Hard truths

Rethinking Personal Independence Payment

Lindsay Judge
Lindsay Judge
Louise Murphy
Louise Murphy

This report examines how Personal Independence Payment (PIP) in England and Wales should be reformed to better meet its aim: to contribute to additional costs of disability to enable disabled people to live fuller and more active lives. 

Few would dispute that the PIP system requires reform: the quality of decision-making is poor; the legitimacy of the system is often questioned; and the cost of PIP is rising in an unsustainable way. But many reforms to disability benefits that politicians have proposed in recent years have been crude, unrealistic or both. As the Timms Review continues its deliberations, this report is our contribution to the debate.  

We find that although disability benefit reform involves confronting a number of hard truths, there is much that could be changed for the better. Our findings and recommendations draw on a new survey of 2,500 working-age PIP recipients, an evidence base that allows us to more fully understand how disabled people’s conditions, needs, costs and capabilities intersect.  

Key findings

  • One-in-six (16 per cent) working-age PIP recipients do not report extra costs linked to their disability. 
  • Many PIP recipients have complex conditions. Few experience only one condition: for example, although three-in-ten (31 per cent) PIP recipients report experiencing depression, just 2 per cent report depression as their only condition.  
  • Conditions are a weak proxy at best of disabled people’s costs. 89 per cent of PIP recipients with ADHD and 87 per cent of those with anxiety report extra costs, very similar to the 93 per cent with back pain and 94 per cent with arthritis.  
  • When it comes to conditions, the differences between PIP recipients aged 16-24 and other age groups are not as striking as perhaps is assumed. Young people are less likely to report depression than 25-54-year-olds for example, and less likely to report anxiety than 25-44-year-olds.  
  • PIP recipients often remain on the benefit for a long time. In part, this reflects a review system that has not kept pace with soaring numbers of claims: before the pandemic, virtually no planned reviews were cleared after an award’s end date; in 2025-26, there were 216,000 late reviews. 

 

Recommendations

  • A function test should remain at the heart of the PIP system, but assessments should also include a discussion of what extra costs claimants experience and what would help them participate more in the wider world.  
  • There should be three elements that a decision maker can award a claimant: an ongoing cash element to contribute to additional costs; a capped one-off payment for capital items such as aids and adaptations; and a participation element, usually delivered through local services, designed to build claimants’ capacity to engage with society. 
  • There should be more frequent but lower-stakes engagement with DWP including light-touch check-ins between formal reviews. Each element of an award could reviewed separately, and the cadence of reviews should be tailored to people’s conditions. 
  • Young people will disproportionately benefit from the introduction of a ‘participation element’, but the need for cash awards for young PIP claimants remains.  

https://doi.org/10.63492/fswt870

Lindsay Judge
Lindsay Judge Research Director
Louise Murphy
Louise Murphy Senior Economist