Reform UK declared war on PIP claimants and on advice agencies in a press conference last week, as they promised to slash the benefits bill by more than £9 billion a year.
Amongst their plans are:
- stopping PIP for 80-90% of claimants with depression and/or anxiety, instead these claimants will be put on a fast track to work, involving talking therapy,
- incentivising PIP assessors to fail applicants,
- stopping alleged “gaming” of PIP assessments by Citizens Advice,
- replacing Motability cars with dangerous three wheel trikes.
Dodgy stats and appeals to patriotism
MP Lee Anderson MP and Reform UK head of policy Zia Yusuf justified their attack on PIP by claiming that awards, especially for depression and anxiety, are costing the taxpayer too much and ruining young people’s lives. Anderson argued:
“We cannot and must not allow our young people to be labelled as disabled because they may have the odd bout of anxiety. It’s not fair on the taxpayer and its not fair on our young people. We are literally throwing them on the scrapheap.”
Yusuf, who argued that PIP was a “de facto out-of-work benefit” because only one in six people who get PIP are in work, took a similar line claiming:
“Pip staggeringly now accounts for 1% of UK GDP, not public spending, 1% of GDP is being spent on PIP. . . New claimants for PIP for under 25s in this country have tripled in 5 years, so we are betraying our young people. Reassessments are basically not happening anymore, so these young people are being labelled, they are being tossed onto a scrap heap for the rest of their lives.”
In fact, the number of PIP awards for claimants under 25 has gone up not by 300% in the last five years, but by 80%, according to the DWP’s Statxplore, from 232,512 to 419,222.
And as for reviews “basically not happening anymore”, that doesn’t appear to be anywhere near the truth either. In fact, in the year to July 2025, there were 697,000 reviews. Of these, 63,000 involved claimants aged under 25.
Anderson also framed working as a patriotic duty, saying: “. . . if you want to live a good life in a great country, then you must do your bit. You must get up in the morning and go to work for your family, for your community and for your country.”
War on mental health
In order to save claimants and the country, Reform say that they aim to stop the awards of 80-90% of all those claiming PIP for:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Mixed anxiety and depression
Instead they will be placed on a Fast Track to Work Programme which will be centred around talking therapy.
As of July 2025 there were 572,000 people receiving PIP for these conditions meaning that Reform are aiming to remove around half a million PIP awards for mental health.
Anderson explains:
“We are going to end payments for non-serious anxiety disorders in terms of PIP and move those people on to a fast-track to work programme . . . by 2029 it will save £9 billion a year.”
“Our assumptions are, we worked with the Centre for Social Justice to come up with this forecast, around 20% - somewhere between 10% and 20% - of those half a million we would expect to be recategorized into a different welfare category.”
Anyone older claimant comforting themselves that Reform are only targeting young people, should be aware that just 58,000 of claimants with these conditions are under 25. So almost nine out of ten of those projected to lose their award under a Reform UK government would be 25 and over.
And those half a million former PIP claimants will also lose eligibility for the health element of universal credit under Labour’s plan to abolish the work capability assessment.
However, some mental health conditions would be entirely exempt from the Fast Track To Work according to Anderson:
“We would probably disapply schizophrenia, bipolar, PTSD, personality disorder, I think we can all accept they are very serious mental health illnesses.”
There was a great deal of detail missing from these headline grabbing proposals. For example, Anderson failed to explain who would decide which claimants have “non-serious anxiety disorders” or how they would do this. If it is to be left to XXXX
There was also no explanation of whether the and Fast Track to Employment based on talking therapy would be voluntary or mandatory.
If mandatory, given that these claimants would already have lost their PIP, there was no explanation of whether, for example, universal credit would be sanctioned instead, if they received it. And, again if mandatory, there was no explanation of how the ethical and legal considerations of forcing people to undergo therapy with threats of benefits sanctions would be dealt with.
But one thing was clear, at least in Anderson’s view: this plan does not amount to cutting PIP:
“It’s not cutting PIP benefits, it’s getting people who are able-bodied back to work. The genuine people who are disabled suffering things like schizophrenia, bipolar, PTSD, personality disorder, they will be kept on PIP and they will be supported.”
War on advice agencies
Anderson is also set on demonising the organisation that unquestionably does most to help people claim PIP:
“Before I came into politics I worked for Citizens Advice Bureau and we were the first point of contact really for people who wanted to claim PIP, or DLA as it was at the time, and we used to fill the forms out for clients before that application form went in, and I can tell you now we were gaming the system. It was a competition between the adviser, ie the person who’s filling the form out and the DWP
“And I can tell you I know people who worked for the CAB, they’d got a 100% hit rate on a benefit form.
