Access to Work Isn’t Working! The scheme is supposed to help disabled people work. So why is it pushing people out?
I love my job. I have spent almost ten years building a career as a disabled content creator, speaker, model and actor. In that time I have supported so many people sharing tips and hacks to make chronic illness a little easier and have educated many more people about disability. I desperately want to work, and I have built my working life around finding ways to do that alongside my disabilities and chronic illnesses. But I cannot do my job without support.
For the last three years, Access to Work has helped fund the support workers who make my work possible. I raved about this scheme that truly changed my life because it meant I was able to keep doing the job I loved as my disability became a bigger barrier to work.
But now, with almost no warning and no individual explanation, it’s doing the exact opposite because my funding has been cut by around 85%.
I am sharing what has happened to me because I need help to keep my own business and support team going. But I am also sharing it because this is not just about me.
There is mounting evidence that disabled people across the country are experiencing substantial cuts, enormous delays, inaccessible administration and uncertainty about whether the support they rely on to work will continue at all.
Access to Work is supposed to remove barriers to employment but for too many disabled people, the way it is currently operating risks becoming another barrier itself.
What is Access to Work?
Access to Work is a government scheme designed to help disabled people and people with health conditions overcome disability-related barriers at work.
It can fund things like support workers, specialist equipment, communication support and disability-related travel costs. It can be the difference between a disabled person being able to work and not being able to work. That is certainly true for me.
My support workers, Poppy, Eboni and Beth, help me with tasks where I face barriers because of my disability that enable me to run my business and fulfil my work. This can be anything from driving me to locations where I am speaking, performing or modelling, to carrying bags and setting up equipment, to doing a variety of tasks on the computer whilst I direct them as I am no longer able to sit up or look at a screen. They do not simply make my working life more convenient. Their support makes work possible.
What has happened to my Access to Work support?
My existing award funded 24 hours of support a week at £30 an hour. I applied for my renewal in June, as soon as the renewal window opened. My support needs have not decreased since my previous award. If anything, I now need more support and we were asked to fill in a new Support Worker Record of Tasks form which we had done 3 years previously and looking at our tracking realised that I was working more like 36 hours so needed around 32 hours a week in support on average (my work is quite changeable and events can take big chunks of hours at a time). So we applied for 32 hours a week of support. We explained less than a quarter of what was on the form to my case manager over the phone (because you can email Access to Work anymore which is a whole other ridiculous issue) and he started to tell us some of the things that would no longer be funded with no explaination. Understandably, I got upset on the phone but I was never rude, I simply asked why things would no longer be funded and explained how the support I needed met the Access to Work criteria. We didnt make it past 3 tasks before my case manager hung up the phone on me and then made no further contact until my decision letter arrived.
My new award provides just 8 hours a week at £13.72 an hour. Taken together, that means my weekly Access to Work support-worker funding has been reduced by around 85%. The decision letter is dated 19 August. It did not reach me until 1 September. My existing award ends on 13 September.
So despite applying as early as I possibly could, I have been left with less than two weeks to deal with an enormous change to the support my entire working life relies upon and in reality, I may not even make it to 13 September on my existing funding because I currently need more support than my old award provided, let alone the new one.
I still don’t know why it has been cut
My decision letter does not contain an individual explanation for such a significant reduction and also doesn’t explain what the 8 hours can be used for as my case manager only told us over the phone things it can no longer be used for.
Instead, it includes generic wording saying that Access to Work support is based on someone’s “individual needs and circumstances” and that, if a previous award was higher, this may be because Access to Work made an error and the previous award was “more generous than the scheme allows”.
But what was the error? And this letter is a template no doubt sent to hundreds of other people, so that would be a pretty big error! The scheme allows a maximum of £69,260 per year in support for an individual and we were applying for a lot less than that.
Despite calling to ask I haven’t been given an explanation for why my support-worker hours have been cut from 24 to 8. I have been given no explanation whatsoever for why the funded hourly rate has fallen from £30 to £13.72 (which when you are self employed isn’t even minimum wage)! And when I originally applied for Access to Work three years ago, I was specifically asked to obtain quotes from support workers so that the appropriate rate could be established. £30 an hour was the average of those quotes and now my support workers are more experienced and the cost of living has increased so drastically if anything they need more, not less. I am the one left feeling guilty having to tell them I need to cut their pay by more than half as well as cutting their hours after they’ve worked brilliantly alongside me for the last 2 years. It’s not just my job and income at risk, it’s theirs too, and they have rent and bills to pay.
