'It feels like my life isn't worth paying for'

As Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered her Spring Statement announcing changes to health-related benefits and universal credit, the Brighton & Hove Crips Against Cuts group held a demonstration in Hove to oppose plans to cut health-related benefit payments.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall said the overhaul would create a more "pro-work system" to encourage people to take up jobs, while protecting those who cannot work.

Eliph Hadert, 29, from Brighton, has long-term health conditions, autism and impaired mobility.

Alongside paid work and volunteering, she receives the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) which she used for living expenses, but also allowed her to buy her own wheelchair.

She said she used the payment "to survive" and that she worked but couldn't do many hours because it made her "so ill".

"I need PIP for food, electricity and washing clothes. It's such a lifeline and it's the way into a lot of other help, like having a disabled bus ," she said.

"There seems to be some rhetoric that people in the receipt of PIP are benefit scroungers when actually all the people I know on PIP, including myself, work very hard, in paid work or in voluntary work, which I think is just as deserving to be called work."

Ms Hadert said she thought the government was "reinforcing the perception of disabled people as benefit scroungers".

"I've received a lot of abuse on buses and trains when I've asked if I could sit down," she said.

"Someone said to me once 'I've been at work all day, my legs are tired. You've been been sitting on your arse all day. Why should I give you my seat":[]}