At 8.30 on a Friday morning in July, the CEO of Disability Rights UK got a phone call. After more than 15 years, the travel support that gets Kamran Mallick to and from work had been removed. No discussion, no transition, no warning. In its place, a suggestion: the support worker he has for 20 hours a week could drive him too.

His words: “I know I am not alone in this, and that is exactly the problem.”

He isn’t. In July 2025 I published the article below on LinkedIn, after my own routine renewal turned into a demolition. Twelve months later, nothing in it has dated. What’s changed is the evidence. When I wrote it, the pattern was something disabled people were telling each other. Now the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee and a string of disability organisations have counted it. The numbers are at the end, and they are worse than I feared.

Here is the article as I published it on 15 July 2025.

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From support to sabotage

In December, I submitted a routine renewal for my Access to Work (AtW) grant, something I’ve done successfully for years. What followed wasn’t a renewal. It was a demolition.

Access to Work, once the scheme that made inclusive employment possible, has become a labyrinth of confusion, misrepresentation, and silent cuts. I’ve filed complaints, escalated to ICE, contacted my MP, and submitted FOIs. I’m not the only one. A growing number of disabled professionals, like those in the Access to Work Collective, are speaking out about the systematic erosion of support.

This article exposes how the system is failing us, not through overt policy changes, but through quiet administrative sabotage dressed up as “operational reform”. The quotes throughout are taken directly from my official Access to Work renewal decision letter.

Rewriting the rules, mid-game

“As per ATW guidance the renewal is subject to a full review by the case manager regardless of no changes to the support required.”

That’s not what the guidance says.

According to the government’s own website, case managers may request more information, if things have changed. Mine hadn’t. Yet my “renewal” was treated like a brand-new application, complete with confusion, form-misreading, and ultimate support cuts.

Flexibility ignored, reality denied

“You work 35 hours per week.”

I don’t. I work when my condition allows. My hours are flexible, not full-time, not part-time, but adaptive. Access to Work refuses to recognise that, forcing rigid definitions onto lives that are unpredictable.

Fabricated roles to justify reductions

“You provide coaching and mentoring services.”

I don’t. This wasn’t in any documentation I submitted. It’s unclear where they sourced it. A guess? An assumption? Regardless, it was used to reframe my support needs and reduce my funding.

Misreading critical evidence: the SWROT debacle

I clearly recorded in my Support Worker Record of Tasks:

• 11 hours unassisted
• 17 hours assisted by a Support Worker
• 7 hours with a Job Aide

And yet, I was told:

“Your condition remains the same, so support was revised to 7 hours.”

Not only did they misread the document, they failed to provide guidance on how to separate job aide from support worker tasks. Then they used that confusion to erase 17 hours of essential support, support I’ve had for a decade.

Retroactive excuses and moving targets

In the original decision, my case manager wrote:

“I have not been able to renew your support at the frequency that you were awarded before. This is because our existing policies may not have been enforced correctly in the past when your original grant was awarded.”

This statement attempts to justify cutting 17 hours of Support Worker assistance, not because of any change in need or guidance, but by retroactively questioning the legitimacy of support I’ve received for over a decade.

Both the original and reconsideration case managers misunderstood the distinction between Support Worker and Job Aide roles. That confusion became the basis for an arbitrary cap and the withdrawal of support. Yet the Access to Work staff guide makes no mention of a 20% cap on support worker hours, and clearly states support should reflect an individual’s disability-related needs, not some internal audit of past approvals.*

This isn’t enforcement. It’s erasure, disguised as procedure.

Absurd contradictions

“The additional 17 hours can be completed using the SW already being provided.”

What support worker? You just cut them.

“Retaining current hours.”

You didn’t. You slashed them by more than 70%.

“There is insufficient evidence the support is enabling.”

Ten years of AtW funding wasn’t sufficient?

Weaponising accessibility

The review cited my use of remote tools like Zoom, home working, and digital delivery as reasons to reduce support, as though reasonable adjustments somehow replace human assistance.

These aren’t luxuries. They’re lifelines. And they’re being twisted into justifications to withdraw help.

Financial fictions

“7 hours of job aide/support worker were paid at the higher rate.”

False. The job aide rate is, and always has been, higher than the support worker rate. This factual inaccuracy directly affected the funding outcome.

The business need excuse

“This appears to be a business need, which AtW does not cover.”

For a decade, they did. Now, vague phrases like “business need” are being wielded to cut funding without accountability. No policy update, no consultation, just quiet removal.

