The cost of being disabled in the UK is huge – but the Government couldn’t care less

Disabled? Live in Britain? That’ll be £570 a month, thanks very much.

What’s that? You’re among the one in five whose needs are more complex? We’ll have more than £1,000 from you then.

Worried about how to pay this tax? Don’t be. HM Revenue & Customs will let you do it online.

There’s also the phone for if your broadband provider is crap. Which, let’s be honest, most of them are in Britain. See? Couldn’t be easier.

What’s that I hear you say? HM Revenue & Customs doesn’t collect any “Disability Charge”?

Well, ok, you’ve got me there. The Charge is not, technically, a traditional levy collected by central government, by a local authority, or by some other branch of the state.

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.

It is imposed by a society that says if you have some form of impairment you’re going to pay extra for the right to participate – and perhaps a lot extra.

Start with equipment, and the fact that the leaders of that society shrug their shoulders at the way providers squeeze customers until the pips squeak, at £15 for a knife with an angled blade, £600 for a wheelchair battery, £1,200 for a reclining chair, up to £5,000 for a wheelchair, up to £40,000 for a motorised one.

Want some gel filled gloves for wheeling? How about £15. No, how about £20. Cha-ching!

Those same leaders will say it’s jolly awful that bus companies ignore the fact that their drivers routinely flout court rulings saying disabled travellers should have a space. But they won’t do anything about it.

They also sit back while train companies, and the London Underground, provide services that are inadequate at best and often simply unusable. As a result, disabled people spend an awful lot of money on taxis. It is because there’s often no other option.

Those adapted cars that some people, who have the luxury of enjoying good health, get their hands on? Good luck getting them parked, because disabled bays aren’t properly policed. Costs, innit.

Tell you what though, hand over £4,000 and you can have one outside your home.*

*Which we still won’t police.

It’s not just transport. If you’re not able to move around a lot, you spend more on heating your home.

The rules allow insurance companies to charge you more, and sometimes a lot more. A host of other goods and services are also more expensive.

Profits count more than people in today’s Britain. Leaders are more worried about corporate costs than they are about the personal costs imposed on vulnerable people in part because businesses can afford to pay for lobbyists to foot the bills for the Cristal champers served up at the party conferences.

All these things, and more besides, make the Disability Charge function as a societal tax if you’re on the receiving end.

There is, of course, the Personal Independence Payment, which is supposed to help. It is characterised as a “benefit”.

In reality it is a tax credit that only partially offsets the cost of the Charge. And to get it you first have to complete a course that even the jockeys who are crazy enough to line up for Cheltenham’s bonkers cross country chase at the Festival next month would baulk at.

What really infuriates me when I read press releases like the one issued by Scope, the charity that crunched the numbers for the most up to date cost of the Charge, is that a couple of years ago, it tried to do something positive and constructive to address it.

This I know because I was involved in it.

The Extra Costs Commission brought representatives from industry and regulatory bodies together with people with disabilities, such as myself, to investigate the issue and produce a report. We were, out of necessity, required to limit the scope (sorry) of our inquiries because the issue was just so big.

But we nonetheless managed to come up with some good ideas about how markets might be improved to bring at least some of those extra costs down. To bring about a tax cut, if you like.

It was hoped that the Government, and its friends in business, might take a look.

Sadly, while some progress was made following its release, it was patchy and slow, not helped by the revolving door of MPs bearing the title of “Minister for Disabled People”, which is surely an oxymoron – most of them have seemed far more interested in squeezing whatever PR they can get out of the role as a substitute for making meaningful progress on, well, anything.

The Commission didn’t consider the car crash of PIP, and the appalling mess of the disability “benefits” system more generally. Others (such as the Work and Pensions Committee) have, however, been active on that front. Sadly they haven’t had much more success than we did.

Still, at least we have near full employment, which ought to help with paying the Charge… Oh, right. We don’t. The disability employment gap is something else the Government has utterly failed to address.

And ministers wonder why people are sometimes inclined to throw eggs at them.