NUJ Disabled Members’ Council calls on journalists to scrutinise UK government claims as welfare reform bill is rushed through parliament

  • 01 Jul 2025

The DMC has compiled advice and resources to support journalists to understand and scrutinise the impact of the proposals in a fast-moving political discussion.

The UK government is progressing proposals for welfare reform with some speed. The UK’s social security system is complex, especially for non-specialist journalists who are reporting on these policy developments.

Progress of the policies and legislation

The Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill will have its Second Reading and a Money Resolution in the Commons on the 1 July, with the Committee of the Whole House and 3rd Reading on the 9 July. It has been met by a significant public opposition and a groundswell of Labour MPs stating they will rebel.

Due to backlash from rebels some very late concessions have been offered. These are unclear, not written into the Bill and the NUJ does not believe they are as significant as the government claims.

The Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper was published in March 2025. The consultation closed on the 30 June 2025, after the Bill was tabled. The NUJ submitted a response to the consultation.

The Green Paper contains proposals to reform the social security system, specifically the support given to disabled people.

In particular, the Green Paper sets out proposals to alter Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and the health element of Universal Credit (UC). These are vital forms of support for people who are disabled and/or have long term health conditions.

The proposed PIP eligibility reforms and reforms to the definition of severe condition under the Universal Credit fail to take into account the fluctuating nature of many disabilities, including very severe disabilities, and the cumulative impact of multiple impairments which are covered by the internationally accepted definition of disability as enshrined the Equality Act 2010.

Journalists should do their best to research and consider the equality impact of the proposed reforms on disabled people and on minoritised groups, e.g. women who the government's impact assessment shows will be disproportionately affected by PIP eligibility reforms (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/59-01/0267/hcb267_ia_no22025.pdf) and vulnerable claimants such as children, including care-leavers, migrating from their DLA benefit to PIP post-16.


Example of responsible coverage here: Labour’s benefit cuts will have ‘devastating’ impact on disabled women, say charities, The Guardian, 24 June 2025.

Not all of the proposals in the Green Paper have been consulted on. Legislation was tabled prior to the close of the consultation as effectively a means of introducing significant changes without consultation or full understanding of the impact of the Bill.

The UN Committee on the Rights of Disabled People found the UK government in breach of disabled people’s human rights in 2024. It specifically highlighted the lack of adequate social security. The DMC’s view is that the UK government has not taken disabled people’s human rights into account throughout this consultation process.

MPs are being asked to vote without full information:

  • Lack of full and accessible consultation with disabled people, especially regarding the last-minute concessions, which will result in a two-tier system.
  • The Office for Budget Responsibility is not due to publish its analysis of the employment impact of these reforms until the autumn of 2025
  • The government is still awaiting the findings of the Minister for Social Security and Disability’s review into the assessment for Personal Independence Payment and Sir Charlie Mayfield’s independent review into the role of employers and government in boosting the employment of disabled people and people with long-term health conditions.

The government has yet to produce its own impact assessment to identify the impact of the proposed changes on:

  • Future PIP and UC LCWRA claimants
  • The number of people, including children who will fall into poverty
  • The number of people who will experience worsening physical or mental health
  • How many carers will lose carers allowance
  • The impact on those under the devolved Scottish Social Security System

Framing narratives

Understand the Social Model of Disability, which is a framework for understanding and expressing the barriers disabled people face in their daily lives. It places a collective responsibility on society to support disabled people’s access and inclusion.

The proposed cuts exist in a context of a society that is systemically inaccessible and creates barriers to disabled people’s inclusion in everyday life, including education and employment.

It can be easy to make judgements and assumptions about the value and quality of

life of disabled people and people living with chronic health conditions. It is vital to recognise the important roles and value that disabled people bring to their families, friends and communities. An individual’s worth is not dictated by their employment status.

We encourage journalists to challenge negative societal attitudes when reporting on disability and social security issues.

See a recent NUJ statement on reporting on disability.

Links and resources:

DPAC mythbuster below

Disability Rights UK statement

Inclusion London statement

Joseph Rowntree Foundation analysis

Citizens Advice Pathways to Poverty report

Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper

Disability and social security mythbuster

Welfare spending is not out of control

  • It is lower than a decade ago and not set to rise within the next five years.
  • What is true is that disability benefits as a share of overall welfare spending has risen. This is due to many factors, one being the increase in State pension age, but also NHS and mental health support waiting lists, the effects of Long Covid, and escalating mental distress among young people. These are all very real issues which we need the government to address.
  • Nearly £23 billion worth of social security and social tariffs currently goes unclaimed due to lack of awareness, stigma and the complexity of the UK social security system. In the Financial Year Ending (FYE) 2024, DWP estimates that 4% (£870 million) went underclaimed for PIP and 11% (£750 million) for DLA.

Tests for eligibility for disability benefits are not too easy

  • Deaf and Disabled people who need disability benefits are too often found ineligible by assessments that are arduous, harrowing, frequently inadequate and result in arbitrary decisions. These are the same assessments that Labour criticised when in opposition and which were the subject of a number of highly critical Work and Pensions Committee reports.
  • The rate of assessment decisions over-turned at appeal is at an all-time high.  Currently around two-thirds of PIP appeals are overturned in favour of the claimant compared to around half of universal credit and ESA appeals. However, many give up either before or after Mandatory Reconsideration stage because they cannot face the battle and due to lack of welfare advice and support to challenge unfair decisions.
  • Recent research demonstrates that people claiming benefits for reasons of mental health are living with high levels of mental distress: Mental distress among people receiving benefits: new evidence. This is in contrast to deliberate misrepresentations contained within political rhetoric and media reporting of people supposedly found eligible for benefits who have low levels of anxiety or depression.
  • This picture is further supported by OBR’s calculations that of the 163,000 benefit claimants with mental distress impacted by the proposals to change the WCA, a maximum of 3% would be able to find and undertake paid work.
  • Recent media headlines about 200,000 claimants found unfit for work who are ready and willing to work now were deeply misleading. The survey question to which these claimants responded was whether they could work now with the “right job” and the “right support”. There was no follow up question about the likely availability of either. The 200,000 figure was extrapolated from a much smaller claimant sample. People who have learning disabilities and/or are autistic were twice as likely to respond yes to this question. 49% of respondents felt they would never be able to work or work again. 62% of these customers were over the age of 50, and 66% felt their health was likely to get worse in the future.

