Personal Independence Payment and Disability Benefits: Implementation and Impact

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin for tabling this important Motion, and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, to the Front Bench. Yesterday the Chancellor delivered a Budget that left one of the greatest challenges facing this country untouched. He acknowledged that in an interview yesterday when he said:

“There will be a reduction in the benefits bill, we’ll do that in a Labour way”.


I can hardly express how inadequate this is as a statement of government willingness to tackle a real crisis.

Others have already rehearsed the terrifying arithmetic. The OBR has said unequivocally that the borrowing trajectory is unsustainable. But this is not just a financial crisis. It is a crisis for those who act rationally, using the safety net of sickness and disability benefits at points of real need, but for whom the net becomes a trap, confining them to worklessness as efficiently as a lobster-pot. It is a crisis for the young people who turn to benefits in a labour market where their job opportunities have been drastically curtailed by Labour’s poorly directed tax, national insurance and minimum wage measures, and by the Employment Rights Act.

It is a crisis for those with mild mental health conditions who could and should live and work normally with just a little extra help, but who are incentivised by the availability of these benefits to drop out of work or, worse, never start work. It is a crisis for those who see others exploiting disability benefits to achieve lifestyles that many working families cannot hope for. This is, understandably, breeding cynicism and disaffection, and moral corruption is contagious. It is also a crisis for those with real and serious disabilities who need a fair and stable welfare system and are unfairly tainted by the increasing suspicion and distrust around PIP and its claimants. All this is a disaster for the mutual trust and cohesion that are essential to sustain public willingness to pay for a generous welfare state.

Many people are now studying this, most recently Fraser Nelson in his excellent project at the Times. The Centre for Social Justice has been looking forensically at the problems for years. The Chancellor has done another media round today to respond to criticisms that his speech essentially ignored what must be a flashing red light on the Treasury dashboard. Now he has promised proposals before the end of the year, after the Milburn and Timms reviews are published.

What indications do we have of what the Labour way might be? First, we have the ill-fated Liz Kendall reforms. These were a serious, if modest, attempt to start tackling the growing problem, but the Government were unable to carry them through, forced to eviscerate their plans by their own Back-Benchers. This is not encouraging. Next, we have the Timms review. As my noble friend Lord Young pointed out, there is little in its interim report to give confidence. The Minister’s assertion when it was published was:

“My view is that the current level of spending is not a great concern”.


Yet the OBR has already had to revise its projections for PIP substantially upwards. The Green Paper from which the review arose rightly emphasised that good work is good for health and plays a vital role in recovery from illness. Not all disabled people can work but, for the majority who can, work gives more than just income. It gives purpose, social interaction and respect.

Much of the recent rapid growth in disability relates to ADHD, autism and other mental health conditions such as anxiety. In most cases, these conditions should not be a barrier to work. Yet the interim report quotes, without apparent concern, a recent finding that of non-working disability benefit recipients, only one in 20 believed they could work now—even with the right job or support. Only just over a quarter thought they might be able to work in future if their condition improved. That leaves more than two-thirds believing they will never be able to work, some of them very young or in the prime of life.

This finding, along with the facts that only 20% of PIP claimants are working and that the longer they claim, the less likely they are to work, casts serious doubt on the suitability of PIP for many of those currently claiming it, as my noble friend Lord Young also pointed out. Granting PIP to anxious teenagers may be downright cruel. It does not help young people into work. It does not convince them that they are capable of maturing into resilient adults. Instead, it confirms their own pessimistic self-assessments and very likely locks them into dependency for life. It is so easy for the state to be kind on a short-term view and so much harder to be honest about what will really help young people in the long term.

The Timms review should have asked about disability definitions. The UK uses a harmonised definition of disability based on individual self-perception rather than clinical diagnosis. The ONS has published a study showing that roughly three times as many people are categorised as disabled under our definition as under the UN-recommended Washington Group methodology. This may help to explain why reported disability has risen in Britain in recent years at rates not seen elsewhere.

