Until five years ago, Phil Brehaut was healthy and earning a decent wage working in the warehouse at his local Morrisons in Stockport. But in the spring of 2011, the 57-year-old was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and found himself in a position that any of us could: physically unable to work. With bills still coming in, he applied for sickness benefits.

It gives an insight into how successful the Conservatives’ benefit-shaming has become that, as he describes his assessment, Brehaut – who has excruciating pain in his legs and can’t keep his balance – is concerned to assure me he has “never signed on before” and has worked since he was 15.

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“It was very daunting, like being in court,” he says. “The lady on the panel actually asked me, ‘How long are you likely to have Parkinson’s?’” He pauses. “The person next to her quickly whispered in her ear … You would think they’d know a little bit about it.”

Brehaut was granted employment and support allowance (ESA) but put in the “work-related activity group”, or Wrag. This second-tier ESA group receives lower benefits than the “support group” and requires disabled claimants to undertake “work-related activities” or risk being sanctioned and left to get by on £67.50 a week.

In order to receive his money, his local jobcentre told him, he would have to bring them a weekly “sick note” – leaving Brehaut to visit his GP every Monday and hand-deliver the note to a DWP adviser by 10.30am. This went on every week for nine months.

“It was awful,” he says. “Some days I couldn’t get up – because mornings are tough for me – but I had to or I wouldn’t have any money.”

The jobcentre “did nothing” to help, he says.

“They made it very clear that if they found what [they thought was] a suitable job, they’d have stopped my benefits. They asked what sort of work I could do but I can’t do anything physical because of my tremors … I can’t hold the wardrobe handles to get my clothes out in the morning.”

That image might be one for George Osborne to pause on as he talks of cutting sickness benefits as an “incentive” for people such as Brehaut to get a job.

The government is now calculating how to respond to the Lords voting down its plan to take £30 a week from new claimants put in the Wrag from April 2017. In Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions, David Cameron signalled that it will press ahead with the cut.

A third of chronically ill and disabled people in the Wrag say they already can’t afford to eat, according to the Disability Benefits Consortium, a national coalition of charities. Brehaut tells me he and his wife, Mary, struggled to “pay for the basics” – food, gas, electricity – and watched the savings they’d built up over the years disappear. At the same time, they had to find money to adapt their home – taking out the bath for a shower, buying large door handles, fitting smaller steps – with no government help.

“It was like turning a tap on,” Brehaut says. “We had to ask family and friends for help – mainly family.”

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In February 2012, after his GP contacted the DWP, Brehaut was moved to ESA’s “support group”, with the DWP noting “recent changes to your condition” as the reason. “My condition hadn’t changed whatsoever,” Brehaut says.

Things are still tight. This winter the couple have largely confined themselves to the upstairs of their house to keep warm. Brehaut used to get a warm homes grant of £140 a year but the government has stopped this payment with no explanation. “That’s something else they’ve taken off me,” he says.

Mary, 52, is disabled too – she has a crumbling spine and has had to give up her job as a machinist – but isn’t eligible for ESA herself.

“We’re both surviving on £136 a week on what they call a ‘joint claim’. They’re paying Mary £26.01 a week,” Brehaut says. “They said she was ‘fit for work’. To get JSA, she’d have to go for jobs. But she can’t do them.”

The couple have also been told they’re on the wrong benefits for Mary to receive carer’s allowance (perversely, the complexity of the sickness benefit system means Brehaut is eligible to be classed as the carer but his wife – who cares for him – is not). Meanwhile Brehaut tells me he’s waiting for a date to be assessed for personal independence payments (PIP) – the government’s tougher replacement for his disability living allowance.

“This is why I’m scared about PIP,” he says. “They’ll look at me and say, ‘Nothing’s wrong with you’.”