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

Baroness Stedman-Scott Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Stedman-Scott]

That this House regrets that the Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 will result in claimants receiving payments without the appropriate reviews having taken place and fail to reduce the overall benefits bill.

Relevant document: 2nd Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

May I start by saying how delighted I am to see the Minister in her place?

My Lords, these regulations make a significant change to the way in which personal independence payment awards are reviewed. They allow the Secretary of State to extend an existing fixed-term PIP award whenever Ministers consider that necessary to safeguard the efficient administration of the benefit. The department’s stated intention is that, for most claimants aged 25 and over, initial awards should generally last four years and subsequent awards six years, with reviews taking place after three and five years respectively. Formerly, according to the department, 77% of awards were made for periods of two years or less. The effect is therefore not simply to prevent awards expiring during an emergency, but to make substantially less frequent reviews the normal approach for a large proportion of the PIP case load. That is why I have tabled this regret Motion.

A properly functioning welfare system must ensure that people receive the right support at the right level and for the right length of time. Reviews should never be treated merely as an attempt to remove support or catch claimants out. They provide an opportunity to establish whether somebody’s needs have remained the same, improved or deteriorated. Indeed, I might say to some of those noble Lords on the Labour Benches that fewer reviews will not only mean that some people whose functional capacity has improved continue to receive an award that no longer reflects their circumstances; it could also mean that people whose conditions have deteriorated remain on an award that is too low.

The Government cannot therefore present this as an entirely claimant-friendly change. Reviews provide protection in both directions. Nor can Ministers simply rely on claimants to report every relevant change themselves. Some people will report changes promptly, but others may not recognise that a gradual improvement in their functional capacity is relevant. Some may not fully understand the reporting requirements. Others may be reluctant to report a change that could reduce their income. The Government’s own statistics underline the danger of placing too much weight on self-reporting. In the financial year ending 2026, the estimated PIP overpayment rate increased from 1.3% to 2.3%, or from £330 million to £660 million. The department found that improvements in functional needs that had not been reported were the largest cause of PIP overpayments, accounting for more than £7 in every £10 overpaid. There were also more than £1 billion-worth of cases in which the claimant had been overpaid following a change in functional needs but was not reasonably expected to have known that the change needed to be reported.

We should also consider the breadth of the power being created. The regulations allow the Secretary of State to extend a fixed-term award whenever the Secretary of State considers it necessary to safeguard the efficient administration of PIP. But what precisely does this mean? I therefore ask the Minister to tell the House the following. What is the maximum period by which an individual award may be extended using this power? Will the department publish the guidance used by decision-makers? Will Ministers publish regular figures showing how many awards have been extended, for how long and for what reason? And will the Government commit to reviewing the operation of this power once the current backlog has been brought under control? Without these safeguards, the instrument risks transforming what is supposedly an emergency administrative power into a permanent alternative to conducting proper reviews.

The Prime Minister has spoken of a more preventive, supportive welfare system that intervenes earlier and helps more people to move forward. Yet these regulations do precisely what the Prime Minister says he wishes to avoid: they are a short-term administrative workaround for a backlog, not a long-term reform.

The Prime Minister also inherits the Timms review, which concluded that the current PIP system is not fit for purpose and requires radical overhaul. That review emphasised the need for assessments that are accurate, timely and rooted in proper evidence. Yet these regulations move in the opposite direction: they make timely reviews less frequent, not more robust; they risk leaving people on awards that are too high or too low for years at a time; and they do nothing to address the underlying drivers of rising caseloads, rising costs and rising error rates. If the Government wish to align themselves with the Prime Minister’s stated principle of a welfare system that is fiscally responsible then they must confront the operational challenges in PIP directly.

The department says that younger claimants are more likely to see improvements in their functional capacity and that prolonged unemployment and inactivity early in life can have lasting scarring effects. It therefore does not want young people whose circumstances have improved to remain on PIP longer than necessary. But that raises an obvious question: why does that principle cease to matter on somebody’s 25th birthday? The Government cannot argue that reviews are important in preventing young people from being trapped in the system while simultaneously arguing that the same principle should carry considerably less weight for everybody else.

A central purpose in the working-age welfare system should be to support those who can work towards employment. PIP is not itself an unemployment benefit, but it sits within a wider health and disability benefits system that must promote independence, recognise changes in circumstances and avoid writing people off. Compassion does not mean abandoning people to years of passive benefit receipt without meaningful contact, support or review.

The Government have claimed that these changes, alongside related reforms to assessment capacity, will reduce spending by £1.9 billion over five years. Will the Minister provide the House with a detailed and clear breakdown of that figure? Can she confirm that an impact assessment has been undertaken and produced?

More fundamentally, when does the department expect the present backlog to be cleared, and what is the long-term plan for restoring sufficient assessment capacity? The Government are responding to a backlog by weakening the mechanism that identifies whether awards remain correct; they are relying more heavily on self-reporting at the very moment when their own statistics show growing losses resulting from improvements in functional needs not being reported; they are granting Ministers a broad power without adequate statutory limits; and they have failed to provide Parliament with full information about how the power will be applied. Above all, these regulations fail to answer the central question facing the Government: how will they bring the welfare bill under control while helping more people towards independence and employment?

For those reasons, I believe that these regulations represent less oversight, weaker accountability and a further retreat from the urgent task of creating a welfare system that is compassionate, accurate, sustainable and focused on helping people fulfil their potential. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken, and I thank the Minister for her response. I agree completely with the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, that disabled people need to be treated with dignity and respect. On these Benches, we completely sign up to that. My noble friends Lady Maclean and Lord Shinkwin rightly raised the cost of the current welfare system. A welfare system has to be affordable, sustainable and effective. I say this with a heavy heart: it may not worry this Government how high the costs go, but believe you me, it worries the public and it worries us. That does not mean that we would not be prepared to spend money to do the right thing by people. I also agree that the priority is to help people into work. It would be helpful if the Government took action to reduce the cost of employing people, because that has had the single biggest impact on there being no jobs about.

As I have said, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate, but the central concerns remain the same. These regulations reduce the frequency of reviews, place greater reliance on self-reporting and grant the Secretary of State a broad power without sufficient safeguards or parliamentary oversight. They risk leaving some claimants on the wrong award, whether too high or too low, and do nothing to address the underlying growth in the benefits bill or the urgent need to help more people towards independence and employment. For those reasons, I am not content to withdraw my Motion, and I wish to test the opinion of the House.