PIP review: DWP removes PIP deaths and harm figures from annual report, just as Timms publishes findings

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) hid figures showing how many cases of death and serious harm of personal independence payment (PIP) claimants it had investigated, on the same day it published the interim report of its major PIP review.

Last Thursday, DWP published both the interim report of the Timms Review and the department’s annual report and accounts for 2025-26.

The review looks set to recommend reductions in spending on PIP when it publishes its final report later this year (see separate story), despite finding that the disability benefit is increasingly vital to disabled people to fill in the gaps caused by cuts to services.

But on the same day the interim report was published, DWP prevented the publication of figures that would have highlighted just how many investigations it is holding into deaths and other cases of serious harm involving disabled people who relied on PIP.

Last year, its annual report provided details of the “primary service lines” relating to cases accepted for a secret internal process review (IPR)*.

This showed that, of 90 cases accepted for investigation, PIP was involved in 42 of them.

The latest annual report shows the number of cases accepted for investigation through the IPR process almost doubled to 166 (see separate story) in 2025-26.

But this year’s report includes no information about the primary service lines for these cases.

This means it is impossible to say how many cases of claimant deaths and serious harm were linked to PIP in 2025-26.

DWP has spent years trying to prevent the release of key information about links between its actions and the deaths of disabled people, and in some cases has destroyed important documents.

Last year, Disability News Service (DNS) reported how DWP hid the truth from a coroner about its role in the suicide of Jodey Whiting, allowing ministers to avoid having to explain how they would prevent more claimants taking their own lives.

This week, DWP declined to provide a statement about the failure to include the PIP-related IPR figures in the annual report.

It also declined to say if this failure was connected to the publication of the Timms Review’s interim report, and the likely reaction if the public understood how many cases of death and serious harm were connected with PIP in 2025-26.

It had also failed by noon today (Thursday) to provide figures to show how many PIP-related cases had been accepted for an IPR in 2025-26.

*IPRs are carried out when there is a suggestion that DWP’s actions or failings may have negatively contributed to a claimant’s circumstances, and the claimant has suffered serious harm, has died, or there has been an attempted suicide

**The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, DNS editor John Pring’s book on the years of deaths linked to DWP’s actions and failings, is published by Pluto Press