“I could take the fittest man in Ashfield and we could get them a 100% claim on DLA. That’s how skilful the advisers were at filling these forms out. It has to stop.”
We’re not really sure what “gaming the system” means in this context. If, for example, you encourage a claimant to complete a DLA or PIP form thinking only about their worst day, but their condition is a variable one, that’s not gaming the system, that’s just fraud.
You are also doing your client a huge disservice. Because they are the ones most likely to be prosecuted if they claimed that they could only walk 20 metres without symptoms such as pain or fatigue seven days a week, when in fact that is only true on two days a week and they can walk more than a hundred metres on most days and they are observed doing so.
But if you are simply ensuring that your client takes into account such things as how long an activity takes them and whether they can do it to a satisfactory standard, that’s not gaming the system, that’s just explaining the law.
What we are sure about, however, is that if you knowingly got a “100% claim on DLA” or PIP for a perfectly fit person, then you absolutely unquestionably would be taking part in a conspiracy to defraud.
We do not believe that Citizens Advice train staff to put themselves or their clients at risk in this way. So when Anderson says “It has to stop”, we hope very much to hear from Citizens Advice that it doesn’t have to stop because it never started.
If, however, they let this accusation stand, they risk serious harm to both their funding and their good name as they become yet another enemy of the people, along with the likes of judges and lawyers. And PIP claimants will lose another of the few sources of free support available to them.
Rigging the assessment
Reform say they will make all PIP assessments face-to-face, because the success rate is lower for these assessments compared to remote assessments.
But, alarmingly, another way that Reform wants to cut the benefits bill is by “incentivising” assessors to fail PIP applicants.
In case Reform UK should deny that this is what they meant, here is the exchange between a GB News reporter and Yusuf:
[GB News] “Assessing seems to be right at the heart of this, to try and work out who is seriously suffering from anxiety and who is not. Can I ask who will do the assessing and how will you make sure that those people are incentivised to get people back to work because Fraser Nelson’s documentary revealed that very junior civil servants are essentially being paid to get through as many claims as possible.”
[Yusuf] “That’s exactly right. So part of our proposals will be to fix the assessment process. So that is one problem, So you’ve got to look at the incentives for the assessors who, not necessarily universally but in a lot of cases, probably the majority of cases, are being incentivised on volume not on perhaps the incentives we would think about a) for the life outcomes of the people involved and [b)]for the taxpayer. The nice thing about this is that in some ways those two are very much aligned.”
There’s a certain amount of nudging and winking in this statement, but given Reform’s belief that PIP ruins lives and that the taxpayer is bearing too great a burden, the only way the two goals could be “very much aligned” is by incentivising the assessors to fail claimants.
War on Motability
And in case anyone believes Reform only have awards based on mental health in their sights, here’s Anderson on Motability, in response to a question from the Daily Express journalist, Christian Calgie:
“The Motability scheme has got completely out of hand. One in five new cars on the road now are a Motability car.
“I know people through doing this job and working at the CAB before, that will claim PIP the higher rate mobility for a family member and that family member will never get to use that car apart from maybe once or twice a year. They go to hospital in the car and the rest of the time the family are driving about in a brand new BMW on their drive. Its not fair. . . I remember back in the day if you were on disability and you wanted a car from the state, it was a blue three wheeler. Anybody remember those? What’s wrong with that? Lets go back to that. You’ll quote me on that, won’t you, Calgie?” [Laughs aloud]
In fact, the blue three-wheeler Invacar was so dangerous that they stopped making them in 1981 and the few still on the road in 2003 were recalled.
They were underpowered, unstable in high winds, unreliable when braking, had a flimsy fibreglass body and had only one door, which could make getting out very difficult when they overturned. They also had the petrol tank mounted under the front bonnet, increasing the risk of a fire in a collision.
Racing driver Graham Hill road tested one and said afterwards “ I was so appalled at what I found that ever since then I have tried everything within my power to publicise the fact that such vehicles should not be allowed on the road.”
In addition, they could only legally hold one person, so would be useless for anyone who needed someone else to drive them.
But, for Lee Anderson, bringing them back would just be a bit of a laugh.
More to come
Reform are only just getting started on their war on claimants.
As they explained last week:
“Reform will have sweeping welfare reforms that we will announce in the coming months and years.”
But, if you are a disabled claimant or carer, you have probably already heard enough to be certain that a vote for Reform is a vote for ignorance, discrimination, bullying and, for many people, a deep dive into poverty.
You can watch the Reform UK PIP press conference on Facebook.
