jayanetti is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs - housing, welfare and public services.
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