ABSTRACT
Legislation introduced by the right-leaning New Labour government in 2006: ‘A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering People to Work’, was adopted and guaranteed the beginning of the end for the UK welfare state as it used neoliberal politics to justify the reform of welfare funding. The welfare of the sick and disabled community in need of State financial support would plummet with the election of the Coalition government in 2010, and the appointment of Iain Duncan Smith as the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. To guarantee that there would be no turning back, the Coalition government introduced a catalogue of welfare reforms with the 2012 Welfare Reform Act, which were guaranteed to transform various welfare benefits which had previously supported the needs of chronically ill and disabled people, thus making them much more difficult to access.
