PIP breaks disabled people, ministers know it
The government's own review found PIP 'breaks' disabled people, but ministers had already ruled out the one fix that costs money.
Rob Lewis has multiple sclerosis, a condition that does not go away and does not reverse itself. At his last assessment for the personal independence payment, he was asked to touch his toes and pick up a cup, to prove to a stranger that he was still ill enough to deserve the money. “You’re made to feel like a liar,” he says, “as though you shouldn’t be asking for help or money.”
On Thursday the government’s own review confirmed what Lewis and hundreds of thousands of other disabled people have been saying for years: PIP is not fit for purpose. The interim report of the Timms Review, commissioned by the Starmer government after last summer’s welfare rebellion, states plainly that the benefit is “not working,” that its assessment process is “dehumanising,” and that it “breaks” the people forced through it.
‘Not fit for purpose’, in the government’s own words
The review took evidence from 38,713 people over ten weeks, the largest response of its kind since PIP was introduced 13 years ago. More than nine in ten described a negative experience of claiming it. Only around one in twenty had anything positive to say about the assessment itself.
Review co-chair Sharon Brennan put it bluntly: “Pip is highly valued as a benefit but is not fit for purpose.” Her fellow co-chairs describe a system that is “overly complex, repetitive and difficult to navigate,” one that leads people to give up work and their social lives simply to survive the process of proving they are disabled.
Lewis knows that process from the inside. After a reassessment failed to recognise that MS is a lifelong condition whose symptoms fluctuate, his Motability car was taken away. He won it back at tribunal, as around two-thirds of people who challenge a PIP decision do, but not before the fight did what he calls “major” damage to his mental and physical health. He is already dreading the next reassessment. “I’m going into battle to fight for it again,” he says. “We shouldn’t be made to prove ourselves again every couple of years when it’s hard enough getting out of bed in the morning sometimes.”
A diagnosis with the treatment ruled out in advance
Here is the part the government would rather you skimmed past. The review’s steering group was not permitted to recommend anything that increases overall projected PIP spending. The interim report calls this “no blank cheque”: any changes must fit inside existing spending projections, which is why it leaves the door open to “non-cash alternatives” instead of the benefit itself.
Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden has confirmed as much. He says the government sent reviewers “a signal not to come forward with a big, increasing cost package,” and that he personally asked them to look at “conditions like anxiety and depression, neurodiverse conditions and so on.” That request was made before the review had taken a single piece of evidence.
The review’s own evidence undercuts the case for going after those claimants. Despite the running rightwing press line that young “snowflakes” are exaggerating mental-health symptoms to claim PIP, the report says this was “barely raised” across almost 40,000 submissions. What came up instead was cuts to public services, long NHS waits, falling healthy life expectancy and the cost of living. Overall benefit spending as a share of GDP has stayed flat even as PIP claims have risen. The pressure is not coming from claimants working the system. It is coming from a state that has made people sicker and then built a hostile gate to keep them from the one payment meant to help.
The cost of getting it wrong
Getting it wrong at DWP has not been abstract. Errol Graham, 57, starved to death in his Nottingham flat after his benefits were stopped; his family say he had also been found ineligible for PIP. Philippa Day died after an overdose in 2019 following a PIP decision that a coroner later found involved 28 separate errors; a DWP call handler heard her say she was “literally starving and cold” and did not escalate it. DWP was forced last year to admit that 97 internal reviews into deaths and serious harm involving claimants were carried out in 2020-22 alone, a third of them flagging its own failures with PIP claims specifically. Ministers kept those reviews from MPs while they voted on further cuts.
That is the backdrop against which “not fit for purpose” has to be read. It is not a neutral finding. It is a government admitting, in writing, that a system it has run for 13 years has been degrading people and in some cases killing them, while making sure in advance that the fix cannot cost anything.
The fairest case against this reading
It would be wrong to pretend the cap settles the matter on its own. The review’s steering group includes disabled co-chairs, and its terms of reference say its aim is not to hunt for cuts. Louise Murphy of the Resolution Foundation argues the priority should be reforming PIP “so that it reflects how people actually experience disability, rather than making short-term savings,” and there is a real case that ending pointless repeat reassessments, or moving toward something closer to the Scottish self-assessment model, could improve claimants’ lives without spending a penny more. Andy Burnham, tipped to be prime minister by the time the review’s final report lands in the autumn, says he wants investment in training and housing rather than “crude cuts.”
That is a more honest starting point than the £5bn cuts package Labour backbenchers forced the government to abandon last year. But a frozen budget against a caseload the DWP’s own figures put on course for 4.4 million claimants by 2031 is a real-terms squeeze whichever minister administers it, and “non-cash alternatives” is the phrase in this report that should worry people most. Disabled People Against Cuts, which has rejected the Timms process outright, call the approach “a sticking plaster on a gaping wound.” They commissioned nothing. They were not asked to sign off on a spending cap before a single disabled person gave evidence.
The government has written down, in its own review, that PIP breaks people. In the same document it has made sure the one thing that might stop it, spending more to fix it, was never on the table.
