Reform would strip disability payments from 2.89 million
Reform UK wants to scrap PIP and replace cash support with council-run accounts, a £50bn plan an economist says is £28bn short of adding up.
PIP is not spending money. For most of the people who receive it, it is the wheelchair ramp, the taxi to hospital, the extra heating bill that comes with a body that doesn’t regulate its own temperature. As the debate over disability payment cuts reform rumbles on, the stakes are personal, not abstract. “PIP is not a luxury,” Phoebe Day, a claimant from Alton in Hampshire, said when the last government tried to cut a much smaller slice of it. “This is an absolute necessity and it’s terrifying and un-stabling, the idea of having it pulled away.” She called it “a lifejacket for those of us who are drowning.”
That was 2025, when Labour proposed saving £5bn a year by tightening PIP eligibility for new claimants. Reform UK’s plan, announced by Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick in Sunday’s Telegraph, does not tighten PIP. It abolishes it, along with the health element of Universal Credit for working-age adults, and says the change would strip or “modify” payments for 2.89 million people. A disabled campaigner who gave his name only as David told campaigners fighting last year’s smaller cut what a fight over PIP actually feels like from the inside: “This is an existential threat. The government is coming for us, for me, for people like me. And if we lose this fight, which it seems we will, many will die.” Reform is now proposing to fight that battle at ten times the scale.
To understand why a party can propose this, it helps to know what happened the last time anyone tried something smaller. PIP replaced Disability Living Allowance in 2013, arriving with tighter assessment criteria from day one. By this January, 3.9 million people in England and Wales were claiming it, and PIP spending is forecast to nearly double, from roughly £21.7bn this year to £44.7bn by 2030/31, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. When Labour tried to slow that curve last July, 49 of its own MPs voted against the bill and 18 abstained, cutting the government’s majority to 75. Starmer got the bill through only by promising the stricter rules would apply to new claimants alone, and by launching a review of the assessment process under minister Stephen Timms.
Reform’s plan does not survive on that scale of caution. In place of PIP and the UC health element, Reform proposes a new “Health Security Allowance” for people it defines as “gravely ill and severely challenged” only, subject to regular review. Everyone else currently receiving support for what Reform calls “low-level conditions” would lose the cash payment entirely. In its place: council- and mayor-run “Disability Support Accounts”, covering equipment, adaptations, transport and personal assistance, but not money a claimant can spend on rent, food or a heating bill of their own choosing. Employers with five or more staff would be required to buy “return to work cover” insurance, funding two years of an employee’s sick pay, a model Reform says is loosely borrowed from the Netherlands and partly offset by cuts to employer National Insurance.
The financial autonomy question matters as much as the headline figure. Handing disabled people a council-administered account instead of cash removes their say over how their own support is spent, and hands the decision to local authorities, several of which have issued Section 114 insolvency notices in recent years. A support system for the most vulnerable people in the country would be run, in practice, by the councils least able to run one.
It also may not add up on Reform’s own terms. Journalist Fraser Nelson has worked through the announcement and found only £22bn of the claimed £50bn is actually attributed to disability cuts; 2.89 million claimants losing an average PIP award of roughly £5,500 would produce closer to £16bn, not £22bn, leaving £28bn of the total unexplained pending Monday’s promised costed document. Reform’s own MP has more skin in this than most: Nelson notes that Jenrick’s Newark constituency has 6,011 PIP claimants, against a majority of 3,571. The man proposing to abolish the benefit represents more people who rely on it than voted to send him to Westminster in the first place.
None of that means the underlying pressure on the welfare bill is invented. Working-age disability benefit claims have risen from 2.1 million in 2019-20 to 3.4 million now, and Timms’s own review is reported to have found the current assessment system “not fit for purpose.” A serious left case exists for redesigning how PIP is assessed and targeted. Reform is not proposing that. It is proposing to abolish the benefit for everyone except the most severe cases and call the result compassion, in Jenrick’s words a rejection of what he called Britain’s “suicidal empathy”: “We are not lifting people out of misfortune. We are abandoning them to it, and calling it kindness.”
Reform is not in government, and the next election is not due until 2029; nothing in Monday’s document becomes law by itself. What it does is set the terms of the next welfare argument, at a scale Labour’s own backbenchers could not stomach one-tenth of. Disability charities that mobilised against a £5bn cut have not yet formally responded to a £50bn one. They are likely to. The 2.89 million are still waiting to hear from anyone who has actually asked them what a support account, instead of the money in their bank account, would mean on a Tuesday morning.
