Quiet killings: how future disability cuts are driving people to death

This is not passive neglect. It is intentional harm.

Government ministers must have known that the mere threat of losing disability benefits would be enough to drive people with severe mental illnesses toward suicide.

Now we are seeing the results of the decision to tell them they will lose out because they have “low-level” needs that don’t meet the threshold to continue receiving the daily living component of the Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

Those consequences are worsening mental illness, hospital admissions and—yes—attempted suicide.

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Under Labour’s proposals, claimants who do not score at least four points in any one of the daily living activities will lose that part of their PIP award when reviewed from November 2026.

That means people with multiple, complex, but individually low-scoring difficulties—many of whom live with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, emotionally unstable personality disorder, and psychosis—will be cut off.

The DWP and ministers argue that these needs can be met with minor interventions, appliances, or simple support. But mental illness doesn’t work like that. These are people who often require supervision, reassurance, or informal care to survive—not tools or gadgets.

A Benefits and Work survey of nearly 550 respondents—who fall under the new criteria and live with SMI—has revealed the human cost of this policy, long before implementation:

One person with schizophrenia anticipates losing £5,000 a year. They already cannot communicate with others due to extreme paranoia and say the cuts would be “catastrophic.”
A respondent with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder attempted suicide after hearing about the policy, resulting in permanent physical damage.
Several people said the proposals triggered severe anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
Others fear the loss of carers—many of whom would no longer be eligible for Carer’s Allowance—leading to hospitalisation or homelessness.
Some who have already tried volunteering or part-time work report that doing so worsened their condition and led to psychiatric admissions.

These are not edge cases or exaggerations. The policy is already harming people who were stable before the announcement. That alone should have stopped it in its tracks.

Yet the DWP refuses to release detailed data on how many people with mental health conditions would be affected.

Without it, ministers can maintain the fiction that only those with “low-level functional needs” are at risk of losing the benefit.

It also lets Labour’s Rachel Reeves dodge direct questions with platitudes about disabled people “who want to work”.

But the reality is that many people with SMI cannot work—not because they don’t want to, but because their conditions are episodic, unpredictable, and disabling.

Some require daily support just to shower, leave the house, or manage basic hygiene. Others experience such intense paranoia, suicidal ideation or delusions that unsupervised independence is dangerous, even fatal.

Yet these needs often do not score four points under the PIP assessment. Why? Because the criteria are rigid, physical, and skewed toward visible or practical tasks—dressing, cooking, using the toilet.

Mental health needs are harder to quantify, and frequently misunderstood by assessors with little psychiatric training.

So thousands of people face losing essential income not because they don’t need support, but because the system fails to recognise how they need it.

What you can do

If this policy goes ahead, it’s estimated that 10,000 claimants a month will start losing their PIP daily living component. Many will be people with SMI. Many are already at the edge.

You can act now to push back:

Contact your MP. Ask them to demand the DWP publish a breakdown—by health condition—of how many claimants receive PIP without scoring four points in any descriptor.
Challenge the narrative. These are not “low-level” needs. They are complex, life-threatening vulnerabilities.
Ask your MP: Why is this government choosing to balance the budget on the backs of the most unwell—rather than going after billionaires and corporate tax avoiders?

People with severe mental illness already die 15–20 years earlier than the general population. Now the government is knowingly making that worse.

These are quiet killings. And unless we speak out now, they won’t just start; they will accelerate – and they won’t stop.

Because the government won’t want them to.

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