Disability Living Allowance and Personal Independence Payment


The government is replacing Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for people of working age. Anyone over 16 must now apply for PIP instead of DLA. “Objective assessments” now decide eligibility to PIP. Although the stated aim is to target support on those most in need, the aim is also to reduce spending by 20% by 2017 through the introduction of this benefit.


Many disability groups condemned the introduction of PIPs as a money-saving exercise because DLA was one of the most effectively targeted benefits with an officially-estimated fraud rate of just 0.5%.


For example, Carers UK said that more than a million people were receiving Carer’s Allowance before the introduction of PIPs. For about 270,000 of them, the entitlement depends on whether the person of working age they provide care for is eligible for DLA.


As DLA is replaced by the PIP, there are new rules and assessments to judge who can claim assistance and, if fewer disabled people can claim PIP than are currently receiving DLA, the charity says that this will have a knock-on effect for their carers. 


The DWP says that around 76,000 disabled people with carers will be reassessed for PIP and that around 25,000 of these people will no longer be entitled to DLA as a result. Their carer will also lose their allowance. Charities are warning that around 600,000 could eventually lose their financial support because of re-assessment process and stricter eligibility criteria. 


The DWP started taking new claims for PIP in parts of the north of England from April 2013, and nationally from June 2013. It began to reassess the 1.7 million DLA claimants from October 2013, but then postponed this for most claimants when it realised that claimants already faced long delays, and that significant backlogs had developed.


In June 2014, the Public Accounts Committee branded the introduction of PIP as “nothing short of a fiasco”. Its chair, Labour MP Margaret Hodge, said: “The Department for Work and Pensions has let down some of the most vulnerable people in our society, many of whom have had to wait more than six months for their claims to be decided.”


By December 2015, a Work and Pensions Committee found that while average waiting times for a PIP assessment were down to five to six weeks, there were still examples of claimants experiencing long delays for either an appeal date or their first PIP payment and said that there was still “much work to be done to ensure that those claimants awaiting an appeal, or their first payment following a successful appeal, receive the correct decision and award in good time”.


Chancellor George Osborne announced a further £4.4 billion cut in Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) over the course of this Parliament. However, the government abandoned this in the wake of Iain Duncan’s Smith’s dramatic resignation as work and pensions secretary. Duncan Smith declared that he was resigning over the chancellor’s “deeply unfair” Budget and “indefensible” welfare cuts.