Under both Conservative and Labour governments, the DWP have colluded with the press to demonise younger claimants living with mental health issues, ADHD and autism. Ministers have joined in, to create a smokescreen which obscures the politically inconvenient truth that the majority of those at risk of losing their personal independence payment (PIP) under the Green paper proposals are older people with physical health conditions – many of whom have worked all their adult life until they became ill.
Sickfluencers
In January, the Canary highlighted the fact that “Disabled people living with mental health conditions came on the receiving end of an exponential surge in corporate media attacks against benefit claimants in 2024.” It also found many articles “blaming the rise in disability benefit claims on the increase in claims from autistic people, and people with ADHD.”
Sinister TikTok and Youtube “sickfluencers” who encourage young people to make spurious claims for benefits rather than find employment have become a staple of these hate tales, which continue to the present day:
Spike in disability claims for ADHD — as influencers provide advice Sunday Times 14.04.2024
‘Sickfluencers’ help followers claim benefits as 15,000 a week approved Times 30.11.2024
The benefits sickfluencers teaching Brits how to play the system and take YOUR tax to splash on flash cars and exotic hols The Sun 07.02.25
The £3.5bn-a-year benefits bill for anxiety and ADHD Telegraph 19.03.25
Disability benefits for anxiety and depression double since pandemic Times 25.04.2025
And Liz Kendall, in her speech launching the Pathways To Work Green Paper argued that PIP claims were “rising faster among young people and mental health conditions . . . And the consequences of this failure are there for all to see. Millions of people who could work trapped on benefits… denied the income, hope, dignity and self-respect that we know good work brings
But, if this is the problem that the reforms are designed to fix, why are the bulk of the cuts aimed at older people with physical health conditions?
Physical health to be hardest hit
All the figures provided by the DWP suggest that it is physical health awards, not mental health or neurodevelopmental ones, that will bear the brunt of Labour’s cuts.
PIP awards at risk are those where the claimant did not score a minimum of 4 points for any daily living activity. DWP statistics show that of all at risk awards:
- 72% are based on physical health
- 26% are based on mental health
- 1% are based on ADHD
- 1% are based on autistic spectrum disorders (ASD)
- 25% are based on learning disabilities.
(Numbers do not add up to 100% due to rounding).
Clearly, from these numbers, ADHD and ASD awards are not at the forefront of cuts.
The DWP did not provide us with a condition specific breakdown of awards, but even from the categories it did provide, the focus on physical health is very apparent. The percentage of awards with no 4 point or higher descriptor is:
- 79% for back pain
- 77% for arthritis
- 71% for regional musculoskeletal diseases (excluding back pain)
- 68% for chronic pain syndromes
- 62% for cardiovascular disease
- 55% for respiratory diseases
By comparison, 48% of awards for anxiety and depression have no 4 point or higher and, as we have seen above, 19% for ADHD and 6% for ASD.
What Labour are threatening with their Green Paper then, is almost eight out of ten awards for back pain and arthritis being stopped and even awards for conditions like heart disease and breathing problem being taken away from well over half of all current recipients.
If Labour were honest about this, they would probably find their plans much harder to sell.
Older claimants to be hardest hit
The other claim being made by Labour is that these cuts are aimed at preventing a whole generation of young people becoming permanent benefits claimants and never experiencing the “dignity and self-respect” of work.
The truth is the opposite: younger claimants are much less likely to lose their awards while older claimants, most with a lifetime of graft behind them, are much more likely to lose their PIP.
According to the DWP’s statxplore, the percentage of PIP claimants aged between 50 and 66 is, for example:
- 82% of those living with arthritis.
- 79% of those living with respiratory illness
- 75% of those living with cardiovascular disease
- 63% of those living with back pain
- 57% of those living with chronic pain
- 54% of those living with regional musculoskeletal diseases (excluding back pain)
Claimants living with mental health conditions tend to be younger: only 36% of claimants living with anxiety and depression are aged between 50 and 66.
Those living with neurodevelopmental issues are even younger: just 4% of claimants living with ASD and 2.5% of those living with ADHD are aged between 50 and 66.
But, as we have seen, mental health and neurodevelopmental claims make up only a little over a quarter of all at risk claims.
Whereas, just the six physical health conditions listed above, include over half of all the 1.3 million at risk claims.
When it all unravels
There is no question, as our research has shown, that claimants living with mental health conditions will be hit dreadfully hard by the Green Paper changes and some of them will be amongst the most vulnerable people in our society.
But the number of claimants with physical health conditions who will be plunged into desperate circumstances by a sudden drop in income will be even greater.
Labour ministers may well succeed in conning their own MPs into voting the changes to PIP into law before the summer recess.
But, when the cuts actually come into force in November 2026, the deception will not hold.
It will rapidly become obvious that Labour is systematically destroying the income, not of young people led from the path of gainful employment by greedy “sickfluencers”, but of older people with a lifetime of work behind them.
And as images begin to appear in the press of disabled people close to retirement age, some using wheelchairs or supplemental oxygen kits, queueing at food banks and debt advice centres, Labour MPs may regret their gullibility.
By the summer of 2029, after two and a half years of thousands of older, disabled claimants being remorselessly stripped of their PIP every single month, there will be a general election at which they may regret it a great deal more.
