Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and to join the, I am sure, widespread view around the House in welcoming the continuing presence of the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, in her position. Personally, I consider that a delight, even though I am often pushing her on the departmental decisions for which we hold her responsible.

For the second statutory instrument in a row, I find myself thanking the Conservative Benches for securing this debate while disagreeing by 180 degrees with the position they are taking.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

What is new?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

If Hansard did not catch that, the comment from the Opposition Front Bench was, “What is new?”

I begin by making a very simple point. The way in which the outcomes of the reviews of all the payments we are discussing have been conducted, particularly the personal independence payments, are causing a great deal of unnecessary distress, fear and the wrongful withdrawal of essential benefits. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies, set out, this is a modest, short-term, limited measure. But we cannot discuss this situation without looking at the broader context, which, indeed, is what the Conservative Front Bench did.

I make a call here for realism. We have an ageing population, healthy life expectancy that has declined by two years in the past decade and one in 10 local areas where the healthy life expectancy is less than 55 years. We have a mental health crisis and a lot of focus on benefits for mental health issues. We need to tackle the issues behind that: schools forced to become exam factories; inequality; insecurity; and child poverty. We need to take the focus away from individuals, and trying to crack down on individuals, and acknowledge that we have a societal problem that we need to tackle as a society, and the Government need to tackle as a Government, rather than continually pounding away rhetorically at individuals.

In that context, I do not think there is enough awareness that the Timms review, to which the noble Lord, Lord Davies, referred was given guidance that it had to stick within the currently predicted future spending levels of PIP—and there is talk of reductions. Let us be realistic about this. I refer to the reactions to the Timms review from organisations that would not be considered radical. The British Psychological Society, with which I entirely agree, said:

“Those that apply for PIP should not feel demeaned and deterred from applying”


by the process. We are talking about reviews here, but people get so fearful about the reviews that they just give up. The British Psychological Society also said:

“Everyone who has been signed off with long-term sickness, including those living with a mental health condition, deserves support”.


It rightly points out that, for those with financial difficulties, the stress of reviews can cause further mental ill health. That has to be taken into account. It is awful for the individuals concerned and also very bad for the whole of society.

An organisation with which some in your Lordships’ House may have even more sympathy is the RNIB, which says that PIP assessments and reviews

“fail to properly understand the realities blind and partially sighted people face. Too many are then forced to challenge decisions that are later overturned”.

I finish by referring to a report in the Times last week, which I urge noble Lords to look at if they have not seen it. The Times sat through a full day of a hearing of the social security and child support tribunal at Swindon magistrates’ court. Problems with PIP now make up about two-thirds of that court’s caseload. In the first three months of this year, more than 27,000 PIP decisions were appealed, and 67% of those appeals were successful. For all those who were saying, “Isn’t it terrible that this is being done by remote assessments and these remote assessments may be wrong”, many of them are wrong in a way that the court later finds is clearly detrimental to the individuals who need that support.

I cite one case from that report. Appearing before the tribunal was a 63 year-old retired GP practice manager. He was

“there for his 22-year-old nephew who has a neurological impairment, learning difficulties, epilepsy, a severe tic and Tourette syndrome”,

and had

“loss of mass in his brain on the left side, responsible for language comprehension, analytical skills and controlling the right side of his body”.

A phone assessment took away his benefits. The tribunal took a very brief look at the medical evidence and restored those benefits. We have a huge problem here. This SI will possibly do a little bit of cleaning, tidying and sorting, but there is far more to do.

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I support the regret Motion tabled by my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott for the reasons that she set out so clearly in her excellent introductory speech. But before I go into that, I too want to say what a delight it is to see the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on the Front Bench.

As has been said already, these regulations look like they are just simple administrative regulations. They look like they might be just fixing the backlog and look like they might be benign. Of course, nobody wants vulnerable claimants to lose their entitlements to those really important benefits because the department has not conducted a review on time. But that is not what we are debating here today. What we are, in effect, saying, is that it is acceptable for the Government to respond to a system that is failing by suspending one of the few safeguards that exists within it.

