Come and Sit With Us

Before making decisions about benefit cuts or freezing disability support, maybe it’s time to go and spend time inside the homes of those most affected.

Not for an hour. Not on a planned visit with a clipboard and a schedule.

Really spend time there. Watch how they live. Try to do what they do.

Spend a day with the unpaid carer providing 60, 100, even 168 hours of care each week — often without sleep, without a break, without support.

See what it’s like to be responsible for everything: lifting, feeding, washing, managing medication, monitoring seizures or pain, reacting to emergencies — and doing it all alone, unpaid, because there’s no one else.

Spend time with the disabled person or individual living with a life-limiting condition who cannot care for themselves and has no way to change their situation.

See the daily fear they live with — fear about the rising cost of living, about benefit cuts, about the loss of the small but vital supports that allow them to survive. Fear about what happens if their carer burns out, becomes unwell, or dies.

Spend time there before making decisions that affect their futures.

It’s easy to make cuts from a distance — from behind desks, with neat spreadsheets and cost-saving projections.

But these are not just numbers. These are people. Real lives.

And every policy pushed through without understanding the reality on the ground has consequences. It breaks people. It removes dignity. It kills hope.

Maybe if those in power saw the exhaustion, the sleepless nights, and the impossible choices these families face, they might think differently.

These aren’t minor tweaks to a system. These are decisions that change — and sometimes end — lives.

So go and see.

Before deciding who deserves support, who gets to live with dignity, and who gets left behind.

And maybe, just maybe, Channel 4, Dispatches, BBC Panorama — or anyone in the media with the courage to look — can help make that happen.

Can they show the public what those living with disabilities, life-limiting conditions, and unpaid caring responsibilities are really coping with —

so that next time, the headlines calling them scroungers, cheats, or burdens aren’t so easily believed?

Show the truth.