We circulated the letter to other Headway Groups in Scotland and to national newspapers. The Herald published the letter and a number of Scottish Headway Groups have picked it up and are going to send it into their local papers.
Headway UK also picked up the letter and now they have circulated it across England and Wales.
It has also spurred the national body into action as they then circulated a statement calling for the government to stop cuts to those with disabilities, and to stop using the new welfare cuts against us.
Below is the original letter we sent out. The Herald cut it slightly and didn’t get the right names at the end of their version, but the main points were there.
It’s clear that just sending a letter to the paper won’t be enough to protect those with ABI. But at least it’s the start of our campaign.
Please send this –or your own version to your local MP and to the prime minister.
Your local MP can be found at http://findyourmp.parliament.uk/
Open letter to David Cameron
Dear Mr Cameron,
In your rush to cut Welfare and Public Services we feel you are in danger of punishing those with disabilities. You say you want to protect the vulnerable, well perhaps listening to what we have to say may be a start.
It has become increasingly clear that the constant pronouncements by Government Ministers and Departments, and your voices in the media, that benefits should be made harder to claim, is having a very detrimental effect on the well being of people with a Brain Injury. We feel those jibes of “scrounger” being laid very heavily at our door. This causes stress and anxiety and further illness to people who are trying to cope with a life less than ordinary.
We already experience the presumption by DWP that because we don’t have a visible disability and therefore we must be dodging work. The new, misnamed, Employment Support Allowance is no help to getting work. It feels to us like a punishment for having a disability. The new tests you are running give us no hope that there will be any greater understanding of Acquired Brain Injury. These tests seem to focus on physical ability and not on cognitive functions. Many of us do not show an obvious physical impairment, and even those who do, may have additional problems. We have “a hidden disability” and it looks as if our conditions are now set to be completely ignored.
Discrimination in the workplace by employers continues despite the Equality Acts. So when you take away our benefits, how are we to expected to find employers who will make reasonable adjustments for our conditions? How are we going to survive when we are thrown into competition with a burgeoning job hunting population who don’t need employers to make any changes?
On top of this you intend to cut the services many of us rely on. There can be no doubt that we will suffer unless you heed the call of the many campaigns and charities saying that these cuts will effect the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. Your big society cannot make up for dedicated, paid services. Our own charity, Headway Glasgow, like many others, relies on funding from the public sector to furnish our support and services. If that goes, we then experience the double whammy of lost income from benefits and lost support from our public services and our charity. We are not the only group in this situation.
We therefore call on you to stop cutting our services; stop using the benefits system to harass us; and maintain the benefits which are our lifeline.
Members and Board of Headway Glasgow
Also Headway Dundee and Headway Ayrshire.
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