‘Every Disabled Child Matters’ demands DLA take-up campaign
23 August 2007
The Every Disabled Child Matters consortium is calling for a major take-up campaign on Disability Living Allowance to lift families with disabled children out of poverty.
The call is made in a new campaign briefing, ‘Disabled children and child poverty’, published on 15 August in support of the Campaign to End Child Poverty. The briefing shows that, as a result of additional costs and barriers to work:
- Over one in five families with children with a disability can’t afford to feed their family properly
- It costs three times as much to bring up a child with a disability as other children
- Only 6% of these families are ‘comfortably off’, with 93% reporting some form of financial difficulty
To end child poverty for families with disabled children, EDCM wants:
- A major take-up campaign on Disability Living Allowance (DLA)
- An increase in the childcare element of working tax credit for these families to £300 per week
- An increase in DLA to meet the real cost of caring for a child with a disability
Families with disabled children are both 50 per cent more likely to be in debt and 50 per cent less likely to be able to afford essentials like new clothes or school outings for their children than other families. Steve Broach, EDCM Campaign Manager, comments:
'It is scandalous that families with disabled children are forced to choose between going into debt or going without. We want government to prove that disabled children are at the heart of the efforts to end child poverty by committing to a major take-up campaign on Disability Living Allowance, the critical source of extra income for families.
At present, only around 50% of families with disabled children receive DLA. This means that potentially over 100,000 families are missing out on vital extra support to which they should be entitled.'
The lack of appropriate services and supports also pushes families into poverty. The briefing tells the story of the family of Amy, aged 7. Since her diagnosis at 5 weeks, her family have had 774 meetings with professionals, spent 4,942 hours on appointments regarding Amy’s needs and driven over 11,000 miles to these appointments. As a result of this uncoordinated support, Amy’s mother has had to give up work, increasing the financial and emotional strain on the family.
Steve Broach continues:
‘The government have started to make disabled children a priority through providing an extra £340 million to services in the recent Aiming High for Disabled Children review. Now we need to see evidence that Ed Balls’ commitment to disabled children will extend to making sure that the child poverty strategy delivers for our families.’
The Every Disabled Child Matters campaign is made up of four organisations: Contact a Family, the Council for Disabled Children, Mencap and the Special Educational Consortium.
Listen to a podcast interview with Louise Franklin from the Every Disabled Child Matters Campaign:
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