As anniversaries go, Michael’s is not one to celebrate. This month marks one year since the government brought in one of its most controversial “welfare” policies: cutting the benefit for people too ill to work – Employment and Support Allowance – by £30 a week. Like hundreds of thousands of other disabled and chronically ill people, Michael was collateral damage.

The 48-year-old has Crohn’s disease, a debilitating bowel disease that leaves him weak and depressed. He’s thinner than he should be – “I’m exhausted, malnourished,” he says – and needs heavy-duty painkillers to get through the day.

For the past six years he’s survived on out-of-work sickness benefits because his illness makes having a job impossible. But as mass re-testing of disabled people was rolled out in 2017, Michael was summoned to an assessment centre to see if he was “fit for work”. He scored zero points – meaning he was judged to have no reason why he couldn’t work. “The [report] didn’t remotely correspond with the interview,” he says – and was promptly shunted on to jobseeker’s allowance.

Michael spent a year fighting to get his disability benefits back – page after page of paperwork and a tribunal in court. He won. But even though the government now officially acknowledges that he’s too disabled to work, the ESA cut for new claimants means he is getting no more money than when he was classed as a healthy jobseeker. That’s just £73 a week. It doesn’t take a medical degree to understand why unemployed disabled people used to get a little more support than non-disabled jobseekers: a few months out of work is not the same, in terms of its effect on your bank balance, as spending years too ill to have any way to earn a wage.

Michael has had other problems with his benefits – including his housing benefit being temporarily stopped – and financially, it’s crippling. He’s £1,000 in debt to his utility company; bills just have to be ignored. The same is owed in rent arrears for his studio flat in London. Each week, he scrapes together £3.50 just to stop his social housing provider proceeding with eviction.

He’s getting sicker because of the stress. “[All] because of decisions you’ve had no part in,” he says.

This is Britain’s rigged safety net, where disabled people must jump through hoops to get scraps of support

According to ministers, Michael just lacks a bit of motivation. When the disability cut was first introduced, the Conservatives billed it as an “incentive” for disabled people to get a job – as if the reason someone with Parkinson’s isn’t in work isn’t that they can’t hold a pen because of their tremors, but because they’re enjoying an “easy life” on benefits. One year on, there’s no evidence the policy has succeeded in boosting flagging disability employment numbers. Its real achievement? Making disabled people hungry.

In order to afford to eat, Michael has had to create a military-style method: his fridge and freezer are packed with large boxes of raw chicken, parcelled up and stored as a result of scouring the reduced aisles of local supermarkets. “When I’m well enough to slog across each evening at 7pm,” he says. Then, last week, even this lifeline went: his fridge caught fire. “Like Grenfell,” he says. He has no money to replace it – he’s already paying back a £300 budgeting loan deducted from his benefits at £12 a week, and without a fridge, he won’t be able to store cheap food. This for a man who’s already malnourished. “It’ll simply mean missing meals, not eating,” he says.

From its inception, the cutting of sickness benefits was always one of the grubbiest austerity measures – one that played on the idea that “scrounging” disabled people need “tough love” to force them out of bed to get a job. It’s amounted to little more than knowingly starving the sick: in 2015, research found that the unemployment disability benefit rate was already so meagre that it was leaving a third of recipients struggling to afford food. The government cut it anyway.

But look again: this is about more than one nasty policy. It’s part of a wider pattern of falsely removing unemployment benefits from disabled people. Since the infamous “fit for work” assessments were first rolled out, faulty testing has seen tens of thousands of severely ill people thrown off benefits – a system so darkly inept that this month, a woman handed over her mum’s ashes to the Department for Work and Pensions after they asked to assess her for work months after she’d died.

Meanwhile, the benefit sanction regime has been found to be discriminating against disabled people: disabled jobseekers are 53% more likely to have their money docked than a claimant who isn’t disabled. And only last month the National Audit Office found that the government has falsely underpaid about 70,000 disabled people on ESA, with some now owed as much as £20,000. The NAO found that the government knew about it in 2013, but did nothing.

This is Britain’s rigged safety net, where disabled people must jump through hoops to get scraps of support, but the government can remove it anytime it wants.

A few days later, Michael emails to tell me his mum’s had a stroke – another worry on top of the rest. The bills are mounting, and it’s getting too much to deal with. Michael wonders what the point of ministers making these cuts was, and for the life of me, I can’t find one. “There’s no public gain,” he says. “Just a great deal of loss to myself and others like me.”

• Frances Ryan writes the Guardian’s Hardworking Britain column