Pip review is an opportunity – and headache – for Andy Burnham

Original article by Frances Ryan

If Andy Burnham is keen to deliver “change” as prime minister, then the government’s landmark review into disability benefits has just handed him a big opportunity – and a potentially even bigger headache.

Stephen Timms, the disability minister tasked with reforming personal independence payments (Pip) after Labour MPs forced Keir Starmer to U-turn on cuts last summer, did not pull his punches in his interim report. The entire assessment system must be redrawn as part of a “radical” welfare overhaul, he warned, as disability benefits are “not fit for purpose”. The process, he added, is not simply widely ineffective but “dehumanising” for disabled people.

That’s a judgment that few campaigners, charities or thinktanks would surely disagree with – all of whom have argued for years that Pip, brought in by the Coalition government in 2013, has led to a system plagued by basic errors, insensitivity and widespread wrongful rejections, resulting in increased poverty and food bank use and, in extreme cases, deaths.

What exactly a “radical” overhaul should entail, however, will be less easy to agree on. Labour MPs will have to wait until the autumn for Timms’ detailed recommendations. But the interim findings give some hints.

The points-based system currently used to assess disabled people’s day to day needs comes in for the heaviest criticism in the report, with Timms arguing there should be a new system that “adequately reflects the diverse reality and needs of disabled people today”, in particular the growth in fluctuating or less visible conditions such as depression, which are “harder to evidence.”

But will the full report recommend a redesign of the assessment or go as far as to advocate for ditching a points-based system entirely? Campaigners will probably push for new rules to give more weight to evidence from disabled people’s own doctors, with claimants having long reported that the system disregards detailed medical records in favour of brief, function-based questions asked by private assessors who are often unqualified in their condition. Pip assessors include paramedics and physiotherapists.

The report – prepared in collaboration with disabled people in what is the largest co-production undertaken at national level – is littered with crumbs that are aimed at winning the trust of both claimants and MPs on the left of the party. Highlights include countering media claims of a “bloated welfare bill” by acknowledging total benefit expenditure as a proportion of GDP has actually remained roughly the same in recent years, despite rises in Pip spending, to accepting the population has genuinely become sicker due to the pandemic, NHS backlogs and the cost of living.

Nonetheless, there will be some alarm over the report’s admission that the next stage in the autumn will examine how any new assessment could help people to work where able, despite the fact Pip is paid to disabled people regardless of their job status. Timms argues that the current assessment acts a barrier to work as it encourages claimants to focus on the worst of their condition, a finding which will be of concern to ministers in light of the growing numbers of young people who are unemployed due to ill health.

Any attempt to add conditionality to Pip or to link its receipt with whether a disabled person uses it for work would be passionately opposed by campaigners and Labour backbenchers, some of whom were frustrated last summer over the way Pip was misrepresented by colleagues on the media rounds as being an out of work benefit as an apparent means to justify Starmer’s cuts.

The government is keen to stress the goal of the Timms report is not to reduce public spending (finding cuts is notably not included in the review’s current remit). But Burnham will come under pressure to lower the benefits bill, with sections of the rightwing media already lobbying him to reduce social security to help fund defence.

If disability cuts last year was a key nail in the coffin of Starmer’s leadership, Pip reform will be one of the first big tests for Burnham. Will he oversee the long overdue overhaul of a broken benefits system? And will he resist calls to make cuts part of it? The path he chooses will affect millions of disabled people – and send an early signal for what a Burnham government will really mean.