This Liverpool community has more disability benefit claimants than anywhere. Where do they get help?

James used to get 30,000 steps a day in when he worked on a building site. But when he went back to work after lockdown, his calves started swelling up. He didn’t know why.

Over the course of two years, his legs kept giving way, kept swelling up, leaving James (not his real name) unable to work. Doctors gave him statins, and a trip to hospital yielded no answers. Yet the 59-year-old found himself unable to qualify for personal independence payment (PIP).

“I just kept getting knocked back, six points, four points, three points,” he tells me. “I gave up in the end, I said we’ve tried everything.” So he came to the Bridge Community Centre.

Around the table, in this community centre in a Liverpool suburb, there are similar stories: one woman, Diane (also not her real name), who uses a wheelchair, was knocked back three times. It was only after a court case that a seven-year wait to get PIP ended. When Layla (not her real name)’s husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s recently, she went through the application for attendance allowance, a benefit giving money if somebody needs looking after. “I did fill it in, and I filled it in wrong,” she tells me.

Marshalling them is Sue Carson, who they come to for help with their claims. Glasses on top of her tied-back black hair and striped shirt sleeves rolled up, Carson sits at the table, encouraging the others to share their stories.

“I don’t like anyone falling through the net, especially if they’re vulnerable,” she tells me. 

Carson, 60, runs the Bridge Community Centre, operating out of an old pub in the Walton constituency of Liverpool. They’re here five days a week, dishing out advice and fighting on people’s behalf. By Carson’s count, they’re up to 180 “wins” a year.

“Life’s too short. If you’re entitled and you’ve got that factual, actual information from the GP surgery or the hospitals and everything else, then I will fight for you all day long,” Carson says.

“It’s not just about nine til five in here, you’re talking right the way through the night. I get messages one o’clock, two o’clock in the morning, struggling,” she says.

A city in the firing line

The Labour Party Conference is in Liverpool with the party on the ropes. Had Keir Starmer got his way this year, the city would have suffered.

The attention of the country – or at least the media and political classes – will for a few days focus on the dockside ACC Conference Centre. But away from the cameras, a little bit to the north west, the debate over the government’s direction could have a profound impact.

Liverpool Walton, where the Bridge is located, holds a distinction: of any constituency in the UK, it has the highest rate of disability benefits claimants. Some 18.6% of the working age population are in receipt of PIP, amounting to 12,095 people out of 65,056.

Four constituencies in the city – Walton, Knowsley, Bootle, and West Derby – are in the top 15 in the country for PIP claimants. Across just those four areas, Liverpool’s economy would have seen almost £100 million vanish a year from Labour’s planned benefit cuts, a report from Health Equity North found.

Walton would have been hit harder than almost anywhere else, with an estimated £26.2m disappearing from the constituency’s economy – amounting to £403 per person.

The link between poverty and disability is strong: the areas hardest hit by potential cuts already have worse general health and struggling local economies, one study found earlier this year. Walton ranks third highest in the country for constituencies on the Index of Multiple Deprivation measure.

As a government searching for its soul came to the city, I was in Walton to discover what life is like for those on benefits, who is trying to help them, and where we go next.

‘I can eat decent food’

Sue Carson doesn’t skirt around calling Walton deprived. She’s got a good view of the sharp end. She used to claim benefits herself for an anxiety disorder, but couldn’t face dealing with the system. “I had to literally walk away,” she says.

For Diane, without the money it brings in, she’d struggle to leave the house. “Mine’s a condition where eventually I’ll be paralysed from the waist down,” she says. “I’m that severe I don’t have to have the checks every three years.”

She adds: “I’m lost without either a wheelchair or a scooter. My scooter’s broken down at the moment, so I’m relying on my wheelchairs til that’s repaired. If I didn’t have that money, I’d be in the house constantly, and I’d really struggle mentally.”

Now the money’s coming through, James can see a change in his life. “It’s made a big difference. I know now I can go to the shops, I can buy me daughter something, I can eat decent food,” he says.

The politics of fear

In 2017, Liverpool City Council added up the cost of austerity on the city. It found that more than 55,000 families in the city had lost out, producing a month-by-month list of how benefits and spending cuts had hit residents. Another report found the council’s spending power fell by 35% from 2011 to 2014, equating to £780 per person per year lost. If you take the findings of another study – that each £100 reduction in funding cut lives by 1.3 and 1.2 months for men and women respectively – then austerity made life 10 months shorter for the residents of Liverpool. By 2020, the council was on the brink of bankruptcy.

It was on this landscape that Labour’s benefits plans cast a shadow.

Labour had planned to make it harder to get PIP – with claimants having to score more points on a single measure to qualify. By the government’s own measures, it would have seen 430,000 applicants a year rejected by 2030.

But a revolt from MPs meant Starmer was unable to get it through, abandoning the plans. In the meantime, PIP cuts are off the table until the Timms Review, due in autumn 2026, concludes.

