- She works 20 hours a week as an employment advisor
- take-home pay less than 10,000 a year.
- But with 400 a month in welfare payments
- she is able to live alone
- work
- and pay for a specially modified car.
- She pays for carers to come in twice a day to prepare meals,
- twice-weekly visits to the physiotherapist.
- The money from the Department
- allows her the freedom to exist
- independently.
- The inexorable spread of her disease
- (progressive multiple sclerosis
- she was diagnosed as a teenager)
- meant she would end up a ‘cabbage with a heartbeat.’
- She decided long ago to take her own life at some stage:
- ‘I don’t want people mourning me before I die.’
- In a consultation paper last December
- the Department said it was paying ‘a lot more
- than expected’
- to disabled people.
- It aims to reduce costs by a fifth.
- A consultation ends this week.
[The Guardian, 14/02/2011, ‘Life not worth living’ for disabled people facing benefit cuts]