DWP’s ‘brutal’ green paper suggests replacing PIP with vouchers or one-off grants

The government is considering making it harder to claim disability benefits and even replacing cash payments with vouchers or one-off grants, as part of its latest “brutal, ideological attack” on disabled people’s support.

The plans could see the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) abandoning a core principle behind the disability benefits assessment system that dates back more than 30 years.

The potential options for reforming personal independence payment (PIP) in England and Wales were laid out in a new green paper, Modernising Support for Independent Living.

Its publication, and the launch of a 12-week consultation on the options, provoked an angry reaction from disabled campaigners, who called the government’s plans insulting, dangerous and dehumanising.

The proposals were announced by the government on Monday by the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, who said the PIP reforms would address “spiralling” costs.

The current PIP assessment is based on a “functional test”, an attempt to assess the impact an impairment or health condition has on a disabled person’s ability to “function” in daily life.

Among the options for reforming PIP, DWP is asking if it should base eligibility instead on the diagnosis given to a disabled person by a healthcare professional.

This would require “a greater emphasis on the provision of medical evidence of a diagnosis”, although the green paper admits the department would need to consider the extra workload “this would place on the NHS and health professionals”.

With DWP already announcing plans to scrap the work capability assessment after the next election, the green paper suggests an end to DWP’s focus on functional assessments, a much-criticised principle that stretches back more than 30 years.

DWP refused to comment on that suggestion this week.

Another proposal in the green paper is to retain the current PIP assessment, but change the eligibility criteria, which currently assess how the health condition or impairment affects the disabled person’s ability to carry out 12 daily living and mobility activities.

The consultation document suggests that ministers want to tighten these criteria, as it says the aim would be to ensure that “we focus support on people with the highest needs and significant ongoing extra costs”.

It also suggests that ministers are considering lengthening the time that the impact of an impairment or health condition must have been present from its current three months, and increasing the length of time this impact is likely to continue from nine months.

DWP ministers are also suggesting replacing how the social security system contributes to a person’s extra disability-related costs – which is currently through PIP’s four-weekly cash payments – with other means of support.

This could mean offering a disabled person a list of equipment or aids to choose from; providing them with vouchers to contribute towards the cost of a disability aid; forcing them to claim back the cost of equipment by providing receipts to DWP; or offering a one-off grant for major purchases such as home adaptations or expensive equipment.

The green paper also suggests replacing PIP cash payments with improved access to support such as health care, social care or respite services.

And it suggests imposing more of a duty on cash-strapped local authorities and NHS bodies to “improve services and support for individuals”, such as equipment, personal assistance, health, respite services and contributions to utility costs, in place of all or part of PIP.

Although the statements made by ministers around the green paper stressed the increase in the number of successful PIP claims from people with mental distress – with the proportion of the working-age population who are PIP/DLA claimants with anxiety and depression more than doubling from 0.6 to 1.3 per cent between 2012 and 2023 – the consultation itself did not place a huge emphasis on mental health.

Of the 39 questions, only three explicitly refer to mental health, although one of them, question 27, does ask if some people could “benefit more” from improved “mental health provision” rather than cash payments.

Inclusion London said the government’s PIP proposals were “another brutal ideological attack on our rights, at a time when the UK’s welfare policies were yet again found by the UN to be leading to grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights”.

Only last month, the UN’s committee on the rights of disabled people concluded that the UK government had made “no significant progress” in the more than seven years since it was found guilty of “grave and systematic” violations of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

In March, the committee had accused the UK government of demonising disabled people and treating them as “undeserving citizens” by preparing to fund tax cuts by slashing disability benefits.

Inclusion London said its key concerns with the new proposals were that restricting access to PIP would worsen people’s health, and that those who lost their right to PIP could also see them lose access to other support.

It also said it was “dismayed at the way the government singles out people with experience of mental distress or trauma”, which it said was “blatant discrimination”.

Justin Donne, chair of Autistic Nottingham, which is run and controlled by disabled people, said the proposals would put the lives of autistic people at risk.

He said: “Narrowing PIP eligibility for those struggling with mental illness like anxiety and depression, as the prime minister is suggesting, will directly affect autistic people as we are more likely to struggle with our mental health.”

He said Sunak was “dashing the hopes of autistics who need PIP payments to survive and insulting their dignity by saying that they are abusing the system”.

Paula Peters, a member of the national steering group of Disabled People Against Cuts, said the PIP proposals were “deeply concerning”.

She said: “We need a mass mobilisation of disabled people to resist this draconian consultation.”

And she warned that removing PIP from disabled people in work would put their jobs at risk.

She said: “If they take it away from disabled people in work, they will not be able to work. They are shooting themselves in the foot.”

Dan White, policy officer for Disability Rights UK, said: “The clear agenda of the government’s latest proposal is to reduce the number of disabled people receiving the crucial support we rely on.

“Being offered vouchers is more than an insult; it is dangerous.

“They will shut us off from our communities, leaving thousands without access to crucial services and support.

“Their punishing approach, which is obsessed with austerity, sanctions and conditionality, has fuelled increases in disability and sickness by under-resourcing not just the social security system but also health services, social care, education, housing and transport.”

The Disability Poverty Campaign Group said in a statement that the “hostile and misleading rhetoric” being used by Conservative ministers ahead of the general election was “creating considerable distress” among disabled people at a time of “exceptional financial hardship”.

It described the suggestion that vouchers could be used instead of cash payments as “dehumanising” and said it would “use all possible avenues to challenge the implication that disabled people eligible for PIP lack the capacity to manage cash-based income”.

And it added: “We know the prime minister and his government are seeking to weaponise disabled people’s poverty with their dishonest and divisive rhetoric to hide the deficiencies of their own failed legislation and years in office.”

The 12-week consultation closes on 23 July.

Picture: Mel Stride (left) and Rishi Sunak

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