Contribute To Volatility

Created by the previous Government that now dominated both the Conservative Party and Reform UK, PIP is an in-work benefit with the clue in its name. Yet John Pring writes:

The proportion of disabled people who are successful in their claim for the main disability benefit has plunged by nearly a quarter since Labour came to power two years ago, new figures have revealed.

The figures, released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) this week, suggest the department may have been engaged in a secret programme to cut the number of new claimants awarded personal independence payment (PIP).

Even though PIP spending and claimant numbers were rising sharply under the last Conservative government, the opposition has used figures showing increasing numbers of PIP claimants as a key point of attack against Labour in recent months.

But this week’s figures show that, for the first quarter of 2026, the award rate for all cleared new claims (excluding withdrawn claims and claimants using the “special rules for end of life”) shows just 37 per cent of claims led to any kind of PIP award, down from 43 per cent in 2025, and 48 per cent in the first quarter of 2024.

This means there has been a drop of 11 percentage points, a fall of 23 per cent in just two years.

Previous figures had shown a rise in successful claims from 44 per cent in 2023 to 48 per cent in the first quarter of 2024.

For those new claims where a PIP assessment had been completed (excluding withdrawn claims and claimants using the “special rules for end of life”), 44 per cent of claims led to a PIP award, down from 50 per cent in the same quarter of 2025, and 54 per cent in 2024.

This was a drop of 10 percentage points, and a fall of 19 per cent in two years.

Previous figures had shown a rise in successful new claims from 51 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 to 54 per cent in 2024, shortly before Labour came to power.

These figures show that, before Labour took control of DWP in July 2024, the proportion of new PIP claims receiving an award was increasing – although figures from the second quarter of 2024 suggest it may have fallen slightly just before the election – but that it has plunged dramatically in the last two years.

The sharp rise in the proportion of disabled people having their PIP claims rejected might also help to explain why the number of PIP appeals received by the social security tribunal increased by 24 per cent in the first quarter of 2026, compared with the same quarter in 2025.

Yesterday (Wednesday), DWP refused to say if the new government had taken steps in 2024 to ensure that a higher proportion of new PIP claims would be rejected.

But it said that timescales for different parts of the PIP process can contribute to volatility in its official figures.

It pointed to figures for the five-year period from August 2019 to July 2024, which show 42 per cent of applicants received an award for normal rules new claims.

A DWP spokesperson said in a statement: “Award rates can vary over time because the number of awards being made changes, and because the number of cases that are withdrawn or disallowed varies.

“For the latest five-year period ending April 2026, 43 per cent received an award for new claims under normal rules.”

Caroline Richardson, a former statistician and part of the Spartacus network of disabled researchers, said: “Obviously disabled people will be concerned with the figures.

“We are keen that people take a deeper look into these figures to ascertain if indeed this is just down to fluctuations, or if circumstances such as population trends and reactions to these trends are influencing the DWP and the awards.

“This isn’t a straightforward data set and has to be interrogated further to draw concrete conclusions beyond what we are seeing, and into why we are seeing it.”

Media attention this week focused on the increase in the number of PIP recipients to four million, a rise of two per cent in three months.

Of these four million, 3.3 million (83 per cent) were of working-age and 680,000 (17 per cent) were of state pension age, with the Resolution Foundation thinktank pointing out that the proportion of claimants who were of state pension age had risen from 14 per cent in 2019.