The Reform guide to making your life more shit

August 19, 2026

Cartoon of a large open cardboard delivery box, empty except for one small grab rail and packing paper. Caption: YOUR NEW SUPPORT PACKAGE.

On Monday morning Robert Jenrick stood up in a room full of journalists in Westminster and announced fifty billion pounds of welfare cuts. He called it the largest reform in a generation. He is not wrong about the size.

Here is what it does to you.

1. Get ill, lose the money

Personal Independence Payment abolished. The health element of Universal Credit abolished for working-age adults. There are 6.9 million people on disability benefits in this country. Under the plan 2.16 million keep what they have. The other 2.89 million have theirs modified or withdrawn.

"This is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs," Jenrick told the room. That is true. It is also how you describe a rise in mental illness when you would rather not call it one.

2. Prove it, then prove it again

Cartoon: a cheerful official with a clipboard sits across a desk from a weary person with a walking stick. Caption: PROVE IT AGAIN.

The reassessment runs three to four years. That is three to four years of brown envelopes, forms written by people who have never had to fill one in and an assessment centre with a lift that does not work.

Scope called it pushing disabled people into poverty and calling it compassion. Mencap warned about hundreds of thousands being plunged into isolation. Fewer than one in a hundred people on health-related Universal Credit moves into work in any given month, which is not a British failing. Nobody anywhere has solved it by taking the money away first and hoping.

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3. Take a grab rail instead of the rent

Cash for what Reform calls low-level conditions stops. In its place come disability support accounts, run by councils and mayors, covering equipment, adaptations, transport and personal assistance.

A grab rail is a good thing to be given. It does not heat the house.

4. Get sick once, become too expensive to hire

Employers would have to buy return to work cover, an insurance product paying for the first two years after anybody goes off sick.

The saving does not disappear. It lands on the payroll of every small business in the country, hardest of all on the person that business is deciding whether to take on. Nobody will ever tell you that is why you did not get the job.

5. Lose it for being foreign, after thirty years here

Housing benefit, pension credit, jobseeker's allowance, child benefit, free childcare, disability payments. All gone for foreign nationals, including EU citizens with settled status who have been paying tax here since before some of Reform's candidates could drive.

Most people who come here cannot claim a penny anyway, because no recourse to public funds is stamped on the visa. Of the five million or so who are entitled to something, about 4.3 million are EU citizens whose rights sit inside a treaty this country signed and celebrated. Take it off them and you get arbitration, penalty payments and 1.3 million Britons in Spain and France holding the very same deal.

Reform has budgeted £500 million for the ones who get sent home. They have costed the retaliation before they have passed the policy.

6. Meanwhile, upstairs

While all this is being weighed to the nearest pound, the flagship tax policy is still abolishing inheritance tax on estates below £2 million.

You will not inherit two million pounds. Neither will I. Around 96 per cent of estates in this country never trouble inheritance tax in the first place.

Woman in a black The Further Right, The Further Wrong t-shirt outdoors — Nobody at that podium is proposing a reassessment programme for inherited property.
Shirt: The Further Right, The Further Wrong · £25.95

So 2.89 million disabled people are going to be asked to prove they still deserve £143 a week.

The part where they need you looking the other way

Cartoon: a long queue of small figures holding brown envelopes on the left, a well fed man raising a glass in a deckchair outside a large house on the right. Caption: SOME OF US ARE FINE.

No wonder they want you angry about immigrants.

While you are busy blaming the bloke who picked your strawberries, you are not asking why a stockbroker from Dulwich gets to decide whether you can afford to be ill.