Aug 13, 2026 · Comments ↓

Last updated on Oct 2, 2026

Access to Work is crumbling, and a year on it's worse

In July 2025 I wrote that Access to Work was being quietly dismantled. A year on, the NAO, the Public Accounts Committee and DWP's own letters prove it.

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 transition period, no warning. Instead, he was told the support worker he has for 20 hours a week could drive him as well.

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 put numbers on it. Those numbers are further down, and they are worse than I feared.

Here is the article I published on 15 July 2025, with a few words tidied.

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 used to be the scheme that made work possible for disabled people. Now it means confused decisions, misrepresented evidence 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’s part of a wider dismantling of the scheme, and it needs putting right, urgently.

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.

A year on: the evidence caught up

Kamran’s phone call came on 17 July 2026, a year and two days after I published this. In the year between, the evidence piled up:

In February 2026, the National Audit Office found that the average time DWP took to process an Access to Work application rose from 28 working days in 2021-22 to 109 working days in November 2025. DWP’s own target is 25. By then, Disability Rights UK was reporting waits of 210 days.
In June 2026, the Commons Public Accounts Committee reported that 66,000 applications were waiting for a decision in March 2026, up from 21,700 in March 2022. That was after DWP had more than doubled the staff working on the scheme. The evidence sent to the committee showed delays at every stage: application, assessment, decision, renewal, reconsideration and payment.
Evidence the Disability Poverty Campaign Group sent to that committee found half of the people who answered its 2025 survey said their support wasn’t enough. 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 linked the job losses directly to the 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%. Those figures are in the same evidence to the committee.

And the scheme pays for itself. The Disability Poverty Campaign Group worked out that 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.

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”. 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.

The ICE did come back to me on the problems I had with payments. On the more complex complaint, I’ve heard nothing. Their automated replies gave no timeline and no clear next step, so as of October 2026 I still don’t know what happened to it.

DWP’s closure letter also told me 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. You get one reconsideration, done by DWP itself. The only independent examiner in the chain isn’t allowed to look at the one 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.

* Access to Work staff guide (GOV.UK), chapter 6, Support Workers. Case managers must award the support a person needs because of their disability or health condition. The 20% limit applies only to a job aide doing part of the job in place of the person, and it is 20% of their contracted hours. Where the person is still doing the job and directing the work, a job aide can cover up to 100% of their contracted hours.

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

If you'd like to support this blog, you can buy me a coffee.

Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi

Comments

Loading comments…

Comments appear once I've read them. I'll put up the ones that are about the post and are useful, interesting, supportive or constructive. Anything else won't go up. Your email is never shown or shared.