Good morning. Motability really ought to be a boring subject. A government scheme designed to help people with serious disabilities get a car by using a portion of their benefits to pay for the lease doesn’t sound like fertile territory for a scandal, after all. But over the last week, anyone who had never heard of Motability before would have got a much more lurid impression.
First in the Daily Mail last Saturday, and then in a string of stories spinning off the same basic analysis, Motability was portrayed not as a useful mechanism for reducing some of the inequities that always accompany disability – but an outrageous example of con artists milking the taxpayer to live a life of luxury. The saga took in “bedwetting boy racers”, so-called “sickfluencers” teaching fellow chancers how to cheat the system, an anonymous social media user who has previously caught the eye of Elon Musk and even the legacy of the Battle of Britain.
