Jean-André Prager, a member of the Timms review steering group, is the leading author of a new report calling for extreme cuts to child DLA for mental health, learning difficulties and neurodevelopmental conditions.
The authors want to see up to 70% fewer awards for these conditions and the amount of money paid for successful claims reduced, with criteria revised every three years to keep awards down. They also question whether a “cash disability benefit is the right form of support” for children with these conditions.
The report “Child Disability Living Allowance. A Policy Exchange Research Note” was published on 2 October by the right-leaning Policy Exchange think tank, with Prager as its lead author.
Prager is a former Downing Street special adviser covering DWP under prime ministers May, Johnson and Sunak. As well as working for Policy Exchange, he is also a director at Flint Global, which advises businesses on policy, politics and regulation and whose chief executive is former Labour Secretary of State for Work and Pensions James Purnell..
Prager is one of the 12 Timms review steering group members, appointed by Timms and his two co-chairs. The co-chairs themselves were selected by the DWP and no open selection process for their appointment has ever been published.
The Policy Exchange report notes the rise in DLA claims for children whose main disabling conditions, as recorded by the DWP using its outdated DLA categories, are:
behavioural disorder (this includes eating disorders, conduct disorders and other childhood psychiatric disorders);
hyperkinetic syndrome (primarily ADHD);
learning difficulties (broader than the modern definition and including autism and Down’s syndrome).
You can read more about the DWP’s main DLA disabling conditions here.
The report recommends changing the eligibility criteria for the three conditions, both for new claims and reassessments, in order to ensure a reduction of either fifty, sixty or seventy percent in the number of awards.
A 70% reduction in awards, the authors claim, would save £11.9bn in its first four years, with one third of the savings recommended to be used to improve child mental health provision and two thirds used to reduce the national deficit.
The authors also suggest that the award criteria for these conditions should be reviewed every three years to make sure that numbers don’t increase.
In addition, the report suggests that the revised criteria should ensure that fewer children with these conditions get the higher rates of each component.
Just as concerningly, for current PIP claimants, the report points strongly towards a costs-based system for DLA awards with a clear implication that, for learning difficulties, mental health and neurodevelopment issues, cash awards may not be appropriate.
The report notes that:
“The assessment does not ask a parent or carer to itemise the extra cost for the child, but rather the form uses proxies to try and determine costs. These proxies include additional care, attention, prompting and assistance.”
It goes on to suggest that this “means that what the assessment measures and what the benefit is intended to compensate for are not necessarily the same thing.”
Later the report adds that “The relationship between the proxy and the financial cost will be stronger in some cases than others.” It uses the examples of children who need tube feeding, oxygen or substantial mobility assistance as conditions that will generate “readily identifiable additional expenditure”.
On the other hand “where the principal additional need takes the form of prompting, behavioural management, supervision or motivation, the burden may fall primarily in the form of parental time, vigilance and complexity rather than direct expenditure.”
The authors ask, with the conclusion being implicit in the question “whether these proxies continue to provide the most appropriate way of identifying those children for whom a cash disability benefit is the right form of support.”
Prager was a Downing Street special adviser covering DWP in 2024, when Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government published their infamous Modernising Support for Independent Living Green Paper, which called for a disability-costs based PIP system with some cash payments being replaced by vouchers, equipment or services.
Prager is one of only two Timms steering group members whose primary professional interest is welfare benefits. The other is Professor Ben Geiger who, was seconded to the DWP in 2015-16 and is on record as telling the Timms work and pensions committee four years ago that the DWP should “have a look at the extra costs that people face and how those match up to the assessment. Then it needs a testing and piloting strand to see what other forms of assessments could be done.”
It seems very possible the only two welfare experts on the steering group will have considerable influence over the deliberations and final conclusions of the Timms review steering group, which now seems very likely to recommend a costs-based assessment system.
You can download a copy of “Child Disability Living Allowance. A Policy Exchange Research Note” here.
