An open letter to Ed Miliband: don’t close the Independent Living Fund

Dear Ed,

I’ve been a life long Labour supporter and also a party member for much of my life. I voted for you in the Labour party leadership election after attending your campaign talk at Haverstock School. When I was a kid, my house in Tottenham was routinely used as a campaign office to help fight for the Labour party in local elections. So I’m writing to you as a friend.

With that said, I feel wholly let down by your decision not to oppose the closure of the Independent Living Fund (ILF) and it makes me question voting and campaigning for you in the forthcoming general election. I say that with a heavy heart.

As a severely disabled person, I receive funding from the ILF to help me employ the help I need to live in my own home and lead a full and independent life.

This in turn enables me to work full time, as a technology journalist covering the digital economy.

Surely, given all of the rhetoric you have espoused regarding winning the votes of disabled people and supporting our right to live a full and active life, as well as rewarding hard working people, I’m exactly the kind of person you should be fighting for.

But the planned closure of the ILF this June has the potential to turn my world upside down. My ‘care package’ is fragile as it is — I haven’t had an increase in care funding, either from the ILF or local authority in many years, meaning I’ve had to freeze wages for the personal assistants I employ — and closing the ILF and expecting social services to fill the funding gap will likely only go one way.

The pressures on adult social care are well known in an authority like Haringey, and it’s very possible the ILF funding that is supposedly being transferred and redistributed locally will get absorbed and not ring fenced, resulting in further real cuts to my care package, and its eventual and inevitable collapse.

This would mean I’m no longer able to live an independent life (and in my own home) — as I have done for the last 22 years — which in turn would mean losing my job.

That feels entirely counter to your stated beliefs and policies.

Along with the much-touted and very real cost of living crisis, there is a pending cost of independent living crisis, for disabled people like me and many, many others.

As a start, please reconsider your policy on the closure of the ILF, and commit to repealing it if and when you win the upcoming general election.

I’m counting on you.