Personal Independence Payment and Disability Benefits: Implementation and Impact

Lord Godson Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Godson (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington on securing this debate. I too welcome my noble friend Lord Willetts and congratulate the Minister on her new responsibilities on the Front Bench. It is important that we are debating this matter in advance of the publication of two significant forthcoming reviews: the Milburn review and the Timms review.

I declare an interest as director of Policy Exchange, which has undertaken extensive work on disability benefits over the past couple of years. I draw noble Lords’ attention to two reports by my colleague Jean-André Prager, who will be known to some and who played a significant part in policy-making on these matters under a number of previous Governments over the past decade. For Whose Benefit? and Lapse of Judgment? have examined both the purpose of PIP and the constitutional questions surrounding its administration. It is through those lenses that I will focus my comment today.

As Prager correctly puts it, there is sometimes a reductive quality to our desire to protect disabled people. Protection, although always well intentioned, can become a form of infantilisation at times, overlooking the great economic and creative potential of disabled people. Our disability benefits system embeds this paternalism in its architecture. Too often, it defines disabled people by their functional limitations rather than what their potential or capabilities are. If we focus exclusively on what disabled people cannot do, PIP can never act as a means of empowerment for disabled people. Therefore, our approach should be recalibrated, first and foremost, to enable disabled people and, then, to protect them where necessary.

This brings me to a second but equally important point. If we are to reconsider what PIP is intended to achieve, we must also ask some difficult questions about who exactly should be entitled to it. As the DWP Secretary of State said to the Times recently, we began this decade with 2.4 million people claiming PIP; today, that figure stands at 4.1 million, with projections suggesting 5.4 million by the end of the decade. Expenditure is forecast to double to £41 billion over the decade, which is more than double what we spend on the British Army. These are staggering figures. They underline the need for a benefits system capable of adapting to the changing world around it. That adaptation needs to take place in that way, rather than allowing eligibility criteria to evolve without regular parliamentary scrutiny, as has happened too often to date. Therefore, eligibility criteria should not be treated as immutable; they must be reviewed regularly to reflect changing medical understanding, technological advances and the objectives that Parliament intends the welfare system to serve. In short, it must be properly accountable.

Policy Exchange has recommended that the Government review PIP criteria every two years to ensure they remain an appropriate proxy for the additional costs that disabled people face. I implore the Minister to take forward this recommendation and the Government to create a more responsive PIP system. We need fundamentally to reform PIP to ensure that it meets the needs of disabled people, retains public consent and remains sustainable for many years to come. Our PIP system should be an enabler, and it is my firm belief in the enormous contribution that disabled people make to our society that motivates my comments today.