Imagine you are working on a zero-hours contract when you’re diagnosed with cancer – the odds are good – but still, you need to undergo months of appointments, tests, surgery, treatments, and suffer the effects of these. Your diary becomes even more full than it was when you scrabbled around for a few hours of work here, a few hours there – at the mercy of a ‘normalised’ socio-economic business model based on insecurity – in which the risks of employment land squarely on your own shoulders.
At the point of diagnosis, when your world is turned upside down, you may already be on, or could be entitled to sign on for universal credit. If this is before April 2026, you could receive the health-related element, which is around £420 per month on top. If you are diagnosed with cancer after April 2026, you will only be entitled to half the current amount of the universal credit health-related element, and this will be frozen until at least 2029.
When I had radiotherapy, I had to go to the hospital every day for three weeks. It was actually spread over four weeks due to Christmas and New Year bank holidays – not so merry. It was a 25-mile round trip each day, which cost a lot of fuel, and public transport would not have been cheaper (I live rurally), and would certainly have tripled the time spent attending appointments. Besides which, your immune system is shot, and it’s not ideal to be mingling with the public at such time of vulnerability.
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I’m not sure if the costs of petrol, road tax or taxis will be halved after April 2026. I’m not sure if the creams you need to soothe the radiotherapy burns will be half-price, nor the foods you can tolerate when you’re having chemo, or whether the necessary new clothes due to weight loss or weight gain will be in the sale. What about a cut-price rent deal from the landlord? Mortgage lender? Insurances? Utilities?
I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you’ve got less than a year to live then the government will honour the pre-April 2026 amount.