Welfare Reform Bill Update (1:00 PM Montreal Time)

 

No 10 guts welfare bill in big new concession as minister says Pip cuts planned for 2026 shelved until after Timms review

In the Commons Anna Dixon (Lab) has just intervened to say the Timms review should be brought forward.

Andrew Pakes (Lab), who has the floor, says he agrees. He says he would like to see Duracell batteries inserted into the review.

At this point Stephen Timms, the social security and disability minister, intervenes, to make the concession reported earlier. (See 5.18pm.)

He says:

I want to make this point to [Pakes] that he and others across the house during this debate have raised concerns that the changes to Pip are coming ahead of the conclusions of the review of the assessment that I will be leading.

We have heard those concerns, and that is why I can announce that we are going to remove the clause five from the bill at committee, that we will move straight to the wider review, sometimes referred to as the Timms review, and only make changes to Pip eligibility, activities and descriptors following that review.

The government is committed to concluding the review by the autumn of next year.

That is another big concession. It has two implications.

It means there is a chance that new Pip eligibility rules will not come into force in November 2026. (The government said it wanted the Timms review to report in the autumn of next year, and that it would implement its recommendations as quickly as possible, but legislating for welfare reforms is never quick.)

Much more importantly, it means that the switch to the four-point Pip eligibility rule may never happen at all. It won’t be in the legislation. And there is no guarantee the Timms review will revive the idea – certainly if it is genuinely “co-produced” with disabled people, as the government promises. The four-point rule was the key instrument that was going to deliver the £2.5bn savings that, this morning, the Treasury was going to deliver.

This means MPs are set to pass a bill that won’t necessarily deliver anything like the level of cuts originally planned. It is a huge win for those campaigning against it.

Updated at 17.54 BST

Welfare Reform Bill Update (9:41 AM Montreal Time)

 

I cannot cross by on the other side' - Rachael Maskell says she can't ignore what 'Dickensian' cuts will do for disabled

Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP who has tabled the rebel amendment, is speaking now.

She says 138 deaf and disabled people’s organisations have backed the reasoned amendments that would kill the bill.

She recalls a constituent visiting her, with his young daughter. He could not work because of his mental health condition. He said, if is benefits were cut, “it would be better that I wasn’t here”.

She says people with fluctuating conditions are particularly worried.

(Liz Kendall tried to address this point earlier – see 2.01pm.) She goes on:

These Dickensian cuts belong to a different era and a different party.

They are far from what this Labour party is for – a party to protect the poor, as is my purpose for I am my brother’s keeper, these are my constituents, my neighbours, my community, my responsibility, and I cannot cross by on the other side for one, let alone for the 150,000 who will be pushed further into poverty.

Here's a scholarly analysis of PIP, and it clearly calls for a sharp response grounded in both empathy and evidence

🧭 Reforming PIP is not just policy — it's a moral necessity.

This critique lays bare how fundamentally flawed the current system remains. When your chance to access vital support hinges on whether you had a stroke at 63 or 67, something’s gone terribly wrong.

🔍 PIP was never truly designed to reflect the real costs of disability, nor the lived disadvantages that people face. Calling it an “extra costs” benefit when there’s no actual calculation of those costs is misleading at best — and harmful at worst.

💡 What’s needed isn’t more convoluted points-based assessments. It’s a humane, evidence-informed system that:

• Automatically entitles people with severe, clear diagnoses
• Respects professional medical input over bureaucratic hurdles
• Stops punishing people for the timing of their impairments or for aging

🛑 Abolishing Severe Disablement Allowance and barring older claimants from mobility support only compounds the injustice. If the aim is to “focus help on those most in need,” why are we denying mobility support to someone with profound difficulty walking, simply because they turned 67?

⚖️ Let’s not forget the most important insight here: Disability benefits are not about employment. They’re about equity. About restoring dignity and agency to people living with systemic disadvantage — regardless of whether they can or should work.

📣 True reform begins when we stop pretending the system is working. This piece makes it clear: tinkering isn’t enough. We need compassion, not conditionality. Justice, not jargon.

---

Important: DWP confirms 4-point rule won't apply to existing Pip claimants reassessed in future - after Kendall mis-speak implies otherwise

 

DWP confirms 4-point rule won't apply to existing Pip claimants reassessed in future - after Kendall mis-speak implies otherwise

The Department for Work and Pensions has released a letter that Stephen Timms has sent to MPs about the concessions on the welfare bill. It contains a Q&A, and the text of the amendments relating to Pip.

The Q&A covers what will happen to existing Pip claimants if their claims are reassessed. It says:

What has changed?

As part of our measures to strengthen the UC and Pip bill, we will bring forward an amendment for Commons committee so that the 4-point minimum only applies to new claims. This means that no existing claimants will be subject to the 4-point requirement, including if they undergo an award review, whether planned or due to a change in circumstances. Those making a new claim after the measure comes into force (not before November 2026) will be subject to the 4-point requirement.

Earlier in the Commons Liz Kendall seemed to the opposite, implied that existing claimants would be subject to the four-point rule if they ask for a reassessment after November 2026. (See 4.38pm.) But DWP sources have said Kendall mis-spoke, and that the situation is as set out in the DWP Q&A.

