A troubling picture of DWP disability minister Stephen Timms has emerged from a meeting he held with campaigners from the Christian charity Church Action on Poverty. Timms allegedly walked wordlessly around a disabled woman collapsed on the floor in order to leave the meeting and did not send a message afterwards to check how she was.
Four campaigners had a thirty minute meeting with Timms about the Pathways To work Green Paper and told the Disability News Service that the minister would not listen to their arguments.
One of the campaigners said the Timms had gone into the meeting “with his foot stamped down” and when he was challenged with difficult questions he became “abrupt and defensive”.
She said: “There was no expression of warmth, there was no sitting and listening; he was expressionless.
“There was no change in his expression, that was what was odd.
“He just kept saying, ‘It’s going to work, it’s going to work,’ like a child.”
Timms told the campaigners that the cuts to benefits would cause a “cultural change in disabled claimants”.
“When we asked him what he meant, he said: ‘People like yourselves, with support, you could go to work.’”
This was in spite of the fact that one of the attendees, Mary Passeri, had formerly been a further education lecturer who had lost three jobs because she kept collapsing due to her health conditions.
When Passeri, who had travelled three hours from York to be at the meeting, passed out at the end of the meeting it is alleged that Timms edged around the table and past the collapsed activist, leaving the room without saying a word.
Afterwards a first aider arrived, but Timms did not send any kind of message to enquire after Passeri’s wellbeing.
Passeri said Timms behaviour was “a good indication of how removed he is from disabled people”.
The picture that emerges from the meeting, if accurate, suggest a minister deeply devoid of empathy who has replaced listening to evidence with a blind faith that if only the reforms can be forced through they are certain to work.
It is an alarming thought that this is the man who has already begun work on rewriting the assessment criteria for PIP.
Meanwhile, claimants and other campaigners will probably be better served by putting evidence of the harm the Green Paper will do in front of backbenchers who are still willing to listen.
