Loss of the Independent Living Fund so wrong

“I would love it to be a woman, I think it would be marvellous. Not through pressure of political correctness but it sort of just feels like it’s time. I think it would just be great” AN excellent letter by Dylan Murphy last week concerning cuts for the disabled, but he left one out – the closure of the Independent Living Fund (ILF), which happened a couple of years ago, under the Cameron/ Osborne administration.

ILF was an independent trust set up by the Department of Work and Pensions to assess for and provide funding to severely disabled people so they could pay for care to help them live, as it said, more independently.

I declare an interest. I became seriously ill and severely disabled at 42 and discovered that the only help then available meant I’d spend the rest of my life in bed staring at the wall, being provided with meals twice a day and being kept approximately clean while I slowly rusted away mentally.

Without ILF, which started around then, I’d have died long since in self defence, or of one of the complications of immobility. But they closed it down a couple of years ago. The story they told was that they were cutting out an unnecessary layer of expensive admin and that they would hand the cash over to local authorities who would carry on shelling it out to the same people.

I was told recently by a Kirklees social worker that not a penny of that ILF money ever reached them.

So the last Conservative Government, in effect, drove a