I’ve been on disability benefits for 10 years in total now. After a while, they contacted me and told me that they’d actually been paying me a slightly higher amount than I was entitled to and I’d have to pay it back. So far, the extra had added up to about £2800. I spent 5 years paying back £11 a week. It was totally their own mistake but I had to lose £11 a month for 5 years, and at the time I was only getting £135 a week, so I had to live off £124 a week (and that was the total amount, for rent, utilities and food) for 5 years and got massively in debt because who can live off £124 a week?
Now again, because they wrongfully put me through an appeal that took about a year and a half, I’m massively in debt again from living off credit. I’ll never be debt free because of all this. This is why I have to spend my life begging for help on mutual aid, because the amounts paid on disability are so low (I now get more than £135 a week but still not anywhere near enough) and due to being put through appeals, told to pay money back etc I’m always in debt, so not only am I always paying off debt but the interest accrued from the debt too.
So on top of telling people to work when they clearly can’t, causing them endless stress and bullying them to death they’ve set up a system where claimants can never get out of debt either. I have to spend my life begging for people to buy me food and toothpaste and going without a lot of things. Yet the newspapers make out that disability benefits are a free-for all, so easy to claim and pay massive amounts. I remember one woman on reddit who worked as a nurse and said she only earnt £1700 a month and she could not live off that. But when I said my disability benefits are much lower than that and I couldn’t live off it either she told me disability benefits are too high and should be cut!
My disability benefits are so low, plus all this debt, that the only place I can afford to live is renting a room in an old lady’s house. She’s only renting the room out because her pension is so low that she can’t afford to live without an extra income especially since she is taxed to death, it’s not just that utility bills are astronomical but council tax is ridiculously high despite getting hardly any services for it (our rubbish is collected only twice a month and the roads are full of potholes) but even her pension gets taxed! This is why I had to beg on mutual aid for people to help us buy a washing machine, and why we can’t afford the £160 repairs for the oven. We literally can’t afford to get the oven fixed, can’t cook food unless someone comes through on mutual aid. What kind of life is this?
Because the media has a narrative to push, rather than honestly reporting.