Yes 1,000 people claim DWP PIP a day – but it should be much higher
The gutter press are back demonising disability benefit claimants again – just as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are trying to push through benefit cuts.
The Daily Mail ran with the breathless headline:
One in 10 working age Brits are on disability benefits with 1,000 successful claims A DAY – as pressure piles on Keir Starmer to face down Labour MPs on cutting welfare bill
However, if you can suffer through reading the bile, you’ll see where they got this maths from. There are 43.4 million working-age people in the UK. As of January this year, there are 3.93 million claimants on PIP, which is clearly not 10%.
Unusually for the Mail, I’m sure, they’ve been sneaky cunts. What they’ve done is taken all PIP claimants ever, since the benefit began in 2013, which is 4.5 million. From that, they’ve made an estimation that there are 1,000 claims a day.
DWP claimants: it should be much higher
The thing is, this is true. But it should be much higher.
For starters, that 1,000 is the number of successful claims. The Mail article glosses over the fact that, in those 13 years, 4.4 million claims were denied. It also completely ignores the scale of the backlog to even get PIP.
As the Canary has previously reported, the DWP has diverted staff from dealing with new claims to make it look like they’ve got a handle on the backlog of reassessments. Up until October 2025, there were 40,000 new claimants waiting for their claim to be processed. As a result, clearance for new claims fell by 25%, despite there being 6% less claims than the year before. This also means the decision time has risen, from 14 weeks in October 2024 to 16 weeks in October 2025.
There’s also the fact that just 3.9 million people claim PIP. The DWP and press make this sound like a huge number, but it’s only a fraction of how many disabled people there are in the country. 16.8 million people self-identify as disabled in the UK, so that’s less than a quarter of them claiming PIP.
There might be a huge uproar over ‘1 in 10 people claiming PIP’, but disabled people make up 25% of the population. It should be 1 in 4.
Why now?
It’s also a question of why now? Why is the Mail deciding to publish what they’re packaging as massively informative about the ‘ballooning welfare bill’ on a random day in March? Well, because we have to look at what was happening last year in March.
This time a year ago, Labour was declaring its new war on disabled people with the cuts announcement coming on 18 March 2025. All around this, we saw weeks and months of ramped-up hate levelled at disabled benefits claimants. Labour tried every dirty trick in the book with giving the press sound bites of wild claims about benefit claimants.
In fact, Labour minister Wes Streeting made this exact claim almost a year to the date of this article being published. The Labour cuts, of course, didn’t all go through, because disabled campaigners rallied, leading to Labour MPs to ‘rebel’.
However, it coming back again isn’t a coincidence. A year on, Labour are still trying to push through its cuts on disability benefits.
Labour is ramping up hatred again
A big reason for the campaigning against cuts last year was that the DWP wanted to change the criteria for who can qualify. This is something that’s still being considered by the Timms Review, for both new and existing claimants. The review is typically a complete fucking shambles, by the way.
Whilst the DWP attempts to make it harder for those with mental health and neurodivergent conditions to claim, the Department of Health is carrying out reviews into whether the conditions are overdiagnosed. This is despite 32 health professionals calling out Streeting’s bullshit on this.
Alongside this, the department is cutting the amount a disabled person who can’t work is entitled to. In April new claimants will be entitled to £200 less a month. This, according to the DWP will ‘tackle perverse incentives’ to not work, such as y’know being able to afford to keep a roof over your head.
The department also wants to eventually move the ‘UC health element’, which people get when they can’t work, over to PIP, which has nothing to do with work and is a harder benefit to qualify for, even before they tighten the criteria. Of course, this will push disabled people into further poverty.
Demonisation of poor people
At the end of the day, the welfare system is supposed to be there to help those who need extra support. We should be proud to support so many people. But instead, in a system where the rich hold all the cards, it’s the poorest in society who are blamed.
Yes, 1000 people a day do qualify for PIP, but we should be supporting far more. And so many will be left without support if the DWP has their way. The press needs to take a long hard look at the way they report on welfare cuts, because they’ll be complicit in a fresh wave of welfare deaths.
Featured image via the Canary
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30 years ago, in my job, every third weekend I had to check all the bin chute rooms and lights in an 11 floor block of flats. I used to run to the top, then walk down doing all the checks, I used to do the same on 3 blocks of 3 floors 3 times a week. Then suddenly I had major cardiac problems. I was medically retired. I ended up on DLA, home oxygen and monitoring to keep me out of hospital all the time. I survived every attempt to be cut out by governments trying to cut the benefits bill. the worst one was the change from DLA to PIP. I was actually in hospital having suffered a heart attack st the time. I managed to get a 4 week extension, weren’t they generous??!!!! I filled in all the forms, yes I had done them correctly. My home assessor evidently had instructions as she ignored all the paperwork, all her own seen evidence and said I had no health problems. She was literally sat 5 feet from my home oxygen concentrator. I went to nil rate PIP. She ignored all the 1st and 2nd tier tribunal decisions. I lost my motability car. I got a standard award on a Mandatory reconsideration and then went on to appeal where i regained the enhanced rate. The thought of having to go through this nonsense terrifies me. Why do they hate the disabled so much.
“At the end of the day, the welfare system is supposed to be there to help those who need extra support.”
It actually isn’t. It’s there to keep the economy going when times are tough and improve it when times are going well anyway. If you give people who’d otherwise have no money just enough to tide them over for a week or so, perforce they’ll need to spend it to keep going. Spending into the economy improves the velocity of money which encourages investment from the corporate sector. That in turn encourages employment. It is important however the unemployed, for example, aren’t given so much that they start saving it as that defeats the object. It’s a different story with the sick and long-term disabled though as they will have extra and recurring expenses which need to be covered by social security due to their having no way to independently raise the money themselves.
They contribute through their spending; that needs to be recognised. The end recipients and beneficiaries of social security then is everyone in the economy in question, not simply claimants.
I wish the Canary (and others) would make more of this very basic point as understanding of it completely undermines any idea that claimants aren’t contributing or are somehow being favourably treated over working people.