Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of people claiming disability benefits cited mental health issues as a reason for claiming those benefits in 2023.

Data on Personal Independence Payment (PIP), Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Attendance Allowance (AA) can be found on Stat-Xplore. In particular, the requested data can be found in ‘PIP Cases with Entitlement’ dataset by going to ‘Disability’ and choosing ‘Psychiatric disorders’ from the drop-down list. The same can be done to ‘DLA: Cases with entitlement - Data from May 2018’ and ‘AA: Cases with entitlement - Data from May 2018’ dataset by going to ‘Main Disability Condition’ and choosing the mental health conditions you are interested in from the drop-down list.

Data is based on primary disabling condition as recorded on the PIP, DLA, and AA computer systems. Claimants may often have multiple disabling conditions upon which the decision is based but only the primary condition is shown in these statistics.

You may also wish to filter for “DWP policy ownership” under Geography due to the devolution of some disability benefits to Scotland.

You can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest user and, if needed, you can access guidance on how to extract the information required.