THE Hereford Times front page news story dated Thursday, August 1, ‘Time running out to find sick man home’ says: “A Hereford woman waiting over two years for a new house to meet the needs of her dying partner says she despairs of this happening in time”.

Welcome to a national scandal: an acute shortage of ‘accessible homes’. Meanwhile, the new Starmer and Reeves-led ‘Change’ government has sick and disabled people in its sights, not for the supports that chronically sick and disabled people require, but for ‘financial savings’.

The national Disability News Service (DNS) website lead story for the same date states: “Disabled people are back ‘in the firing line’ on spending cuts, activists have warned, following a trio of decisions announced by Labour’s new chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

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Cuts to social care and winter fuel payments have been announced, while DNS says she also “appeared to suggest that cuts to benefits would be announced later in the year”.

This is all further to a DNS report stating that new work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall wanted to increase pressure on disabled people to move off benefits and into work, and the Department for Work and Pensions to move from being “a department for welfare” to becoming “a genuine department for work.”

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For many sick and disabled people, including long-term disabled jobseekers as I was for decades before claiming employment and support allowance, this has resonances with the Nazi ‘Work will set you free’ pronouncement at Auschwitz.

Yet I conclude with the headline from another DNS report from August 1: “Four weeks into a Labour government and DWP blocks release of more info on deaths from secret reports.”

Time to get local MP Jesse Norman onto the case for Juliet Francis, her partner Matthew Slack and their autistic children, I’d say.

ALAN WHEATLEY

Hereford