IN January 2016, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, promised a revolution in mental health care and announced almost £1bn in funding to support the promise.
Fourteen months (and a new Prime Minister) later and the Conservatives are planning to tighten the criteria for claimants of Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which will see tens of thousands of people with mental health and anxiety conditions such as schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder lose the benefit altogether.
This is a result of the Government losing a court case in January and, rather than accept the ruling, it is changing the regulations to specifically exclude mental illness as grounds for claiming PIP.
It is doing this without any kind of debate or vote in Parliament so it has fallen to Liberal Democrat peers to table a motion in the House of Lords to attempt to block this change.
In 2002, Theresa May said that the Conservative Party needed to shed the “nasty party” image. Now that she’s in charge, she seems determined to prove that it is still the “nasty party”.
Philip Knowles, chair, Richmondshire Liberal Democrats
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