How cancer patients could suffer after Labour's cuts to universal credit

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.

After my cancer diagnosis, there was a delicate time of uncertainty before prognosis. In that period, which for myself was 10 days, I am somewhat ashamed to say that I felt quite peaceful at the prospect of no longer having the continuation of existence in late capitalism. It was a temporary euphoria that I’m sure would’ve crashed had my prognosis been terminal, but I can’t deny the fact that there was a relief at the prospect of giving up the struggle and pressure to earn enough money to cover the basics. A ‘bare life’ existence in a society where inequalities and the gap between the richest and everybody else is grossly increasing. 

Now, I work as a researcher with people on low incomes or in poverty. I’m often only a stone’s throw from that myself, with short fixed-term contracts the best I can hope for in a sea of academic casualisation. So there are people already on the edge, and there are people, like myself who had a low income at diagnosis (a PhD three-year stipend of approximately £16,000), and there are many others who are on unstable contracts or other forms of precarious work.

Plenty of us are “working people” who are not protected by our employers, nor earning enough – or consistently enough – to have savings, should we become sick.

Economic worries should not be prescient as you face the shock and energy needed for recovery. The idea that after April 2026, you somehow become of less value to ‘society’ than you are today, less ‘deserving’ of support to get you through the dark days fills me with repulsion and rage. 

Like other cancer survivors, I’m twitchy around the yearly check-up time. At the back of my mind, I am mildly fearful that there could be a recurrence. With a contract that takes me to July next year, no certainty of further work in sight, and a September annual check-up, I don’t have any sense that there is a safety net should I need it.

I just have a pathetic hope that I won’t ever need to turn to what many people I’m working with experience as an undignified, and deeply distressing system. And I feel a deep sorrow for anyone (the one in two of us) who will become sick or disabled with cancer after April 2026.

Dr Millie Light is a research associate on Changing Realities, a participatory project documenting the lives, and amplifying the voices, of families on low incomes in the UK.

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