The Department for Work and Pensions has started testing new rules for personal independence payment assessments in a pilot that has already been rolled out to about 4% of claims nationwide. The change shifts key judgment calls away from healthcare professionals and toward DWP case managers, potentially affecting more than 150,000 disabled people.
The department confirmed this week that the pilot is live, making the move a present reality for claimants rather than a future proposal. For people searching for the dwp introduces new rules for extending personal independence payment awards story, the immediate point is simple: the way some PIP decisions are being made has already changed, even if most claimants will never see the pilot directly.
Under the current PIP system, healthcare professionals assess how a claimant’s impairment affects day-to-day life across 10 daily living activities and two mobility activities, then recommend the level of support they think is needed. Under the pilot, their role is narrowed to basic information gathering. The work of suggesting which descriptors apply, justifying those descriptors and deciding entitlement has been moved to DWP case managers, a handover that goes to the heart of who controls the outcome of a claim.
Disability Rights UK said the move was “absolutely astonishing” and warned that it would “create chaos and injustice in the processes for claiming PIP and possibly the WCA.” It also called the changes “a recipe for disaster.” That criticism matters because the department is running the pilot while also carrying out the high-profile Timms Review of PIP in co-production with disabled people, leaving the impression of one arm of government redesigning the process while another is asking disabled people to help shape it.
The pilot sits inside the secret Transform Decision Making programme, which is part of the wider Health Transformation Programme introduced under the last government to improve the PIP system and build a new assessment process. The programme does not appear to have been mentioned publicly online or in parliament, and concerns about the pilot came to light only after a DWP whistleblower contacted Disability Rights UK. The department is also looking at whether the same approach could be extended to the work capability assessment, though no decision has been announced. What remains unclear now is how many individual claimants are already being assessed under the pilot and what results, if any, it has produced so far.
