Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking to ensure consultations on disability benefits reforms are accessible for disabled people.

This Government values the input of disabled people and people with health conditions in addition to the representative organisations and people that support them.

That is why we brought forward a Green Paper and opened a public consultation – which received over 47,500 responses before closing on 30 June 2025. The consultation was published in a range of accessible versions including braille, audio, British Sign Language (BSL), Welsh language, Easy Read, large print and web-accessible formats. In addition to the public consultation, we ran a programme of accessible public events to further facilitate input. The series of both virtual and in-person events across the country helped us to hear from disabled people and representative organisations directly.

Our conversations with disabled people and people with health conditions, as well as experts, shaped and informed the Green Paper. We are committed to continuing this dialogue and drawing on a wide range of insights and experiences to get these reforms right. We published our summary to the Pathways to Work Green Paper consultation responses on 30 October 2025. We are considering feedback on these proposals as we develop them further.

The Timms Review is being co-produced by disabled people, the organisations that represent them and other experts. The steering group is committed to ensuring the Review is informed by a broad range of voices and experiences, and to making engagement accessible. The steering group agreed to use a mix of approaches combining lived experience, expert insight, existing research, new quantitative data and workshops across the UK to gather evidence.

The Review has run a Call for Evidence and ‘Workshop in a Box’ sessions to gather input from individuals and organisations with a full suite of accessible versions, including British Sign Language, Braille, Easy Read, Large Print, Audio, and Welsh versions. The Call for Evidence received over 38,000 responses. A summary of these findings was published alongside the Interim Report on 9 July. The Review will report to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for final decisions by autumn 2026.