Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many PIP applications her Department has received from claimants with (a) Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or (b) Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) as a medical condition in each of the last three years.

The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.

A Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimant’s main disabling condition is recorded during their assessment and is not centrally recorded prior to this. Therefore, disability information is not available for analysis for claims registered. To provide the information requested the Department would need to manually examine each individual PIP registration, which would take in excess of 4 working days.

The Department publishes statistics on the number of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) decisions made by main disabling condition. Statistics are available to January 2022 for PIP on Stat-Xplore, in the PIP clearances dataset. Guidance for users is available here.