In the great alphabet soup of the social security world (DWP, UC, DLA, PIP, ESA, JSA), it’s no surprise that the name and function of different welfare benefits gets muddled in the minds of the general public and of our elected representatives. The complexity is something of a double-edged sword: capable of targeting specific need but also making it easy to lump ‘benefits’ in a homogeneous mass and do a bit of budget slashing along the dividing lines of who is ‘deserving’ of public support and who isn’t.

It’s therefore worth taking a bit of time to unpack the purpose of Personal Independence Payment- what is it for and how do the UK Government’s recent announcements affect its original purpose?

Personal Independence Payment or ‘PIP’ is a descendant of Disability Living Allowance and was designed to support recipients with ‘the extra costs of disability.’ It is not, and has never been a benefit connected to employment; it is also not means-tested and therefore could be claimed equally by those who are better off as by the very poor. Successive governments have fiddled around with the eligibility criteria and assessments - but critically those assessments have never concerned themselves with whether someone is capable of working and sought to provide or withhold support on that basis. Instead they look at what support someone might need to assist with daily life and seek to apply an element of financial support to meet this.

PIP/DLA makes a huge amount of sense; the very recognition that our world doesn’t do enough to break down barriers, (be they physical,  informational, communication or other) and therefore governments have a duty to provide financial support which makes life a little easier, aligns with the social model’s understanding of the world.

Why is this important? Arguably because PIP or DLA as originally conceived are closest to the idea of a social security system aligning with the ‘social model’ of disability. This understanding of disability rejects the idea that the mere fact of having an impairment ‘causes’ disability. Instead, the social model argues, disability arises because neither our physical world nor our society are designed around the diversity of needs which exist- and the interaction between a person’s impairment and all the barriers which they comes across in their day to day life is what is disabling. In this context, PIP/DLA makes a huge amount of sense; the very recognition that our world doesn’t do enough to break down barriers, (be they physical,  informational, communication or other) and therefore governments have a duty to provide financial support which makes life a little easier, aligns with the social model’s understanding of the world.

Of course, PIP cannot replace a wider programme of ensuring that the barriers facing disabled people are dismantled in the first place, which arguably would have a transformative effect on the ability of a greater proportion of disabled people to participate in the work place. As it stands, just over half of disabled people are working, which is around 30% points less than the employment rate among non-disabled people. Imagine what people could achieve if the right support was easily available and accessible?

It’s doubly disappointing then to see UK Labour trying to dismantle PIP by restricting it to only those who meet the very highest level of need in certain categories; but also deliberately confusing PIP with payments which are meant to cover periods of unemployment, in a clumsy attempt to once again justify the reduction in public spending by blaming and shaming disabled people. Pleasingly, several MPs have pointed this out to Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves, including the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood:

“These support payments aren’t for people on long term sick who could return to work – they are designed to help people live independently regardless of their work status. Slashing this element of social security will only make it harder for people with disabilities to live their lives.”

According to the Green Paper (para. 63), “in Northern Ireland, health and disability benefits are the responsibility of the Northern Ireland Executive, although the UK government and the Northern Ireland Executive work closely together to maintain parity between their respective social security systems.” The matter is currently with the Executive.

The entire purpose of PIP is to give people the support they need to be included in society; removing that support for people who need just a little of it will have potentially far-reaching effects in a country where housing, transport, education and the health system are still not particularly accessible. The day to day of just moving around your house, getting to the shop, parenting your kids or caring for your family will be made harder. And of course those costs will eventually be passed on to the health and social care system.