If we all cast our mind back to when the personal independence payment—or PIP—system was introduced, it was never intended to be a benefit that just rolled on indefinitely after it had been awarded. When Parliament debated and agreed the PIP system, the whole point of it was supposed to be based on the fundamental understanding that conditions can change over time and can get worse but can also get better, so you should not just lock somebody into a system of benefits and never look again. That is a fundamentally pessimistic way of looking at human lives.

I listened to the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and he was obviously very critical of the former Government. I am sure that he is probably right on a lot of those points—I am not an expert so I cannot possibly go back over 14 or 16 years of that history—but, at the end of the day, the current Government have been in power for more than two years, so there must come a point when they now need to take the responsibility for fixing what is currently presenting in the system and looking at the things that have happened on their watch.

If the department does not have the capacity to conduct the reviews, the answer cannot be to abandon them. We need to look at the root cause. Why do we have this backlog? Why do we have so many more claims in the system and this lack of capacity? It is due to the unprecedented rise in the number of people claiming disability and benefits. The growth, as has been said, is particularly striking among younger people claiming on mental health grounds. We have a social security and welfare system that is increasingly being asked to compensate for not just severe disability, which we all agree it should do, but a large and growing number of mental health conditions, such as anxiety, mild depression and ADHD, which would not have been recognised as disabling just a generation ago or even more recently.

Before I came into the Chamber, I saw somebody putting a comparator on X. I do not have the citation, but it is very interesting and I urge the Front Bench and everyone to look at it. The rise in mental health conditions and mental health disability is proportionately much greater in this country compared to about 40 other developed nations. We in the UK are not biologically different or biologically more likely to be disabled because of mental health than people in countries such as France, Germany, Canada, Korea, China, Singapore and so on, so we need to start asking ourselves some of those hard questions. I have spoken in this House on a number of occasions—

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Does the noble Baroness acknowledge that we should look at our society and ask why we might be suffering from higher levels of those conditions, and why people are not able to find a place in our society, as well as looking at biology?

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

I am sure the noble Baroness is right, and I thank her for that point. She has posed a very broad question, and I fear I would detain the House for much too long if I tried to answer it with the seriousness it definitely deserves.

I want to touch on a few themes. I have spoken in this House on a number of occasions about what I and a growing number of others regard as the growing medicalisation of ordinary human experiences—just life experiences. We do not do people any favours if we do not distinguish between severe and enduring mental illness, and the very broad spectrum of distress and difficulty that finds its way into our welfare system in one way or another. This is at the root of my worries about these regulations, because every change that reduces scrutiny or delays reassessment sends a signal that says to that person, “Now you are in this system, we expect you to remain there. Just carry on. You are getting the benefits. We have decided that this is the thing that is making your life difficult, and we are going to support you”. It is not saying. “We are looking at you through an optimistic lens about what we can do to help you move off this system”.

Reviews are not just a mechanism for saving money, but that is important. People have mentioned the Timms review, and I am sure it is an excellent piece of work. There are many good points in it. My real worry is that the Minister, when interviewed about this, said that he did not have any worries about the level of welfare spending. That is completely unrealistic; it is fantasy. We should be concerned about the level of welfare spending in this country. It is completely unacceptable, unsustainable, wrong for the taxpayer and wrong for people who are on welfare.

This debate and these regulations risk masking the true scale of the problem. We should be expecting Ministers to explain why they think this is acceptable. It is great that the Minister is here today, but we should be having a much more in-depth debate. We should be asking much bigger questions. Why do we have so many young people, in particular, in this system? Why are we diagnosing them with these mental health conditions that mean they are receiving welfare, PIP and other benefits? Why are we allowing this welfare system to reinforce itself and reinforce a life on benefits for some of these people?

I support my noble friend’s regret Motion, and I will certainly vote for it if she divides the House.