A new FOI has destroyed Labour’s argument that its DWP PIP cuts will support disabled people into work

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cuts to the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) will strip more working claimants of the benefit than claimants not in work. This is according to figures the department has revealed to Private Eye in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Of course, it blows a gaping hole in the government’s claims that its so-called reforms to welfare will help chronically ill and disabled people into work.

Of course, to these communities, it has been patently clear from the beginning that the Labour Party government has little interest in actually doing so – a fact that repeated revelations have continued to cement. Now, Private Eye’s new findings are only more damning ahead of the government imminently laying these plans before parliament.

DWP PIP cuts FOI: new figures show up government claims

The government is gearing up to lay its suite of regressive so-called reforms to PIP and other benefits before parliament.

Its plans will mean that disabled people who need help with things like cutting up food, supervision, prompting, or assistance to wash, dress, or monitor their health condition, will no longer be eligible for PIP.

Specifically, it’s increasing the number of points a person will need to score in their assessment to access the daily living component of the benefit. This will now require people to score four points or more in a daily living category to claim it.

Alongside this, there’ll be cuts to out-of-work benefits like the LCWRA health-related component of Universal Credit. Once again, Labour wants to make this harder to claim. It’s doing so as it ramps up reassessments and conditionality requirements for doing so.

DWP boss Liz Kendall set out these plans in the government’s Green Paper in March. And since then, the work and pensions secretary, alongside other government ministers (including prime minister Keir Starmer himself), has sought to justify the cuts under claims that the reforms will support disabled people into work.

Of course, chronically ill and disabled people have been pointing out how preposterous this is. Cutting PIP will categorically not help these communities into employment. This is not least because many who claim it are too sick to work. Moreover, the cuts will in fact put more barriers in place. So as opposed to dismantling the many obstacles already impacting chronically ill and disabled communities’ daily lives, it’s only adding to them. That’s hardly going to help individuals to access employment.

Now, new figures obtained by Private Eye have further put paid to this idea again – and shown up the government in the process.

Working claimants to lose PIP

Private Eye’s DWP PIP cuts FOI to the department revealed that:

• Of the 2.69 million people claiming PIP, 510,000 are working.
• Under the government’s plans, 281,000 – more than half – will lose their PIP. This is due to the new four-point rule it wants to introduce.

In other words, as the magazine highlighted, the DWP PIP cuts FOI showed it will actually hit more claimants in work than not in work. It shows that the government’s claims its ‘reforms’ will support more disabled people into employment are therefore utter nonsense.

Notably, as Private Eye exampled, chronically ill and disabled people rely on PIP to help them access work.

In a nutshell, PIP is there to level the playing field for chronically ill and disabled people. There are a huge number of barriers across society, that have been built and maintained for uplifting non-disabled people. Naturally, it means disabled people have higher costs in many aspects of their lives. Therefore, PIP is there to help with this, and enable them to access aids and supports they use for daily living.

Of course, it’s something government ministers have purposely left out from their punch down on PIP claimants.

Making it harder for disabled people all round

What’s more, the eligibility changes to PIP are only part of the picture. The government’s sweeping changes to Universal Credit will also compound all this further. Notably, it intends to align the work capability assessment (WCA) for the LCWRA to the PIP assessment. Alongside this, it’s going to cut the health part of Universal Credit. That tweak alone will cost claimants not able to work £146 a month.

The Canary has pointed out before how, for people unable to work, PIP (plus Universal Credit LCWRA) doesn’t even take a single claimant up to the national minimum wage. And that’s factoring in the higher rate of both components to PIP – which the majority don’t get anyway. It’s little wonder disabled people are twice as likely to live in poverty. The state’s equitability benefit amounts to paltry poverty pay at best. And it’s about to make all this inordinately worse.

To top it off, the government has made moves to strip back the Access to Work scheme. Some disabled people use PIP to afford the aids and accessibility interventions the scheme should be providing. Due to spiralling backlogs and in-built ableism of the scheme and the department delivering it, for many, it simply isn’t. Instead of fixing this, there are indications it wants to restrict the scheme even further.

In short, everything it’s doing will make it HARDER for disabled people who can or might one day be able to work to actually enter and stay in the workforce.

The government knows, but it doesn’t care

So when it comes down to it, cutting PIP will only plunge chronically ill and disabled people into poverty. What it won’t do is help them into work or enable them to increase their hours.

Make no mistake, the government knows all this – as these figures direct from the DWP itself prove.

And ultimately, as the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey has pointed out, the government also knows PIP isn’t an out-of-work benefit. It has been deliberately blurring the line to drum up division in the communities the cuts will impact. It has leaned into rancid ableist, classist, Victorian ‘deserving poor’-style rhetoric to decide which chronically ill and disabled people are worthy of support. This all sits amid a media and political landscape that paints claimants not in work as ‘scroungers’, ‘skivers’, or ‘an economic drain on the taxpayer’.

Moreover, Charlton-Dailey highlighted how the DWP is counting on disabled people justifying their right to exist through its own capitalist frame. That is, chronically and disabled people tying their value to being ‘productive’ cogs generating capital for the profiteering asset class. Charlton-Dailey underscored how perpetually pointing out that PIP is not an out-of-work benefit only feeds the government’s divisive ‘deserving’ versus ‘not deserving’ narrative.

Let’s be abundantly clear: this is the government deciding who deserves to live. There’s a word for the state-sanctioned poverty policies like this: democide. That will be the result – chronically ill and disabled people will die. The government knows this too, but has obstinately refused to acknowledge it to the public. In the footsteps of callous welfare cuts of Conservative past, Labour is weighing up the economic value of marginalised communities’ lives. And it has determined they’re worth more to society dead.

Figures that don’t fit its narrative

None of this is even to recognise how PIP is already woefully inadequate. It doesn’t come close to covering the extra costs an inaccessible, ableist capitalist society saddles chronically ill and disabled people with. Yet Starmer and co now want fewer to have access to even this pitiful amount of state support. That’s the case whether claimants are in work or not – as Private Eye’s FOI has made clear.

At the end of the day, the government’s motivation behind the cuts is just about paring back the welfare state en masse. The DWP has had these facts from the start, but it didn’t fit the image it wanted to project to the public. This is its fabricated reality in which it actually gives a shit about chronically ill and disabled people. Now, there’s no hiding behind outlandish pretexts that its ‘reforms’ will support these communities. Ultimately, for all its bluster about this, it will do precisely the opposite.

Featured image via the Canary