Benefits: fix the system, tax the rich!

Although a government review the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is not yet making any recommendations, it has already concluded PIP is “not fit for purpose”.

Chaired by Social Security and Disability Minister Stephen Timms, overseen by a steering committee of disability experts, and informed by nearly 39,000 public submissions, the review was conceded after last summer’s protests against cuts to the health components of Universal Credit. Its interim report came out on 9 July.

The government originally intended to cut PIP, a non-means tested cash benefit for people living with disabilities and long-term or terminal health conditions.

TheFinancial Times has reported that Timms wants a more flexible system with a wider range of payment rates, with some claimants offered therapy or treatment instead of cash. Timms’s preference is raised in a coded way in the report; for example, it says the emphasis should be “on supporting independent participation in society.” A more flexible system with less cash paid out will bring the cost of disability and long-term ill-health benefits down (£24 billion to working-age recipients in 2025). It would be a cut by any other name.

However, the government has a problem. The review makes a big deal of its “co-production” with disabled people; it was set up this way because the opposition to the 2025 cuts successfully scandalised the complete lack of consultation with disabled people. Any unrealistic or unsustainable alternatives to the cash benefit may not be popular with the review’s committee.

Nonetheless, as the government intends to scrap the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), it seems likely that a changed PIP assessment will become a one-stop gateway to benefits or other forms of support. The WCA is an intensive process through which claimants have to prove they are less capable of working on a short term or long term basis. The assessment, like the current PIP assessment, is tortuous and dehumanising.

Flexible

It seems like that the new one-stop assessment will be less difficult and more flexible; the interim report strongly criticises the PIP assessment’s many flaws.

Applications for PIP (and the legacy benefit Disability Living Allowance) have been steadily rising since its introduction in 2013. There are many reasons for this. The report highlights: how more people are self-reporting as disabled, the various long-term effects of the pandemic, pressure from a rising cost-of-living pushing people to apply, long waits for treatment for chronic health conditions, rising mental ill-health and diagnosis of neurodivergence.

Four million people are now entitled to the benefit (including some pensioners who made claims before retirement). This is why the government in panicking. That said, according to the government’s own figures, the increase in numbers entitled to the benefit slowed down between 2023 and 2025. This is not highlighted or explained in the report.

For the Tories and Reform the amount spent on disability benefits is a signal that the UK has become a nation of “scroungers” and “layabouts”. Some Labour MPs are influenced by that reactionary propaganda. It underlies Labour’s drive to make the cuts last year and Burnham’s recent statement that he wants to reduce welfare benefits without “crude cuts”.

Pitiful

Labour claimed cuts to Universal Credit last year were not crude; they were accompanied by £2.2 billion in extra support to help get disabled people into work. However, spread out over four years, that is a pitiful amount of money. Getting work as a disabled or chronically ill person is becoming harder. Review submissions, quoted in the Timms interim report, highlight how a more fragmented and demanding labour market, with increased reliance on digital interaction requiring sustained concentration and self-management, is bad news for people with certain health conditions.

Unfortunately this review, despite the involvement of very sincere people, is not fit for purpose. If the committee really wants to radically overhaul PIP without causing distress to current claimants it will have to address that fact that the welfare system, especially after the unreversed Osborne cuts, cannot adequately respond to lack of social care, poverty, inadequacy of other benefits, failing mental health care services, and all kinds of social exclusion. All these things impact on people who need PIP to survive.

Whether PIP continues as a more easily obtained cash benefit or even if it were to be partially replaced by more therapeutic and other practical help, more money needs to be found. It can only be found by taxing the rich. That is unlikely to be one of the review’s recommendations!