As Disabled people, we’ve grown to expect the UK government to ignore us. Last week, ministers went a step further: insulting us with the publication of the long-awaited Disability Action Plan (DAP).

You do not have to start reading the DAP to realise it will have no real impact on Disabled people’s lives. Introducing the document, the government promises only to “lay the foundations” for any meaningful long-term change.

To this end, it pledges 32 “practical actions” that include promises to create an “online information hub for families with disabled members”, to form a working group that will “make recommendations” on how to improve support for people with guide and assistance dogs, and to “explore” a bid to host the 2031 Special Olympics.

None will deliver any transformative policy before this year’s general election – particularly disappointing given the action plan comes after an extremely turbulent few years for Disabled people.

In 2022, the High Court ruled the National Disability Strategy unlawful for not consulting with Disabled people, the following year the official Covid-19 inquiry found that Disabled people were an “afterthought” in the UK’s pandemic response, and, most recently, the disability minister’s post was left empty for a week before being downgraded.

All of these injustices were of the government’s own making. But you wouldn’t know it from ministers’ reaction to the DAP’s launch, said Kamran Mallick, the CEO of Disability Rights UK, who was in the room when the plan was unveiled last week.

“It was a self-congratulatory event,” Mallick said. “The minister said how great it was and the commitment to improving Disabled people’s lives.”

The government is patting itself on the back for pulling together a list of random policy ideas and research proposals, at a time when Disabled people “are being immiserated deliberately”, said Rick Burgess, the co-founder of Manchester Disabled People Against Cuts.

Burgess continued: “As the UN found, the history of the last 15 years has been of systemic human rights abuses of Disabled people. This has resulted in thousands of excess deaths and in Disabled people dying during Covid at three times the rate of non-disabled people and now in 60% of food bank users being Disabled people.”

Ministers would only have to speak to a Disabled person to realise that the time for research is over – we desperately need transformative changes that improve our lives.

Instead, we have a plan that “feels like a lot of bluster and bragging about highlighting the issues disabled people face”, said disability rights journalist and campaigner Rachel Charlton-Dailey. “But there's no actual action in it that would make our lives easier now.”

Pointing to areas the government could be taking immediate action on, Charlton-Dailey said: “Disabled people are struggling to find accessible housing, get on trains and walk down the street both accessibly and without being a victim of hate crime.”

Disability rights campaigner Claire Glasman, a founder member and co-ordinator of multi-racial grassroots organisation WinVisible (Women with Visible & Invisible Disabilities), agrees, saying the DAP overlooks key findings on inequality in recent years.

Glasman said: “The Disability Action Plan dismisses important problems the Disabled Mothers’ Rights Campaign and others raised: children being taken from disabled mothers – mainly single mothers – triggered by disability discrimination, racism and poverty.

“[It] hides disabled people’s poverty and increasing destitution, which empowers abusers. Through Universal Credit, waiting time for money to come in, deductions and sanctions, the two-child limit and total benefit cap, the government has deliberately impoverished children.”

Though the DAP has largely been greeted with an outpouring of disappointment and anger, some commentators have tried to argue that it includes a series of small-scale wins for the disability rights movement. But even these don’t hold up to scrutiny. A promise to “improve the accessibility of playgrounds”, for example, comes with no offer of funding, only vague commitments to “explore the most effective way of creating guidance on how to develop more inclusive and accessible playgrounds”.

It is hard not to feel let down by a government plan that rejects real action in favour of promises to make government publications and communications more accessible (which they are already legally required to do under the Equality Act 2010).

Burgess summed up the shared disappointment of disability rights campaigners, saying: “This is a plan about what non-disabled policymakers are willing to offer us. It is not a plan which protects or enhances our rights or demonstrates an understanding of the social model of disability.

“It is not what we need. Rather, it is what a disablist government think they will grudgingly offer.”

The DAP is insufficient, but many of us didn’t expect it to contain radical policies that would lead to a much-needed systemic overhaul. That’s why we have a plan of our own: the Disabled People’s Manifesto, which contains a roadmap to the future we all have a right to.

We should use the DAP’s failures to build our collective power as Disabled people to ensure the next UK government cannot ignore our radical reform programme. It’s time we demand ministers tackle disablist policy-making and systemic oppression and work to build a society where everyone has the same life chances and is treated and valued as equal citizens.