Punitive cuts to disability payments

The article on the lady living with multiple sclerosis fearful of losing the welfare support needed to retain her independent living (Disability grant cut: a life and death issue, 14 February) will strike a chord with anyone whose work brings them into contact with the benefit system. Disability living allowance (DLA) and attendance allowance (for older people) were designed to be enabling benefits, not a measure of how sick or infirm you were.

How many readers understand how anxiety swells to intolerable levels for people receiving this arbitrary benefit and their carers when the package from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) drops on the mat containing forms to apply for renewal? Imagine having to plead every two, three or five years for half your income. Even before the politicians and their agents at the DWP made their absurd comments that the benefits were too easily awarded, the system has applied judgments to individual cases so bizarre that the term Kafkaesque (or Orwellian) can be appropriately applied.

I have represented 55 claims at independent appeal tribunals for benefits relating to severe and enduring mental ill health. In every single case a rejection has been overturned or the award substantially increased. I am no hotshot advocate. I just apply the descriptors of incapacity that the DWP themselves have set. DLA is not means-tested and it can take up to a year before an appeal is heard – a year of misery as, unlike other benefits, all payments are stopped awaiting the outcome. The system stinks and has done for a long time.

John Byrne

Oxhey, Hertfordshire

• Polly Toynbee's article (A turbo-charged programme for accelerating inequality, 12 February) highlights the savagery of the arm's-length cuts to local government services imposed by the Cameron-Clegg government.

I am a 66-year-old man with multiple sclerosis. I receive care services in the form of direct payments from my local council in the Oxfordshire constituency of David Cameron.

I have received a letter from my social care co-ordinator stating that my payments have been reduced by 18%. She writes: "This is a result of the 'cuts' that have been implemented reducing the rates per hour. I have submitted your overview twice to get as much as I can for you, but unfortunately the reductions are beyond our control."

My condition is progressive, so that I will need more care, not less, in the months and years to come, if I am to remain with my family in my own home, rather than move to an impersonal and vastly more expensive care home.

I feel sure, moreover, that the government cuts against disabled people breach equality legislation.

Nick Lewis

Eynsham, Oxford

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