THE government must act now and deliver on its promises to disabled workers, TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell said today.

Addressing the TUC disabled workers’ conference in Bournemouth, Ms Bell demanded urgent action from PM Sir Keir Starmer, whose latest plans outlined in the King’s Speech proposed “nothing” for workers hit hardest by cuts and inflation.

Ms Bell said: “We see a war in the Middle East, a US President making increasingly deranged threats. We have a cost-of-living crisis that never seems to end and that is hitting disabled workers particularly hard.

“We see the far right seeking to exploit the economic insecurity and scapegoat migrants, disabled people — any minority.

“They scapegoat them for problems we know are caused by austerity, privatisation and greed.”

It is the workers’ movement’s duty to “find some hope in these challenging times” and to “build our power and deliver change.”

Ms Bell then highlighted wins secured by unions and activists in pushing the government to walk back some of its harshest cuts to welfare spending, including Personal Independence Payments (PIP).

She said the TUC would continue its work with the government on the Timms review into PIP, demanding it deliver “genuine reform” to the scheme.

“So many people entering the PIP process do so with fear and anxiety that the assessors don’t have the training or the understanding of impairments they need,” she said.

Ms Bell told union delegates from across nearly all sectors that ministers have failed to deliver on their promises for disabled workers, saying: “We were promised action in Labour’s manifesto. But I’m sorry to say that there was nothing in last week’s King’s Speech.”

She demanded ministers “do the right thing and introduce pay gap reporting and action plans now. If we can’t measure a problem, then how can we fix it?”

The government must act now, she explained, to help disabled people deal with the realities they face, including an unemployment rate double that of non-disabled workers and a pay gap “which sees disabled women hit by a massive 27 per cent pay penalty.”

She demanded Sir Keir move to deliver “flexible working, improve workplace culture and to tackle the epidemic of bullying and harassment against disabled people.”

Ms Bell added that universal credit and social security need to be re-examined to “actually be based on what people need to live.”