They made the decision before receiving the evidence they asked me to provide
This is perhaps the part I find hardest to comprehend. During this renewal, Access to Work asked for a Support Worker Record of Tasks. Poppy and I spent approximately six hours completing it and it ended up being 18 pages long and almost 4,000 words.
We went through my work and support needs in detail to explain what assistance I require and why. I have the Royal Mail tracking information. That document was delivered to Access to Work on 20 August. My decision is dated 19 August. If I hadn’t have paid out of my own pocket for tracked delivery, we wouldn’t have any proof of this. They had therefore already made the decision before they received the detailed evidence they had asked me to provide about my individual support needs. Yet the letter tells me that the support offered is based on my “individual needs and circumstances”. How can somebody’s needs and circumstances be properly assessed before the evidence detailing them has even arrived?
What happens now?
I called Access to Work on 1 September and requested reconsideration of the decision.
Their own written record of that conversation notes that the hours and hourly rate had been reduced without explanation, that my current support workers would no longer work for the new rate, that I had not been told what support the new figure was intended to cover, and that the Support Worker Record of Tasks had not been available when my decision was made.
I have been told it could be around five weeks before the reconsideration is even looked at. But the consequences of the decision don’t wait five weeks. We are grateful that Poppy was already due to leave for a new job this week. If you’ve followed me for a while you’ll already know how much of a massive loss Poppy leaving would be as she has been my right hand woman for 3 years and although Poppy herself is pretty irreplaceable before this decision I would have been able to recruit someone to cover her hours but now I am losing 12 hours of support every week before these new cuts even begin. How can I offer someone new a job and promise them regular work when I don’t know whether I will have the funding to pay them?
And I cannot reasonably turn around to Eboni and Beth, with less than two weeks’ notice after around two years of working with me, and tell them their hourly rate is being reduced by more than half. Their work has not suddenly become worth less. So I am currently trying to work out how much support I can fund myself while dramatically reducing the hours I receive and still manage to keep my business running and complete the current contracts we already have for the rest of the year.
I love my job. I desperately want to work. It is incredibly difficult to hear repeated conversations about getting more disabled people into employment while simultaneously watching the support that allows me to remain in employment disappear. It feels like I am being punished for working in the same breath as I am being told that I should work.
This is not an isolated case
This is the part that matters beyond my own situation. In June 2026, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a report into Access to Work. It warned that significant failings in the DWP’s administration of the scheme were having damaging consequences for disabled people’s employment, income, health and wellbeing. (My bill for Therapy in the last couple of weeks alone supports this). The Committee heard evidence of unclear communication, inaccessible processes and a system described as arbitrary and unreliable, including cases where support had been reduced or removed without a clear rationale, change in need or sometimes even warning.
Evidence submitted to Parliament by the Disability Poverty Campaign Group paints an even more worrying picture. Of the people supported through Access to Work reassessments by Decode during 2024 to 2025, 89.5% received a lower-value award than previously, with an average reduction of 53%.
Action on Disability reported that the average support-worker hours awarded to its clients fell by 82% between 2022 and 2025. Over the same period, its job-retention rate fell from 88% to 43%, with disabled people and employers directly attributing job losses to changes in Access to Work support. My 85% reduction is particularly severe, but the wider pattern of substantial reductions is not something we can dismiss as one person’s unfortunate experience.
People are also waiting months for support
Cuts are only one part of the problem. In March 2026, approximately 66,000 Access to Work applications were waiting for decisions, compared with 21,700 in March 2022. The DWP has a target of processing applications within 25 working days. The Public Accounts Committee reported that applicants were being warned that it could take up to 37 weeks. Employment cannot simply wait 37 weeks. A new employer cannot necessarily keep a job open while somebody waits months for the support they need to start it. A freelancer cannot ask a client to postpone a contract for months. A business owner cannot necessarily pay disability-related support costs indefinitely while waiting for a decision. And a support worker cannot be expected to wait without income while their client’s award is reconsidered.
Reconsideration does not undo the damage
We have seen individual Access to Work decisions overturned. Earlier this year, Graeae Artistic Director Jenny Sealey had her Access to Work support cut by 50%. Graeae publicly campaigned against the decision. Theatremaker Renu Arora had her support cut by 80%, before it was eventually restored following a ten-week campaign. I am incredibly glad when somebody gets their support back. But we also need to ask why getting the right support can require weeks or months of campaigning in the first place.