ICE, delays, and what comes next

My case is now with the Independent Case Examiner (ICE), where I’ll wait weeks or months for a reply. I don’t expect justice. If needed, I’ll escalate to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

But the damage is already being done. Not just to me, but to hundreds, likely thousands, of disabled professionals being reclassified, misquoted, and stripped of the support they need to work. This cut isn’t just administrative. It affects how I earn a living, manage my condition, and participate in the workforce.

Access to Work is becoming Access Denied, quietly, systemically, and without accountability.

A system in retreat

Access to Work isn’t failing because it’s broken. It’s failing because it’s being quietly dismantled behind closed doors. Decisions are now built on guesswork, contradictions, and a bureaucratic playbook that favours cost-cutting over inclusion.

I added my voice alongside Disability Rights UK, Scope, John Pring, Leanne Maskell, Alice Hastie, Rachael Rogan, Dr Shani Dhanda, Jacqueline Winstanley FRSA and many others, because this isn’t just my story. It reflects a broader, systemic dismantling that needs urgent redress.

We don’t need apologies. We need accountability. We need transparency. And we need reform, because right now, the message is loud and clear:

You can work, just not with our support.

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A year on: the evidence caught up

Kamran’s phone call came on 17 July 2026, almost a year to the day after I published this. In the year between, the evidence stacked up:

• The National Audit Office found average processing times for Access to Work applications rose from 28 days in 2020-21 to 109 days by November 2025. Disability Rights UK reports waits now running at around 210 days.
• The backlog of undecided applications grew from 21,700 in March 2022 to 66,000 by March 2026, while DWP staffing on the scheme more than doubled. When MPs on the Commons Public Accounts Committee took evidence this summer, they found failings at every stage: application, assessment, decision, renewal, reconsideration and payment.
• Evidence submitted to that committee by the Disability Poverty Campaign Group found half of respondents to its 2025 survey said their support was insufficient. One person’s award was cut from 52 hours of support a year to 5.
• Action on Disability found support worker hours for the disabled people it works with fell by 82% between 2022 and 2025. Job retention among them collapsed from 88% to 43%, and employers directly linked the job losses to Access to Work cuts.
• Decode, which supports disabled people working in the arts, found 89.5% of the reassessments it supported in 2024-25 ended in a lower award. The average cut was 53%.

And the scheme pays for itself. By the Disability Poverty Campaign Group’s analysis, properly funded, Access to Work returns £1.14 to the Treasury for every £1 spent, because it keeps disabled people in work, paying tax and off other forms of support.

Where my own case went

When I published the original article, my case was on its way to the Independent Case Examiner. Here’s what a year of process looks like.

My renewal went in on 4 December 2024. The decision to cut my support from 24 hours a week to 7 came sixteen days later. In money, £489.50 a week of support became £175. The reconsideration took over six months and changed nothing. In November 2025, DWP’s complaints team closed my complaint: the decision “cannot be overturned”. The same letter confirmed what my case manager had been doing all along. They were, it said, “following guidance to encourage customers to work independently, without the need for ongoing human support”. Read that again. The guidance is to reduce human support. The cuts aren’t a side effect of the process. They are the process.

In January 2026, the ICE wrote to say my complaint had been allocated to an investigator, who would update me in eight weeks if the report wasn’t complete. That letter, dated 19 January, is the last I have heard from them. It is now August.

And here is the line worth reading twice, from DWP’s own closure letter: the ICE “can only consider complaints about maladministration or service failures”. Not the decision itself. Access to Work is a discretionary grant, so there is no right of appeal and no tribunal. One reconsideration, done in-house, and after that no one can look at the decision again. The only independent examiner in the chain is barred from examining the thing that matters: whether the decision was right.

DWP decides, DWP reconsiders, DWP investigates itself, and the independent stage is only allowed to check the paperwork.

A year ago I wrote that Access to Work was becoming Access Denied, quietly, systemically and without accountability. I would have liked to be wrong. Instead the evidence caught up, and the phone calls kept coming.

Ministers keep saying disabled people should work. The scheme that makes work possible is being stripped in the same breath. That’s not a contradiction they haven’t noticed. It’s a choice.

We don’t need apologies. We need accountability, transparency and reform. I wrote that a year ago too. The difference now is that nobody can say they didn’t know.

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* Access to Work Staff Guide, Section 17.6: “Support Worker” roles are assessed on individual need and are not subject to a 20% cap. “Job Aide” roles have a 20% limit relative to contracted hours. Source: Access to Work Staff Guide (GOV.UK)

If you’ve been affected by Access to Work changes, speak out. Your story matters.

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