Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people claiming Personal Independence Payments have covid-19 classified as their primary reason for claiming that benefit.

As of March 2021, a new code, ‘Coronavirus Covid 19’, has been added to the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) disability coding system in Infectious disease, Viral disease B01-B10 section with other viral diseases.

Claimants under ‘Coronavirus Covid 19’ are a group of people who remain unwell at 12 weeks, with a wide variety of symptoms whose long-term prognosis is unknown. These people meet the diagnostic criteria for post Covid-19 syndrome. Some may recover in a few more months, some may recover over a longer time period. Others may remain unwell or become more unwell over time. Fluctuating functional impairment and wide-ranging symptoms that change over time seem to be a feature of the condition. It is those claimants who have significant functional impairment at 12 weeks, who do not seem to be recovering, who may have entitlement to PIP. Claimants do not have to have had a positive test result to be diagnosed with the syndrome. Testing has not always been easily available.

Data on PIP applications can be found on Stat-Xplore.

In particular, the PIP cases with entitlement dataset allows you to view the number of cases with entitlement split by primary condition. ‘Coronavirus Covid-19’ can be selected by expanding ‘Infectious disease’ then ‘Viral diseases’. Please note that there may be other claimants where the ongoing impact of a Coronavirus infection has influenced the award of PIP. Data is based on primary disabling condition as recorded on the PIP 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. There may be claimants with long Covid who came onto the benefit before March 2021 who are not recorded under the new code.

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