In July 2024 NSUN responded to a government consultation on reforms to Personal Independence Payment (PIP).
The consultation, titled “Modernising support for independent living: the health and disability Green Paper”, laid out the Government’s proposals for reforming PIP.
The consultation focussed on reviewing PIP and making proposals about how the process could be improved. However, along with many other organisations, we saw the proposals as a dangerous attempt to remove vital support for Disabled people.
Note: These reforms are only proposals, there are no changes to your PIP payments. We will write again if/when these reforms are enacted.
Rather than filling out the Government’s questionnaire, we wrote our response as a letter instead.
Our response was split into three parts;
- Motivations for reform.
In this section we challenged the Government’s motivations for reforming PIP, showing how it tied into dangerous rhetoric around Disabled people being a “burden” to the economy. This is something that we can see across welfare reform, and is something we have written about and challenged elsewhere.
- Disability, mental health, and poverty.
In this section we highlighted the Government’s failure to recognise the interrelation between disability, mental health, and poverty. In particular, we highlighted that reducing the number of people receiving PIP will push more Disabled people into poverty and dangerous working conditions. In doing so, these reforms will increase distress among Disabled people.
- The impact of proposed reforms.
In this section, we tackle some of the proposals head on. Issues we highlight are that removing entitlement to PIP will stop many people from working, because some people use PIP to enable them to work. Similarly, the proposal to change PIP to a single payment fails to acknowledge the ongoing and unexpected costs of disability.
Overall, we see these proposed reforms as misguided and dangerous. We do not think they will have the intended effects, and would instead increase precarity, poverty, and distress among Disabled people (including those with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress, and trauma).
It is our hope that these proposals will be scrapped under the new Government, along with the proposed changes to the Work Capability Assessment. We will publish updates as and when they occur.
Alternatively, download our full response as a Word document.
Update
17/10/2024: over the last few days it has been confirmed that the new Labour government has no plans to respond to this consultation, and will be considering their own plans for social security in due course. There is no guarantee that they will not take forward ideas (such as replacing PIP payments with vouchers) that were proposed in the consultation carried out under the Conservative government, though many people feel this is unlikely. We will continue to monitor for more detail in further announcements.