Making PIP work

Life with a disability comes with additional barriers – inaccessible public transport, inflexible employers, discrimination and additional costs. Our food banks see the impact of this first hand – disabled people face high rates of hunger and hardship and often struggle to afford both essential living costs and the additional costs of disability.

PIP is there to support with these many additional costs – whether that’s for equipment, a taxi because public transport is inaccessible, food that can be prepped without cooking, hospital parking charges or additional heating because it’s dangerous to get cold. It exists to help disabled people overcome the barriers they face, live independently, and participate in society and work.

But right now, PIP is overly complex and difficult to navigate. Unnecessary bureaucracy, delays and frequent demoralising assessments are isolating and exhausting. Time and energy that could be spent on progressing life goals – including getting into or progressing in work – is instead spent fighting the system, often with little to show for it. 

The Timms Review is a vital chance to finally get the system right. However, reform of PIP has been trapped between two inadequate options: cuts that would push hundreds of thousands of disabled people deeper into poverty, or a status quo that is failing disabled people and costing the public purse more than it should through expensive assessments and appeals. 

This report sets out a different path – six concrete proposals that would make PIP work better, remove the fear from the assessment process, and give disabled people the security to focus on the things that matter in their own lives.