Yet Britain is not unique. Other countries experienced similar levels of Covid. Others have similar levels of poverty. We have universal free health care. We do not carry any particular genetic disadvantage. So why do we have high and increasing disability? How much of it comes from perceiving as disability what has previously been considered normal variability in the human condition? How much comes from poor welfare system incentives? At the margin, does a disability label help or hinder? As my noble friend Lord Godson said, are we infantilising or empowering people here? This needs honest analysis and discussion. In the light of all this, it is indeed disappointing that the interim Timms recommendations were mostly about improving the claimant experience rather than addressing more fundamental concerns.

The Milburn review is more encouraging. Much of the Milburn diagnosis is accurate and expressed admirably clearly and frankly. He has said that welfare spending must come down to make way for better support to get young people into work. But this might translate, in the face of fractious Back Benches, into a minimalist approach—just enough welfare reduction to fund a support package but nothing that will make a real impact on our parlous national financial position.

A common theme from Government Ministers and reviewers is the importance of supporting people into work, which is true. But not acknowledged is the fundamental problem that too many people, if they can succeed with a PIP claim and the passported benefits that brings, including unlocking the benefit cap, are often better off financially on benefits. No amount of support and encouragement will stop most rational people on an unconditional package of benefits from doing that arithmetic. Even though PIP is not means-tested, people see working as a risk to maintaining their claim to the benefit.

The disappointing findings published this week from the Government’s Connect to Work programme, which is meant to help health and disability claimants back to work, show that support does not compensate for unbalanced incentives. Despite a budget of more than £1 billion for the programme, take-up has been very low, including from young people. NEET numbers were declining pre-Covid but have risen steeply since and stand at close to 1 million, yet only 6,000 young people in that age bracket have signed up for Connect to Work. That is less than 1% of NEETs. In the first 15 months of the whole scheme, fewer than 1,000 people have worked for more than 18 hours a week for at least 26 weeks. Sadly, the likelihood is that spending on support will make little difference unless the incentive to claim disability benefits is reduced.

As I touched on earlier, there also need to be jobs. A Government who destroy jobs will quickly build up a sticky welfare pipeline. That pipeline is starting much earlier than many people realise. I talk to head teachers who are profoundly uncomfortable about the pressure they experience from parents to have perfectly normal children labelled as SEND to help the parents claim child disability living allowance. Claims for child DLA have shot up in the last two years. Why? It is a generous cash allowance that also unlocks other benefits and disapplies the household benefit cap. I know of one case where a parent is refusing to potty-train their seven year-old because that would remove the justification for their DLA claim. That child is being betrayed by the parent. Most DLA children move on to PIP at age 16, even though many should have outgrown childhood problems by then. We should be ashamed of this.

I welcome the announcement of 2,000 additional DWP investigators to follow up on suspicious welfare claims. It may have been unwise for the Timms interim report to dismiss the distrust associated with PIP as a false and damaging narrative derived from stigma and misinformation. Since I took up this role, so many people have told me of someone they know personally who is claiming PIP but either is not meaningfully disabled or whose disability does not bring extra costs. My noble friend Lord Willetts has shown solid evidence that these cases are far from exceptional. But while extra investigators are a good thing—fraudsters are deterred by a high likelihood of detection and sanction—it does not begin to address the problems of a disability benefit system that is now, quite simply, incentivising worklessness and trapping the youngest adults, and now also children, in an indefensible way.

I am going to add a few more questions to those put by my noble friend Lady Jenkin and my other noble friends. What exactly does the Chancellor mean by reducing the welfare bill “in a Labour way”? What assessment are the Government making of the impact of our unusually broad definition of disability? What steps are the Government taking to identify and eliminate disability-linked welfare traps, as happens in Sweden with the FASIT model? What work are the Government doing to establish whether claiming child DLA improves or worsens the long-term outcomes for a child? I very much look forward to hearing the noble Baroness’s answers.