Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to Table 8, page 21 of Equality Analysis PIP assessment criteria: Upper Tribunal judgments on daily living activity 3 and mobility activity 1, published by her Department in February 2017, and to paragraph 4.112, page 135, of Office for Budget Responsibility: Economic and fiscal outlook, published on March 2018, for what reason the estimate of the number of claimants affected by the judgment of RF v Secretary of Stat for Work and Pensions has been reduced from 336,500 to 165,000.

The previous figure published by DWP was a preliminary estimate of the expected impact of implementing the judgment; we have since updated the analysis with a larger sample. The estimated impacts arising from the later sample were not as large as seen in the earlier, smaller sample. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) are an independent body that provides scrutiny of departmental forecasts for fiscal events, including specific costing exercises such as this. OBR chose to publish the later, larger sample of the MH implementation costs, as this is likely to be more representative.