Assessments for personal independence payments (PIP) have come under scrutiny as the Government looks set to overhaul them as part of welfare reforms.
The Government had been planning to tighten the criteria for getting PIP.
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“The review will examine the PIP assessment criteria… to consider whether these effectively capture the impact of long-term health conditions and disability in the modern world,” Timms has said.
Former assessors have also claimed that the system is target-driven and that there is pressure to downgrade the number of points needed to qualify for PIP.
PIP benefits are designed to help people with the extra costs of living that come from being disabled, for instance transport costs or buying special equipment or food.
Claiming PIP involves filling in an online form, followed by an interview with an assessor, usually a contractor for the Department for Work and Pensions.
For each question, they get more points if they are less able to do the activity. Depending on how many points are reached, they may get PIP at the standard rate or the enhanced rate.
What are the problems with PIP assessments?
A key problem arises for people whose condition gets better or worse from day to day. For instance, people score points if they are unable to do a task more than half the time. But in someone who has that level of disability for slightly less than half of the time, it could still have a major impact on their life and raise their living costs.
The assessment process seems to have been designed more with physical conditions in mind. “If they want to reform the PIP assessment process, they may have to come up with mental health-specific ‘indicators,'” said Dr Stevelink.
Some physical conditions can also be unpredictable, like epilepsy or certain other neurological disorders, said Professor Jon Stone, a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh. “They can be suddenly incapacitating and can make it hard to reliably plan work or social activities.”
The MS Society would like to see PIP assessments change so they use more graduated scales rather than hard cut-offs, for instance in how far someone can walk. “If people can just walk one step over 20 meters, then they won’t receive the highest rate of mobility support,” said Barrett.
The Government planned to change this so that, as well as needing eight points in total, someone would need a minimum of four points on at least one of the questions, which campaigners said was too high a bar.
After pushback from MPs, though, the Government first said the four point rule would apply only to new claimants from 2026, then said there would be no such change until after the Timms review.
What will happen next?
Everything hinges on the Timms review. Ministers have said that disability rights groups will be “coproducers” of the report, so that it takes account of the views of claimants.
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A single assessment for anything to do with health and benefits payments may sound sensible on the face of it, but PIP and universal credit are for different purposes, said Erhardt. PIP is supposed to help disabled people cope with their higher cost of living whether they are in work or not. “The idea of a test that measures extra costs somehow now measuring your ability to work – it’s very difficult for us to understand how that might work.”
That document says that the number of people claiming PIP has grown from two million working age people in 2019 to three million by 2024, and is set to reach four million by 2030.
A DWP spokesperson said: “We’re reforming the welfare system so people are genuinely supported into work, while putting it on a sustainable footing.
“We are putting disabled people at the heart of a ministerial review of the PIP assessment to make sure it is fit and fair for the future, and we will work with them and key organisations representing them, to consider how best to do this.”
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