Labour DWP committee chair Debbie Abrahams says she cannot support welfare bill in current form

Labour DWP committee chair Debbie Abrahams says she cannot support welfare bill in current form

Debbie Abrahams, the Labour chair of the work and pensions committee and the second signatory on Meg Millier’s reasoned amendment against the welfare bill, has said she cannot support the bill, despite the concessions, ITV’s Romilly Weeks reports. She has posted on social media.

NEW: Debbie Abrahams one of 3 MPs to negotiate the welfare concessions with No 10 says they do not go far enough @ITVNewsPolitics

She says the government rowed back on what had been negotiated and in the current form she will not be supporting the bill

This is even more of a mess for the government than first thought. A costly u turn that might yet not get them off the hook

By contrast, Hillier, chair of the Treasury committee, welcomed the concessions on Friday, calling them a “good and workable compromise”.

 

Welfare Reform Bill Update (8:25 AM Montreal Time)

 

DWP explains why its update does not say what impact bill will have on number of disabled people in poverty

Here are some more points the Department for Work and Pensions is making about its updated assessment of the impact its benefit cuts will have on poverty. (See 12.15pm and 12.31pm.)

• The poverty assessment does not take account of behavioural responses, the DWP says. It explains:

The Department for Work and Pensions’ Policy Simulation Model (PSM) is used to model the impact of policies on individuals and poverty levels. The PSM is a static microsimulation model based on a snapshot of the UK population from the Family Resources Survey (FRS), currently for the financial years ending 2020, 2022 and 2023. It uses caseload forecasts alongside benefit rules to simulate results such as poverty levels for each year, currently up to and including FYE 2030. Because the PSM is a static model it does not capture the behavioural impacts of policies, such as changed work incentives due to reductions or increases in benefit rates, or a small number of additional benefit claims expected as a behavioural response to the reduction in household incomes due to the measures.

This means these figures don’t take account of the fact that, when benefit payments change, people react – and how they react will also have an impact on poverty figures.

But no one really knows what the behavioural impacts of these cuts will be. Ministers believe that the current system give people out of work an incentive to say they have a sickness or disability that stops them working (because those benefits are worth more than standard universal credit). The proposal will narrow this gap, by making the standard rate of UC more generous. Ministers hope this will incentivise people to find work.

But there is an argument that because it will make standard UC a tiny bit more generous, it may reduce the incentive for standard UC claimants to find a job. And with Pip being removed from some people who qualify now who don’t have a four-point need on some criteria, the new rules could incentivise more people to claim on the grounds of a more severe disability.

• The DWP claims it has not been able to estimate the impact of the changes on the number of disabled people in poverty. It blames this on the way data is collected.

Definitions of disability in the PSM differ from those used in the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) poverty statistics. It has therefore not been possible to estimate the impact of the package on the level of poverty amongst individuals living in families with a disabled person, as this requires an estimate to be made using the HBAI definition.

• It says the poverty figures it is publishing today do not take account of other factors affecting poverty.

As the poverty impacts presented are independent of the underlying trends in poverty, they are not an estimate of the total change in poverty over time.

Welfare Reform Bill Update (4:30 AM Montreal Time)

 

Good morning. Last week, on their Political Currency podcast, Ed Balls and George Osborne were talking about the Labour rebellion over the legislation to cut disability benefits – the universal credit (UC) and personal independence payment (Pip) bill – and Osborne asked for an example of an MP who would never normally rebel against the government because they were inherently mainstream and loyal, but who was opposed to this plan. Balls menioned Clive Efford, the veteran MP for Eltham and Chiselhurst. They were speaking on Thursday, before the government announced massive concessions to the bill worth £3bn a year.

Those concessions have won over some Labour MPs who were going to vote against the bill tomorrow, and Keir Starmer, instead of facing certain defeat, now seems likely to win the vote – although with a much reduced majority. But many moderates are still opposed and this morning one of them was on the Today programme. It was Clive Efford.

He told the programme that he was still not in a position to support the bill because the government has not yet published the full assessment of how people will be affected, and whether (as ministers claim) the cuts won’t lead to more poverty because people will get jobs instead. He said:

There are still £3.5 billion-worth of savings that are required in these measures and we don’t yet know the poverty impact that they will have. The original motion [the reasoned amendment to kill the bill, signed by Efford and more than 120 other Labour MPs] was asking for more time for us to understand the impact of these changes and that still applies to those people who will be adversely affected.

I think there are a lot of people waiting to hear what the government is saying today who may be inclined to accept what the government has done. For me the situation hasn’t changed for those people who will be adversely affected and until we know and understand the impact on them, we shouldn’t be taking what I think is a leap in the dark.

There are choices that the government can make here; there are other places it can go to identify the resources. What we want to see, and fully support, is measures the government is putting in the palace to assist people to move into work, the right to try, we support, but we can’t guarantee the savings.

When you’re asking for £3.5bn regardless of the impact of those changes that can only adversely affect people who are in the benefit system.

We cannot make assumptions about how much we can save in the welfare system ahead of actually bringing in those changes and seeing how they work.

As Pippa Crerar and Rowena Mason report in their overnight story, Efford is far from alone; Vicky Foxcroft, who resigned as a government whip over the cuts, has not been won over by the concessions.