What happens to the person who doesn’t have a public platform? What happens to someone who doesn’t have an MP willing to intervene, an organisation supporting them, knowledge of DWP guidance, or the energy to launch a campaign while simultaneously trying to manage their disability and keep their job?
And even when an award is eventually restored, what has happened in the meantime? A support worker may have found another job. A contract may have been lost. Someone may have reduced their working hours. A business may already have closed. A successful reconsideration cannot necessarily reverse those consequences.
Access to Work should be an employment support scheme, not a test of a disabled person’s ability to navigate bureaucracy.
Nobody should have to be exceptional to deserve support
I want to be very clear about something. I am not sharing my story because I think I deserve Access to Work because I have built a successful business, have a large social media audience or have done anything particularly extraordinary. That is not how disability rights should work. A disabled receptionist deserves the support they need to work. So does a teacher, a shop worker, an administrator, a freelancer, a tradesperson, a small business owner. No ordinary Disabled person with an ordinary job should have to prove their worth just to be able to work. We shouldn’t have to prove our career is sufficiently impressive before you are allowed equal access to employment.
The cases involving people with public platforms are visible. I worry much more about all the cases that aren’t. The people who quietly reduce their hours, lose jobs, turn down opportunities or leave employment because they do not have the health, time, support or resources to spend months fighting the system.
Cutting Access to Work may not even save money
There is also an economic argument for getting this right.
Evidence submitted to the Public Accounts Committee cited research finding that Access to Work generated approximately £1.14 in fiscal returns directly to the Treasury for every £1 spent. The same research estimated a wider social return of £3.86 for every £1 spent.
That makes sense. When Access to Work enables somebody to remain employed, they can continue earning and paying tax. They may run a business. They may employ or contract other people, who also earn and pay tax. If inadequate support instead forces that person out of employment, the Government potentially loses that tax revenue and the individual may require more financial support elsewhere.
In my own case, if this decision ultimately makes my business unsustainable, I lose my income and the Government loses the tax I pay. Eboni and Beth also lose paid work and income. What exactly has been saved?
How you can help
There are two different ways you can help right now, one helps me and my support workers personally, and the other helps us fight for a better system for everyone.
- Help me keep paying my support workers
I am not asking anyone to donate money to me. For the immediate future, I am going to try to personally fund as much of the support I need as I realistically can. If you want to help me do that, one of the most useful things you can do costs absolutely nothing. Watch and engage with my content on the platforms where I earn money from views:
Watching a video, watching to the end, leaving a genuine comment, sharing something you think somebody else would find useful, or simply watching another video all help my content reach more people and generate income.
My current goal is to generate an additional £700 a month to fund the absolute minimum support I need to keep going. If we can reach £1,600 a month, I can fund enough support to operate at something closer to normal capacity while the Access to Work decision is being challenged.
- Help us challenge what is happening to Access to Work
This is bigger than my individual award. I have created a template letter that you can personalise and send to your MP asking them to raise the wider problems within Access to Work with the Government and DWP. You do not need to receive Access to Work yourself. You do not need to be disabled.
The template includes different sections depending on whether you want to write about your own experience, use my experience as an example, or simply as an ally who believes disabled people should have equal access to employment.
You can find your MP using the UK Parliament website:
Please personalise the letter where you can. MPs need to understand both the evidence of a systemic problem and what it means for actual people in their constituencies.
And if you have your own experience of Access to Work, good or bad, please share it in the comments below or underneath my social media posts. The more experiences we can see together, the harder it becomes to dismiss these problems as isolated cases.
Access to Work needs fixing
I am challenging my own decision. I desperately hope my support is restored. But I don’t want the outcome of this campaign simply to be that I eventually get my funding back and everybody moves on. Because that doesn’t help the next disabled person.
A system where people with the biggest platforms, strongest networks or greatest ability to fight sometimes manage to get inappropriate decisions overturned, while other disabled people quietly fall out of employment, is not a fair system. Disabled people should not have to become experts in DWP policy to stay in work. We shouldn’t have to repeatedly prove that our support needs are real. We should not have to launch public campaigns to access the practical assistance that allows us to do our jobs.
The Government says it wants disabled people in employment. Not every disabled person can but there are already so many of us that can, do and want to work. Please stop making us fight for the support that makes that possible.
