34. "Don’t keep assessing us for our benefits cos our learning disability will not go away!"

I am doing a blog about benefits. 

It’s good doing a job and getting up in the morning… BUT sometimes the benefits cause us some problems and stress in the team. It affects the whole team when they see you are upset and it has a ‘domino affect’. Everyone feels it for you. They feel your pain and sadness. 

We, my colleagues with a learning disability, my mum and the managers, worry that if we work too many hours, it could affect our benefits and our money.  

It shouldn’t be like that. It should be that, erm, that you go to work and it shouldn’t matter … cos the support what you need should always be there to help you live the life that you can. It should be from the cradle to the grave.  

At the moment, they are changing people’s benefits to universal credit and yet again, we are having to be assessed.  

When you have to be assessed, it can feel a bit intimidating because you get asked lots of difficult questions and sometimes personal questions. Questions like: can you do things in the bathroom and what you can do in the kitchen and in the bedroom and sitting room. It makes you feel degraded and makes you feel a little bit stupid and it makes you feel a bit of a burden sometimes.  

And what you have to do is always highlight the stuff that you can’t do. It makes you feel bad, it does. It can be quite stressful and can give you panic attacks, it can, when you know it’s going to happen. It can get you into a real sweat, it can. 

If you don’t get the questions right, they think that you can go to a job centre and are able to get a full-time job. When you have a learning disability from the day you are born, it does not just go away. It’s with you, sadly, til the day you die. So they shouldn’t have to say you need to be assessed again. They should naturally do the changes again without any upset again, as it causes a lot of stress and anxiety to people … which is not needed. 

We all just need a little bit of support and just cos they can see that you can go out and do a little bit of work, doesn’t mean that you don’t need the support because we do - just to be able to live and do the things we can. 

Let us do what we can and don’t interfere with our benefits or stressing us out, as we cannot help that we have a learning disability - whether it’s a visible learning disability or a mild learning disability what you cannot see.  

We do need the support and we do like to go out to work and if the two could work together it would be a lot happier place for everyone. 

Written by Richard Keagan-Bull, Research Assistant at Kingston University London, with support from Jo Giles.