New secretary Pat McFadden has so far not signalled a different direction. “There are at least a proportion of people on long-term sickness and disability benefits who, with the right support in place, could work,” he told the Telegraph in an interview after his appointment, promising not to assess people and then “forget about them forevermore”.

Mo Stewart, a fellow at the Centre for Welfare Reform and research lead of the Preventable Harm Project, says the new government’s rhetoric around disability benefits follows a tradition dating back to Margaret Thatcher. “Thatcher’s cabinet decided the only way to break the psychological security of the welfare state was to adopt what they called the politics of fear. And every administration since then has been gradually reforming various social security policies to bring in the politics of fear, to make it more and more difficult,” says Stewart.

“The PIP assessments are diabolical. People have killed themselves because of them. It isn’t easy to get access to PIP. So if a large number of people in any area has been awarded, that means there’s a large amount of chronic ill health in that particular area.”

Read more:

• I’ve had to appeal every single one of my PIP claims – the system is in dire need of improvement
• Five key things you need to know about PIP
• I have arthritis, incontinence and other chronic health conditions. The DWP didn’t think I needed PIP

‘We watch people deteriorate in front of us’

In the middle of Walton village, squeezed between a nursery and a boxing gym, Jo Abela welcomes me to the Our House community hub.

“I’ve had an opportunity to move out plenty of times and I don’t,” she tells me of Walton. “I feel completely safe, so much so that I’ve raised four kids. It is lovely. It has its problems, obviously. A lot of the problems come to poverty, drugs, alcohol, self medication.”

While working as a teacher in 2019, Abela and a friend took a leap of faith and took over the empty space which is now Our House. “I just saw a need,” she explains.

“The loneliness, the isolation. The mental health was just so clear and obvious. And maybe I had experience of that with previous jobs, and you grow old, you get it, you know what you’re looking at. The poverty, the food poverty. I don’t know whether it’s always been there, or maybe my eyes just became open to it.”

Ask 47-year-old Abela what goes on at Our House and the list is breathless: yoga, circuit training, mental health courses written and delivered by her and business partner Julie, the garden, the cafe, the Streetwise project, bingo, quizzes, arts and crafts, sociology courses, computer courses, dance classes.

Abela’s team doesn’t directly give advice on disability benefits, but she sees the impact poor health and struggles to get benefits can have.

“We’ve had people that, in my opinion, are entitled to PIP. You see them phsyically struggling to walk, to breathe. You couldn’t put these people into full time work, they couldn’t function,” she says.

And yet there is a lack of wider support to send people on. “Where else do you send them? Honestly we get people coming in with raggedy envelopes and papers, and they’re upset, and they don’t know where to go,” Abela says.

When people struggle to get appointments they need, Abela says, “we watch them deteriorate in front of us.”

They try to offer a way back through volunteering, which can be a stepping stone back into paid work. “That’s the way they’ve been brought up, with that work ethic. ‘I want to keep working, and I want to give back to my community,’” Abela says.

When I ask Abela for her guess as to why Walton has more disability benefits claimants than anywhere else, she offers a theory, suspecting it might have less to do with existing residents changing circumstances, and more with gradual changes to who lives in the area, with cheap land and property prices drawing people in. “There’s a whole estate that was put aside for women escaping domestic violence, partners in prison,” she says. “And none of them were from around here. It was like, let’s just take that group and let’s place them in Walton. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, there’s absolutely not, but it increases our statistics massively.”

Sometimes the obvious explanations are obvious for a reason, though. Poverty. Walton ranks third in the country on the Index of Multiple Deprivation measure. Lives are shorter here: a baby born in 2022 could expect to live for 78.23 years, almost three years less than the national average of 81.01 years.

Child poverty rates in the area increased from 20.3% in 2015 to 33.1% in 2024, and compare to an overall UK rate of 21.8%. Put bluntly, one in three children in the area live in relative poverty, amounting to 6,692 young people.

For professor David Taylor-Robinson, professor of public health and policy at the University of Liverpool and co-director of the Northern Health Science Alliance, it all comes back to child poverty. Growing up in poverty causes mental health problems and other chronic illnesses early in life, leading to high use of disability benefits.

“Poverty is the big issue. Either you believe that people are feckless and not working hard enough, and the solution is for people to just buck up and stop claiming benefits. That’s one line of argument. But the evidence shows that people who end up on disability benefits, it’s related to population ill-health,” Taylor-Robinson says.

“I always talk about the Kensington in Liverpool here, and Kensington in London. There’s a 10-year gap in life expectancy and a 20-year gap in healthy life expectancy. It’s not because people are lazy in Kensington, it’s because they get sicker earlier, and it’s crystal clear what we need to do.”

As Carson talks about the process of going through benefits assessments, she says: “It’s annihilating, it’s absolutely, astronomically annihilating”.

She adds: “If you don’t re-appeal, the system’s won. There’s a lot of people getting forgotten and falling through that net.”

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