This is not about fraud

  • The latest figures for  PIP fraud are 0% according to the DWP’s Fraud and Error in the Benefits System Annual Report of 2024, so the government’s crackdown on benefit fraud and its impact is inconsistent with the figures and very low rates of PIP fraud. When government ministers cite amounts lost to fraud, they use the figures for overall benefit fraud rather than disability benefit fraud. This is deliberately misleading.
  • Actual benefit fraud requires a court of law to establish that a claimant knowingly or dishonestly claimed benefit. Only 820 people were convicted on this basis in 2023-2024.  The DWP statistical definition of fraud is much less rigorous - it is an assessment by the DWP of those who were not entitled to benefit but could ‘reasonably be expected to know.’ DWP estimate that rates for this type of overpayment were 2.8% (£7.4 bn) in 2024.  Rates of overpayment for claimant error were put at 0.6% (£1.6bn) and DWP official error at 0.3% (£0.8bn). 

Disability benefits do not act as a disincentive to work

  • Disability benefits keep Deaf and Disabled people out of absolute poverty.
  • In 2022/23, there were 16 million people in the UK living in families in poverty. Of these, there were 8.7 million people in poverty who are Disabled themselves, or who live with a Disabled person, up from 6.9 million in 2019/20. 33% of people living in the lowest income decile are Disabled compared to just 9% in the top.
  • The rate that Universal Credit standard allowance is paid at is deliberately set to be too low to survive on for anything but a very short, temporary amount of time. For those unable to earn a living through paid work, an out of work disability benefit component is essential in addition to the standard allowance.
  • Personal Independence Payment is a non-means tested extra costs benefit intended to contribute to the additional unavoidable expenditure that Deaf and Disabled people face. Scope estimates that Disabled people face on average extra costs of £1067 per month compared to non-Disabled people.
  • Many PIP claimants will not be able to continue in work if they lose access to this benefit. This is because engaging in paid work places extra demands on us that can exacerbate our conditions which in turn increases our unavoidable disability related expenditure. It also gives us less time on top of managing our impairments and illnesses to be able to function in other necessary areas of our lives such as domestic tasks. The OBR states that one sixth of PIP claimants are in work.
  • 54% of all poverty in the country is now disability related.
  • The proportion of people in families with at least one Disabled child and one Disabled adult who were living in poverty rose by 7% from 2019–21 up to 46% in 2021-22. This is compared to a consistent figure of 17% for individuals in families with no Disabled members across these two years.
  • Poverty moves people further from employment. In 2021–22, the poverty rate for individuals in a household in receipt of a disability benefit was 20%.

Cutting disability benefits will not solve labour shortages in Britain

  • There is nothing currently stopping those who can and want to engage in paid employment from doing so while also remaining eligible for the Limited Capability for Work and Work Related Activity (LCWRA) component of Universal Credit. Many claimants simply cannot do this because of the amount of pain, distress and/or fatigue they live with and/or volume of time spent attending medical appointments and engaging in treatment/therapy and/or volume of time that basic daily living tasks such as getting washed and dressed require due to the level of our support needs and severity of our disablement.
  • Deaf and Disabled people do not choose a life out of paid employment reliant on social security for fun. Many more people should be found unfit for work than currently are. Even if you receive both out of work disability benefits and the higher rates of both the mobility and care components of PIP this is just 60% of the Minimum Income Standard required for a decent standard of living.
  • Labour has intensified significantly over the past few decades, increasing the barriers that we face to getting and staying in paid work. For example, whereas once it was traditional for South Londoners to spend Summer holidays hop-picking in Kent, now farmers have picking targets that need to be met in order to stay profitable, leading to the number of farm workers seeking help with dismissal after travelling to work in British fields and orchards soaring. Professions that may only pay minimum wage nevertheless require considerable energy and skill, for example social care work. One of the reasons for rising disability prevalence among working age adults is because increasing numbers of us no longer fit within intensifying and worsening workplace conditions.
  • Measures to review and make changes to the Access to Work government disability employment programme outlined in the Green paper do not include addressing current problems with the scheme. As of the end of 2024, there were a reported 55,500 unresolved cases. Anecdotally, many Deaf and Disabled people have lost employment or are owed significant, unsustainable sums of money due to delays.
  • Deaf and Disabled workers have not benefited from advances in flexible working. Research has shown that workers with childcare responsibilities have been the beneficiaries and Flex Plus working is only rarely available.
  • There are very few available jobs that meet the accessibility needs of Deaf and Disabled workers. Journalist Rachel Charlton-Dailey found that out of 27,467 jobs on the DWP Find a Job site, only eight were fully remote, Disability Confident and part time.

Cuts to disability benefits will cost the economy more in the long-term

  • Poverty costs money. In 2016 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated that poverty costs the economy £78 billion per year and that £1 in every £5 spent on public services went towards mitigating the harms caused by poverty.
  • Cuts will cause substantial additional pressures on the NHS, mental health services, and social care services and will lead to an increase in survival crime.

 

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