Ahead of the budget, Philip Hammond boasted he would do “whatever it takes” to rebuild the British economy. That, apparently, includes denying disabled people benefits. Theresa May’s own policy chief, George Freeman, is keen to sell the new rules for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) as “tweaks” rather than cuts – but look at the small print. This is the sort of “tweak” that’s worth £3.7bn.

Buried on the day two byelection results were announced, and hushed up in the budget, this month the government is set to quietly overturn two tribunal rulings on PIP, including one that found people with extreme anxiety should be given the same status as those who are blind.

That sounds like anodyne policy-speak until you realise it will translate as blocking 160,000 people with mental health problems and disabilities from being eligible for support. Those are not people who are suffering a mild headache but, say, experience “overwhelming psychological distress” when travelling alone.

Maria – a 54-year-old grandmother from the Wirral – has severe anxiety and depression, as well as arthritis, and knows first hand that not having a disability benefit such as PIP means, in her words, struggling to “survive”. For the last two years, her anxiety has been debilitating: the sort of condition that “eats me up”, and “plays in my mind all the time”. She applied for PIP in March 2016 but, because of a backlog in the assessment system, was left without the benefit for six months. In the meantime, all she had to live off was £52 a week of universal credit.

Money was already tight: she lives on the top floor of a dilapidated building – a one-room flat in the eaves – and, as a result of her arthritis, she has to spend £35 a week on gas to stay warm.

Maria’s anxiety means it’s never easy to eat solids (“It’s like there’s sandpaper in my mouth,” she explains), but without PIP she couldn’t even afford to buy a loaf of bread. “I literally had no food. Nothing,” she tells me. Her voice starts to break. “It takes me back, you see. All I’d do was lie in bed and cry.”

Maria was given some vouchers for a Trussell Trust food bank, but because she couldn’t afford the bus fare to get there she could go only twice. As the months went on without PIP, and the pressure took its toll on her mental health, her weight dropped to just below six stone. Maria is small – just over five foot – but that was two stone starved off her body. Because she didn’t have any money to top up her phone with credit, she couldn’t even call her therapist.

That the government wants to claim people like Maria aren’t “really disabled” and in need of benefits is cruel, but it is not new. It’s simply the latest attempt to squeeze chronically ill and disabled people off the “welfare” bill.

Last year’s March budget included its own bid to pull PIP from 370,000 disabled people – that time on the grounds that if you had help from an aid, such as a crutch, you could do without benefits.

The PIP assessment process itself is designed in a way that denies help to people who need it; up to 80% of rejections for the benefit are overturned on appeal because of failures in the system, according to evidence given to MPs this week, and it’s common for people with complex mental health problems to be assessed by physiotherapists and paramedics. That May has told the Commons that the latest change will return the benefit to its “original intention” is telling: there was no denial that this will stack the odds against hundreds of thousands of disabled people – rather, the “defence” seems to be that this was always the plan.

Contrast the £3.7bn being blocked from 160,000 disabled people with the Tories’ £1bn inheritance tax giveaway to 26,000 families. The rhetoric employed by George Osborne post-recession may have been dialled down in recent years but – as yesterday’s budget confirmed – the agenda remains the same. There is money for tax cuts for the wealthy, but social security for the disabled needs squeezing. The growing economy has a “bright future” but another £12bn still has to be pulled from low-paid families.

Blind ideology has human consequences. The disability charity Scope reports that the insecurity around PIP alone has resulted in a 542% increase in PIP-related calls to its helpline over the past year. That’s people with severe depression or Parkinson’s, frantic to know if they’re going to be able to afford their therapy or pay the gas bill to keep warm.

Since her PIP came through last autumn, Maria has put weight back on and her mental health has stabilised. “With some security, you think ‘I can pay the electric now; I can pay to get a taxi to the dietician’,” she says. What Maria tells me next should stick in the chancellor’s mind: “Without PIP, I wouldn’t be here.”