There is growing evidence that the DWP have rigged the results of personal independence payment (PIP) review results to slash the percentage of claimants who get an increase by two thirds. A sudden fall began in the month that The DWP appointed new assessment contractors and set up their own Health Assessment Advisory Service (HAAS) to control them.
Success rates fall
Back in April we warned that the latest official DWP statistics showed that there had been a major drop in the number of claimants getting an increase in their PIP as a result of a planned award review.
The figures for the quarter up to January 2026 showed that all three months saw increases for fewer than 10% of planned award reviews, the first time this had ever happened.
Just 6.44% of claimants got an increase over the quarter, compared to 10.16% the year before and 20.9% the year before that.
We waited to see if the last quarter’s result were just a blip. But the DWP have now released the statistics for February to April of this year. And again the percentage of claimants who got an increase in their PIP as a result of a planned award review was just 7%.
Further research has revealed that there was a particularly dramatic fall in the proportion of increased awards in 2024. It dropped from 26% in August 2024 to just 14.2% in September 2024.
The figure has never gone above 14.2% since then and has continued to fall overall to its current level.
It means that the proportion of claimants getting an increased award has dropped from around 1 in 4 or 5, to 1 in 14 in the space of less than two years.
At the same time, the proportion of awards that were decreased fell from 11.3% to 4.8% and is currently around 6%.
This means that the proportion of PIP awards that stayed the same on review went from 51.3% in August 2024 to 75.9% in September 2024 and now stands at 83%.
In other words, planned award reviews went from changing half of all awards to making no difference whatsoever in over 8 out of 10 cases, in less than two years.
Can it really be the case that suddenly the vast majority of PIP claimants experience no significant deterioration – or improvement - in their condition between reviews?
HAAS takes over
It is worth noting that the month in which these dramatic changes began, September 2024, was the month that HAAS took over providing health assessments.
HAAS is part of the DWP. It now provides all the training, guidance and software for assessors who still work for private companies.
And the private sector contracts changed radically too, with Atos (known as IAS) losing all their PIP assessment contracts and being replaced by:
- Maximus
- Capita
- Serco
- Ingeus
So, just at the point when the DWP took much closer control of the process and appointed new companies, the success rate for PIP renewals took a sudden dive and the vast majority of awards began to remain the same.
This sudden fall in success rates wasn’t replicated elsewhere. The PIP success rate for new claims for example, has also dropped, but the decline has been more gradual and less huge. In August 2024 it was 46% and in April of this year it had fallen to 37%.
Just one call
Something else notable has happened recently, however.
The DWP has been under increasing pressure for several years to increase the proportion of face-to-face rather than telephone assessments. The right wing press and politicians have repeatedly claimed that people can get many thousand of pounds a year in benefits on the strength of a single phone call. It isn’t true, but it was a stick with which to beat the last Conservative government and the current Labour one.
The problem is that it is very hard and expensive to recruit and retain assessors and face-to-face assessments are much more time consuming. So the only realistic way to increase the number of face-to-face assessment would be to dramatically reduce the number of assessments taking place overall.
Nonetheless, in December Labour announced that PIP face-to-face assessments would be increased from 6% to 30%.
In order to do this the time between PIP reviews was to be extended for the majority of PIP claimants aged 25 and over, to a minimum of three years for a new claim, rising to 5 years at their next review if they remain entitled.
And in May, a further change was announced, allowing the DWP to extend PIP awards for existing claimants aged 25 and over, in order to cope with the growing backlog of planned award reviews.
The justification for this was that the majority of planned award reviews did not result in any change to the claimant’s entitlement.
Sound the alarm
In a committee debate on 25 June a Conservative MP said she wanted to “sound the alarm” about the powers being handed to the secretary of state to change the length of PIP awards with no public or parliamentary scrutiny, with the new powers being presented as simply tweaks to regulations.
In response, disability minster Stephen Timms argued:
“As mentioned by my hon. Friend, under the contracts with assessment providers that were negotiated by the last Government, we can call on only a finite volume of assessment capacity. We could, as the last Government did, use a large chunk of that capacity for frequent reassessments of PIP claimants whose circumstances most likely have not changed at all, or we can use that resource in a more productive way. That is what we have chosen to do.”
But it now seems that the reason there are so many “PIP claimants whose circumstances most likely have not changed at all” is that the books have been cooked. In reality, the DWP embarked on a two year project to ensure that very few PIP planned reviews result in a change, in order to free up assessment capacity.
Missing out
We are entirely prepared to be proved wrong about this and look forward to a strong rebuttal from the DWP.
But at the moment it looks like tens of thousands of PIP claimants every year will now miss out on an increase in their award that they desperately need because of changes in their condition.
And the only reason they are losing out is so that the DWP can protect itself from criticism.
