Disability Living Allowance and Personal Independence Payment

The government is replacing Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with a new benefit called Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for people of working age. Anyone over 16 must now apply for PIP instead of DLA. It has also introduced “objective assessments” to decide eligibility to PIP. Its stated intention is to target support on those most in need through this new benefit. However, it also aims to reduce spending by 20% by 2017 through bringing in this process.

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 says 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.

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 of 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.”

Figures released by the DWP in September 2014 showed that of the 529,400 cases registered for PIP between April 2013 and the end of July 2014, only just over 206,000 had been cleared – either awarded, declined or withdrawn (See Chapter 3).