Personal Independence Payment and Disability Benefits: Implementation and Impact

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Willetts, who has shaped progressive thinking on welfare for many years and has asked a number of penetrating questions. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin on her choice of subject for this debate and on her thoughtful and balanced introduction. Some 47 years ago, I was a Minister at what was then the Department of Health and Social Security, and my boss was Patrick Jenkin, my noble friend’s father-in-law. Social security expenditure in that year was £19 billion; it is now £333 billion.

Although this is a Conservative-led debate, I want to look at the issue through the eyes of two Labour politicians, Stephen Timms and Alan Milburn. The Timms review asked whether PIP is fair, accessible and fit for the disabled. Those are the terms of reference, and we have the interim report and emerging recommendations. The Milburn review is broader, looking across welfare, health and skills, but it is more concerned with the interaction of welfare, including PIP, with incentives to work and the sustainability of welfare expenditure. Again, we have his interim report. The two reports have different remits and different priorities, which, in turn, represent the tensions within the Government on the way forward on welfare reform.

First, The press often quote the very words Stephen Timms used about PIP: “not fit for purpose”. Against the background of the current debate about welfare expenditure, some people think that meant it should be cut back. But that is not at all what he meant. I could find one mention in the interim review about finance, but the whole thrust is about making the journey more user-friendly. The emerging recommendations take forward the terms of reference: improving the experience for people applying for and receiving PIP, increasing the availability of accessible digital services across the PIP journey to streamline the process and improve accessibility, and ensuring that people who need help to navigate the process can access advocacy services—all highly commendable objectives.

After reading the report, I, along with other Peers, got an invitation to a virtual briefing session with Stephen Timms and his co-chairs, Sharon Brennan and Dr Farquharson. I joined that session and it reinforced the message of the Timms review that the process could be dehumanising, soul-destroying and degrading. There were some very moving stories.

The tone of the Milburn review is different. He approached the subject not so much from the point of view of the claimant but from that of society as a whole and the taxpayer in particular. He is concerned about the cost. He says:

“Benefit spend on young people for PIP alone is expected to rise to £6.5 billion by 2031/32. If spend on DWP employment support remains at the levels currently being funded through the Youth Guarantee, we estimate that by 2030/31, for every £1 that DWP spend on employment support for young people, around £10 will be spent on welfare support for young people. This is not a spread of investment that prioritises participation. It is an investment choice that prioritises income transfers”.


When he looked at PIP, he said:

“PIP is the welfare system’s first point of contact with disabled young people from the age of 16 and for many it is the only point of contact before an out-of-work claim … Analysis we have undertaken however, does not suggest that it is achieving good participation outcomes. Administrative data shows that PIP claims are getting longer in duration, with 87% of 16- to 24-year-olds in the 2019 cohort still on the benefit five years later, compared to 74% of the 2013 cohort … The employment prospects of a young person claiming PIP get 21% worse over six years, whereas for everyone else they get 31% better”.


He goes on to say:

“The data makes it clear that PIP does nothing to support this key point of transition from education to work. At no point in a young person’s application or journey on PIP are they asked about, or supported to, work. This is not an accident of delivery. It is how PIP is designed”.


That is very different from the Timms approach, which leaves the basic design alone.

The implication from Milburn is not that we should spend more on PIP, but that we should spend less. He concludes:

“It is a symbol of a wider failure on the part of the benefits system to provide practical help for sick and disabled youngsters into work. The consequence is that a disabled person who seeks support is offered a benefit assessment, not a conversation about their goals, their struggles, the support around them and the help they need”.


He goes on to say:

“It measures what someone cannot do and writes a cheque. It does not ask what they could do and build a plan. The benefits system is founded on a deficit model of disability, one that pays for what a young person cannot do rather than investing in what they could become”.


Then he says:

“For a young person with a health condition who is unemployed and potentially seeking work, taking a pathway to inactivity can offer higher income, less hassle and lower risk. This is a perverse incentive. It is the polar opposite of what a participation-first welfare system should be providing and means more and more people are being trapped on benefits”.


Based on that Milburn claim about higher income, I worked out what a young person aged under 25 could potentially claim, using figures on the government website. Universal credit standard allowance would be £338.58 a month; universal credit LCWRA—limited capacity for work—would be £429.80 a month; and PIP highest daily living and highest mobility allowance would be £843.27 a month. Combined, this would be £1,611.65 per month. It would be more were they getting housing benefit.

I then worked out how much a young person could earn doing the national average of 36.7 hours a week of work, on the minimum living wage of £12.71. The answer was £2,021, from which you have to deduct the costs of getting to work, which are on average £55 a week, so you are left with £1,800 against £1,600. However, the £1,600 is guaranteed and involves no effort; the £1,800 is not.

Then it is claimed that not everyone gets the maximum available. That is indeed the case. Here I come to my final point: the ability to game the system, something touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I want to make one thing clear: I am entirely in favour of people getting proper advice about applying for PIP, as the noble Lord said. The application form is 20 pages long and it can be a daunting task to complete it. The Timms review makes the point that claimants are entitled to professional advice, and many organisations, such as the CAB, provide exactly that, which is absolutely right.

However, if you put into Google, “help with PIP”, the titles of some of the sites are clearly aimed at helping people to game the system. For example, “PIP assessors hope you don’t know this”, “Beat your PIP phone assessment”, “PIP telephone assessment masterclass”, “7 PIP mistakes—don’t get caught out”, “Secrets to scoring maximum PIP points”, “Unlock the secret steps for winning your PIP claims”, and so they go on. Some of them actually advise you to tell a lie. One site says: “Why do PIP assessors ask you if you have a dog or a pet? Even if you have a pet, just say, ‘No, I don’t’. They can’t prove you have or haven’t got one”. Another site gives the same advice and advises you to go into another room where your pet cannot be seen or heard. Another asserts—wrongly—that the assessor gets paid £85 for every refusal.

These sites—all on videos—have been seen by tens of thousands of people. Worse, they have been monetised by the advertisements that punctuate them—so people are making money by telling lies and assisting fraud. This underlines the point my noble friend made about a more robust assessment process. So, my final question for the Minister is: what is her department going to do about all these sites?