Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment her Department has made of the implications for her policies of the conclusions of the study published in the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ BJPsych Open journal in January 2019, which found that claimants with mental stress are 2.4 times more likely than physical health claimants to lose their benefit when moving from disability living allowance to personal independence payment.

Many Disability Living Allowance (DLA) claimants have not undergone any kind of assessment of their needs for several years. Their condition and their needs arising from it may have changed substantially; therefore, we would expect to see some variation in reassessment outcomes between conditions. Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is a fairer benefit, which takes a much wider look at the way an individual’s health condition or disability impacts them on a daily basis, ensuring that individuals get the right level of support.

PIP is a better benefit for people with mental health conditions. At the core of PIP’s design is the principle that non-physical conditions should be given the same recognition as physical ones. The number of working age people in receipt of DLA or PIP with a mental health condition has increased by nearly a fifth since PIP was first introduced in 2013, and a higher proportion of all PIP claimants receive the top rates than under DLA: 65% get the enhanced Daily Living component of PIP compared to 22% under DLA; and 35% get the enhanced mobility component compared to 10% under DLA.