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The government is being criticised for failing to clarify how £2 billion of cuts to disability benefits will be achieved.

But don’t we already know what’s planned – from the Labour government’s attempt to shave £5 billion from disability benefits earlier this year?

Dsisability News Service is saying:

“The government has refused to explain the impact that last week’s budget will have on disabled people who receive benefits, despite repeated requests for clarity over cuts of up to £580 million a year.

“The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Treasury have both failed to provide any details of the cuts to spending on disability benefits of nearly £2 billion over five years.

“The Treasury initially claimed that the budget documents were not announcing new policies, but were “just costing existing plans from planned welfare reforms – so nothing new from this”.”

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There are indeed official lines in the government’s Budget documents that match what Disability News Service (DNS) reported, and these lines show the operational changes the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is planning around health-related benefits.

The Budget 2025 Policy Costings document states that the government is introducing a package of “operational improvements to health assessments” designed to “ensure people receive the right health or disability benefit and the system is sustainable”.

These changes include:

• Increasing capacity for Work Capability Assessment (WCA) reassessments;
• Changing the frequency of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) award reviews so that fewer people are called in for reassessment if their condition hasn’t changed;
• Increasing the number of face-to-face health assessments across PIP and WCA.

The budget costings document explicitly shows that the combined effect of these operational changes to assessments and reviews is projected to reduce public spending on health/disability benefits by about £1.95 billion over five years.

But the official documents do not break down how many individual claimants will be affected, or exactly how the savings will be achieved in practice.

In that case, This Writer would say we are justified in referring back to what the Treasury is quoted as saying – that the document is “just costing existing plans from planned welfare reforms – so nothing new from this”.

Has everybody forgotten what the existing plans are? I think they have, so let’s remind ourselves.

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