The Commons public accounts committee (PAC) this month warned the DWP that “unacceptable” delays in decision making for new PIP claims are pushing disabled people into poverty. However, figures not available to the committee at the time, show that the DWP is now delaying decisions for a great deal longer.
In October 2025 the PAC took evidence from the DWP as part of a follow-up on a previous report about issues within the department. Their report, published earlier this month, condemned the delays in processing new PIP claims:
“It is unacceptable how long some PIP claimants are having to wait for their claims to be processed, which can cause them to get into debt and push them into poverty. The Department does not have an adequate plan to improve this in the short term.”
In reality, figures for the quarter to October 2025, which the committee could not have seen as they would not yet have been compiled, show that the DWP have got considerably slower at making decisions on new PIP claims because they are diverting staff to clear the PIP reassessment backlog.
As a result, clearances of new claims for the quarter to October are down a massive 25% on the same period last year. 40,000 fewer new PIP claims were cleared than were registered in the quarter, meaning a bigger backlog of delayed decisions is building up. This is in spite of the fact that the number of new claims is actually falling, down 6% from last year.
So the figures for the year ending April 2025, which is what the committee considered and condemned, were a great deal better than they are likely to be now.
The PAC went on to say that :
“The Department aims to process 75% of new PIP claims within 75 working days but, in 2024–25, only 51% of claims were processed within this timeframe. We have constituents who have waited a long time for their claims to be processed, in some cases over a year.”
The committee pointed out that in 2023, the DWP had claimed that a new online PIP claim service was much quicker and that it that it intended to process up to 20% of PIP claims using the new service by 2026.
Now, however, the DWP says it will be 2029 before it reaches the 20% figure, by which time the new claims system was supposed to have been fully rolled out.
The committee warned that “This is far too long for claimants to have to wait to get a better service.”
But, as we now know, the service is actually getting much worse.
You can download the full PAC report DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025 from this link.
