On 30 th  October 2025, the Labour government released its response to the consultation on the Pathways to Work Green Paper 2025. The government received nearly 15,000 direct responses (i.e. responses that directly answered the questions posed by the government in the consultation) and over 33,000 indirect responses. The large majority of these indirect responses came from “a single campaigning platform, which put 2 surveys asking its own questions to its members.” Individual

I recently published two briefings about social security for sick and disabled people, in an attempt to help MPs see why Labour's planned...

On 1st May 2025, I was part of a small group of women who had a brief meeting with Stephen Timms, to discuss the cuts that Labour plan to...

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Stephen Timms, the Labour MP who is Minister for Social Security and Disability. This was as...

The Learning and Work Institute recently released a briefing which, rather optimistically to my mind, suggested that 45,000-95,000 sick...

This is the fifth in my series of blog posts looking at the impact of employment support for sick and disabled people. So far, a handful...

This is the fourth in my series of blog posts looking at employment support programmes for sick and disabled people. So far, the most...

This is the third blog in a series looking at various employment support programmes that have tried to support sick and disabled people...

There are so many issues with Liz Kendall’s speech today, and the Green Paper proposals, that it is really hard to know where to begin....

My last blog post covered the Work and Health Programme (W&HP) for disabled people who had been “identified as being capable of finding...

The current Labour government is very keen for people with chronic illness to somehow move into work. Despite all the evidence which...

Labour have enthusiastically reported that they are carrying out a review that will be the first of its kind, but it is unclear what is new

I found this old blogpost from April that I had forgotten to publish at the time, about where my chronic illness had got to at that point.

“The word we might use most commonly next to "suffering" is "season." But what if your experience of suffering is your life's climate?...

One of the government’s most common tropes when it is discussing welfare is a desire to focus support on ‘the most needy’. Superficially...

The UK PM perpetuates the myth of the sick note culture, as an excuse to cut support to sick and disabled people.

I actually wrote this blog post back in November - still autumn - but forgot about it so never reviewed and posted it. Here it is, a...

I went to a food club recently. A food club is where you pay a small-ish amount of money for food that is about to go out-of-date, or...

I was pleased to be able to watch, over zoom, the second ‘Accessing the Divine’ conference, held by Boston Theological Inter-religious...

The budget today announced a lot of stuff, and most of it I’m not qualified to comment on. I’m interested, because I have a sister with...