DWP secretly exposes 150,000 PIP claimants to new assessment system that is ‘recipe for disaster’

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is secretly testing sweeping new rules – described as a “recipe for disaster” – on disability benefit assessments, which will reduce the influence of healthcare professionals and hand greater responsibility to civil servants.

The new rules for personal independence payment (PIP) assessments have been introduced through a pilot project that is part of the department’s secret Transform Decision Making programme.

The programme does not appear to have been mentioned publicly, either online or in parliament.

Transform Decision Making aims to dramatically alter the PIP assessment process – and potentially also the work capability assessment (WCA) – by clawing back responsibilities from healthcare experts such as nurses, paramedics and physiotherapists and handing them to DWP civil servants, who are unlikely to have any clinical experience or qualifications.

Currently, healthcare professionals with years of clinical experience recommend the level of support they think a claimant needs from PIP, after assessing how their impairment impacts their day-to-day life.

The pilot project – described by DWP as a “small-scale trial” – has been rolled out to about four per cent of PIP claims nationally, the department confirmed this week, so potentially already affects more than 150,000 disabled people.

DWP is also exploring whether it could extend the approach to the work capability assessment (WCA) process.

Transform Decision Making is part of the wider Health Transformation Programme, introduced under the last government, which aims to improve the PIP system and develop a new assessment process.

Concerns about the pilot scheme only came to light after a DWP whistleblower contacted the national disabled people’s organisation Disability Rights UK (DR UK).

DR UK said it was “absolutely astonishing” that DWP was introducing the programme at the same time as the high-profile Timms Review of PIP, which DWP is supposed to be carrying out in co-production with disabled people.

DR UK said the changes would “create chaos and injustice in the processes for claiming PIP and possibly the WCA” and were “a recipe for disaster”.

At present, healthcare professionals assess a PIP claimant’s ability to carry out 10 daily living and two mobility activities.

They write a report for DWP, which includes recommendations on the level of difficulty the claimant has with each activity, known as descriptors.

This report, including the recommended descriptors, is then passed to DWP for a decision on whether the evidence supports the healthcare professional’s recommendations and the level of PIP the claimant is entitled to.

But under the Transform Decision Making pilot – according to the whistleblower – healthcare professionals who carry out PIP assessments are now restricted to basic information gathering.

The vital work of suggesting which descriptors apply, justifying those descriptors, and deciding on entitlement, has been passed to DWP case managers.

The DWP whistleblower who raised concerns about the programme with DR UK said the programme “has not undergone any thorough testing or proper evaluation of its impact on decision quality”.

And they told DR UK they were “deeply worried about the consequences”.

DWP said this week that evaluation of the new approach was being carried out through the pilot project.

The whistleblower said: “Decisions on complex, fluctuating, and especially mental health conditions require clinical insight and direct assessment experience.

“Removing health professionals from the decision-making process will strip out essential medical nuance, leading to poorer quality, less accurate, and less fair outcomes.

“Many vulnerable claimants will face wrong decisions, increased stress, financial hardship, and unnecessary appeals.”

They also suggested that the programme was likely to increase DWP costs because the department would have to recruit and train many more case managers, with only limited savings from work carried out by contractors Capita, Serco, Ingeus UK and Maximus, which employ the healthcare professionals.

The DWP whistleblower said the scheme “raises serious public interest issues around fairness for disabled people, accuracy of decisions, and proper use of taxpayers’ money”.

It is so far unclear how the programme will affect the £2.8 billion-worth of assessment contracts awarded to the four private sector outsourcing giants in 2023, which were set to last until 2031.

Fazilet Hadi, DR UK’s head of policy, said: “Not satisfied with the hostility and inefficiency of the Access to Work bureaucracy, resulting in lengthy delays and inadequate decisions, it is depressing to learn that the DWP has now moved on to create chaos and injustice in the processes for claiming PIP and possibly the WCA.

“That they are doing this at the same time as a high profile ‘coproduced’ review of PIP is absolutely astonishing.

“Stopping health professionals from making recommendations on the basis of their assessment and requiring them to solely pass information to DWP case managers to make the determination, is a recipe for disaster, which will result in thousands of poorly informed and inaccurate decisions.

“Claiming PIP is intensely personal; we have to talk about the impacts of our impairments and health conditions, in ways many of us find emotionally and practically difficult.

“At least we have some chance of our individual needs and circumstances being understood, when the recommendations are being made by the people we have actually spoken to.

“The fact that this new intensely-flawed process will also cost more money is absolutely galling.

“Just like Access to Work, the DWP is prepared to spend money on more hostile bureaucracy, rather than actually give disabled people the money to which we are entitled.”

DWP has yet to clarify exactly how the pilot project is “re-balancing” the duties of healthcare professionals and its own case managers, but it has not denied the whistleblower’s suggestion that healthcare professionals would now be restricted to information gathering.

It said that healthcare professionals would continue to carry out functional assessments of a claimant’s impairment, while its own case managers would still be able to seek advice and clarification from those healthcare professionals before making a final decision on a claim.

A DWP spokesperson said in a statement: “Case managers already make all final PIP decisions – that has not changed.

“This small-scale trial is about re-balancing roles so that assessors focus on what they do best, freeing up capacity by reducing duplication, and empowering case managers to apply their own judgement based on all the evidence.”