DWP spins the PIP narrative, MSM play ball ahead of the review

The press has been ramping up its hatred of neurodivergent conditions again. Coincidentally, this was just days before the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) released the interim report for the Timms Review into Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

DWP controlling narratives again

The interim report was released this morning, and the Canary will bring you more analysis on that once we’ve digested all 74 pages of it. If the Milburn Review report and the Neurodivergent conditions reports are anything to go by, it won’t yield the results the DWP wanted.

Ahead of the Milburn Review, the media ran rolling, breaking news coverage of a report into youth unemployment. It was absolutely bizarre to watch, but also so obviously engineered panic.

At the same time as Wes Streeting’s interim report into whether ADHD and autism are overdiagnosed was published, the Telegraph put out blatant propaganda from a GP accusing parents of jumping on the ‘ADHD bandwagon’.

Both of these were media exercises in how the DWP manipulated the media against disabled people when they knew their reports hadn’t matched their foregone conclusion.

So now they’ve got a report out that shows how dire their benefits system is for disabled people, the DWP has made sure they’re controlling the media narrative again.

Corporate press jumping to demonise disabled people

The week started once again with the mainstream rags demonising people with ADHD who claim PIP.

The Times went with the headline:

More than 100,000 get benefits for ADHD with no need to seek work

The article continued:

Official statistics show that the government has approved an average of 40 personal independence payments (Pip) a day over the past two years in which ADHD is cited as the main condition

The first glaringly obvious thing here is that you don’t order your conditions when applying for PIP, so there’s no such thing as a “main condition”.

It’s interesting that when the press and politicians pull something like this, they nearly always mention a condition that starts with A – anxiety, ADHD, autism, athlete’s foot. It’s almost as if they could only be bothered to look at the first lot of conditions.

It droned on:

The rise, from 71,528 in July 2024 to 100,207 in April this year, is being driven by a surge in the number of young people claiming the benefit. More than half of claimants for the neurodevelopmental condition are aged between 16 and 24, while nearly two thirds of young people cite ADHD, autism, depression or anxiety as their main disability, up from almost half in 2020.

Of all those claiming PIP for ADHD, about four in ten are receiving the top rate of daily living and mobility allowances worth up to £194 a week. This is paid on top of most other benefits and comes with no requirement to look for work.

Very quickly, it becomes clear that the narrative the DWP wants to continue to push is that PIP is related to unemployment.

Mentioning young people is a very handy way to remind people that a good chunk of young disabled people are out of work, whilst Alan Milburn and the DWP are hellbent on forcing them into work.

Media shills falling for ‘back-to-work’ narrative

The article then, of course, leads into the Timms review, but it feels incredibly suspect that the DWP just innocently gave the Times these figures days before a huge report into the main disability benefit was released. Unless it knew that the report wouldn’t demonise disabled people in the way they wanted to.

The i Paper went with a much less covert:

PIP assessments face overhaul to get more disabled people back into work

The minister for disabled people, Stephen Timms, told them:

There may well be changes that can be made to enable PIP to do a better job to support people into employment or to stay in employment if they run into a health problem in the course of their working lives.

That will certainly be one of the points we’ll be considering when we publish our recommendations, which are due in November of this year.

It’s laughable that Timms is talking about wanting to ensure PIP can support people into work, when, as the Canary has previously reported, the DWP penalises disabled people for returning to work. A memo to DWP staff informed them that starting work can still trigger a change in circumstances reassessment that could result in the claimant losing PIP.

There’s also the fact that support is already supposedly there, but the DWP is trying to erode it. Access to Work is supposed to support disabled people into work with funding for support workers and specialist equipment. But instead the DWP is quietly cutting Access to Work. The scheme is also plagued with delays; the last figures show 66,000 disabled people are still waiting.

What’s more, the people in charge of the department clearly don’t take Access to Work seriously. As the Canary reported, Neil Couling, director general of DWP services and fraud, made a joke about reasonable adjustments outside the inquiry into Access to Work.

DWP weaves a new narrative, the media fall for it

The Times and i Paper are not the only ones that were clearly briefed. Most outlets ran with some variation of ‘PIP not fit for purpose’ but didn’t address the systemic failings of the DWP or the pervasive narratives the department has created.

Though that last one is understandable, because in doing that, the media would have to own up to their part in turning the public against disabled people. And they’d much rather use us for clicks.

What’s clear here is that despite trying to weave a narrative that only scroungers claim PIP, the review has shown otherwise, so the DWP are doing anything they can to get out on top of it. And the only way they know how is to make disabled people the enemy again.

Featured image via the Canary