Britain has a new prime minister. Andy Burnham took over from Sir Keir Starmer on Monday 20 July, and his first week in office produced a run of cost-of-living announcements that campaigners have cautiously welcomed. The welcome came with a clear condition attached: the measures so far are broad relief that helps most households a little, and the real test, the one that decides whether people with disabilities are pulled out of poverty rather than held at its edge, has not happened yet. That test arrives this autumn.
This is a follow-up to our earlier piece on the United Kingdom calling its main disability benefit not fit for purpose, and it is reporting on a developing situation, not advice about anyone’s own claim. It also sits alongside our reporting on nearly four in ten UK households with a person with a disability facing food insecurity, which is the poverty the first-week measures are being measured against.
What changed in the first week
In his first speech outside 10 Downing Street, Burnham said he wanted to “do something to give people some breathing space now, some help with the cost of living.” The following day he set out what that would mean first.
The government will remove VAT, currently charged at five per cent, from domestic electricity bills from October. According to Disability News Service, this is expected to cut bills for an average household by about £45 a year, though it is funded so far only until April 2027, with further measures expected at the budget later this year from the new chancellor, John Healey. Burnham also announced a £2 cap on single bus tickets in England outside London, running from 1 January to 31 December 2027, which replaces the existing £3 cap and is expected to cost around £400 million.
On benefits, Burnham has so far offered signals rather than detail. In that first speech he said he wanted to find a “fair and sustainable way to bring the welfare bill down.” Disability News Service reported that he kept Pat McFadden as work and pensions secretary while replacing the social care ministers, which campaigners read as continuity at the department that runs disability benefits. He suggested he would reduce social security spending partly by getting more young people into work, with more mental health support, an approach that broadly tracks the direction the previous government had already set.
What campaigners said
The responses from organizations run by people with disabilities were a study in cautious hope.
Fazilet Hadi, head of policy at Disability Rights UK, said the first two years of the Labour government had seen “a worsening of living conditions for millions of disabled people,” listing spiralling food, energy and housing costs, cuts to social security, rising charges for social care, and a crisis in the Access to Work scheme that helps people stay employed. Burnham, she said, “offers hope of a reset,” given his record working with organizations run by people with disabilities as mayor of Greater Manchester, but “only time will tell whether his premiership puts Labour on a different path.” She called on him to prioritize “fairness over budget projections” in the review of Personal Independence Payment, to abandon further proposed cuts, to set up a National Care Service, and to stop the rationing of Access to Work.
Tressa Burke, chief executive of Glasgow Disability Alliance, welcomed Burnham’s tone and the removal of VAT from electricity bills, but pressed for more. She called for “reversing the punitive and illogical approach being taken to disability benefits,” and noted that disability benefits exist to recognize the extra costs many people with disabilities face so that those costs “do not become barriers to everyday life.” She added a point that runs underneath the whole debate: an approach “which recognises that not everyone can work and that disabled people need access to decent out-of-work benefits.”
A regional group, Difference North East, used an open letter to ask Burnham to remove the time restrictions that stop many people with disabilities from using their concessionary bus passes before 9.30am, a change its director said would make it easier to reach work, education, healthcare and everyday life.
The test that comes this autumn
The measure campaigners are really watching is the review of Personal Independence Payment. As we reported earlier, the government’s Timms review found that PIP is not fit for purpose, largely because its points test cannot read a condition that changes from day to day. That review published its interim findings in July, and its full recommendations for a redesigned system are due in the autumn.
That is where the hope and the worry meet. Burnham’s language about a “fair and sustainable” welfare bill, and his focus on moving young people into work, leaves open whether the autumn redesign will deliver a genuinely better assessment or a cheaper one. Disability News Service has reported that the disability minister leading the review warned there “may well be reductions” in spending. Campaigners who welcomed the tone of the first week are clear that the tone is not the test. The recommendations are.
Where Canada fits
The specifics do not cross the ocean, but the shape of the argument does. Canada runs its own cost-of-living relief through broad measures, and its disability-specific supports sit separately: the Canada Disability Benefit, which launched in 2025, layered on top of the Disability Tax Credit that gates eligibility for it. Watching another country redesign a disability benefit is not idle, either, as we found when Australia set about rewriting its National Disability Insurance Scheme. The British week is a clean illustration of a distinction that matters here too. Cutting a tax on electricity or capping a bus fare helps nearly everyone a little. It does not, on its own, close the gap that disability-specific benefits are meant to address: the extra, recurring costs of living with a disability that a general measure never sees.
For readers here, the useful takeaway is not a policy to copy but a lens to read your own system with. When a government leads with broad cost-of-living relief, it is worth asking the separate question campaigners in Britain are asking of Burnham: what is happening to the benefits designed specifically for the extra costs of disability, and are they being made more adequate or quietly trimmed? That question has an autumn answer in the UK. It is a standing one in Canada.
By the Living Unlimited Team
Sources
- Disability News Service, Burnham’s cost-of-living steps welcomed, but disabled campaigners say he must do much more, 23 July 2026
- Disability News Service, Burnham offers hints on DWP policy as he promises a ‘fair and sustainable’ way to bring down spending, 23 July 2026
- Disability News Service, McFadden and Alexander keep their jobs, but Burnham replaces social care ministers, 23 July 2026
- Living Unlimited, Britain Just Called Its Disability Benefit Not Fit for Purpose (LU204)
- Government of Canada, Canada Disability Benefit
