You are here: Home / Benefits and Poverty / DWP and Treasury silent over mystery of £2 billion cuts to disability benefits

DWP and Treasury silent over mystery of £2 billion cuts to disability benefits

By John Pring on 4th December 2025Category: Benefits and Poverty

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.

It is just DWP’s latest failure of transparency since Labour’s new minister for social security and disability, Sir Stephen Timms, promised to improve its openness to public scrutiny in September 2024.

Treasury documents published on the day of last week’s budget showed that, from next April, the government will increase DWP’s “capacity” to carry out reassessments of disabled people’s capacity for work through the work capability assessment (WCA).

DWP will also carry out more face-to-face assessments, which have been drastically cut back since the early weeks of the pandemic, both through WCAs and assessments of eligibility for personal independence payment (PIP).

The Treasury’s budget costings document also said DWP would be “changing the frequency” of reviews of PIP awards, which would allow it to “complete award reviews on time, reducing the number of people who are called to a PIP assessment when their function has not changed, and allowing providers to redirect resource to WCA re-assessments”.

The budget document described this measure as “extending Personal Independence Payment award reviews periods”.

The budget costings document said these changes will “ensure people receive the right health or disability benefit and the system is sustainable”.

But there are significant question-marks over these measures, because the changes together are set to save the government £85 million next year, £310 million in 2027-28, £520 million in 2028-29, £580 million in 2029-30 and £455 million in 2030-31, a total of £1.95 billion over five years.

Disability News Service (DNS) has been asking the Treasury and DWP to clarify how these cuts will be made for more than a week.

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”.

But neither department has been able to point to where or when these “existing plans” were announced by DWP, particularly the changes in reviews of PIP awards, and how these changes will affect PIP recipients and those on out-of-work disability benefits.

Although the government has previously made it clear that it wanted to increase reassessments through the WCA, and to increase the number of face-to-face WCAs and PIP assessments, these ideas were included in March’s green paper.

Green papers are supposed to lay out policy proposals for consultation, but they are not announcements of final decisions on government policy.

DNS has been unable to find any DWP announcements on these and the other measures in last week’s budget documents since the spring budget on 26 March 2025, other than a brief reference to carrying out more PIP face-to-face assessments in a speech by the then work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall in May.

Both DWP and the Treasury have refused to provide clarity on the budget changes, with DWP instead releasing a statement that failed to explain what measures it was taking on PIP award reviews*.

It is the latest in a string of DWP failures on transparency since Labour came to power, continuing years of similar failings under successive Conservative-led governments.

At Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, in September 2024, Sir Stephen told DNS: “The department has absurdly refused to answer lots of the questions that you have asked and that is something that we want to change… because public scrutiny is a good thing, and it puts pressure on ministers and on civil servants to have the consequences of what they are doing known about publicly.”

Meanwhile, DWP’s controversial new anti-fraud bill – now to be known as the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error, and Recovery) Act – has become law after receiving royal assent on Tuesday.

Last month, cross-party MPs warned that ministers’ refusal to introduce a key protection into the bill could see a repeat of the countless deaths caused by the austerity measures of past governments.

And they warned that future “authoritarian” governments could misuse the powers the Labour government has claimed through the bill, which applies to England, Scotland and Wales.

One of those powers will allow DWP to force banks to examine the accounts of claimants of means-tested benefits and then provide details of any accounts where there have been potential breaches of benefit eligibility rules.

Disability Rights UK said it was “deeply concerned” at the “bank spying bill” becoming law.

It said on X/Twitter: “A government agency that is notorious for punitive sanctions and bureaucratic faults that have cost lives, this will have dire consequences.”

*The statement is included here as a footnote, as it failed to answer the questions put to the department by DNS: “We are increasing the number of face-to-face assessments and tackling the backlog of Work Capability Assessments we inherited, by changing the frequency of PIP assessment reviews. This will ensure claimants receive the right level of support while at the same time reducing unnecessary award reviews, as we shift our focus from welfare to work, skills and opportunities.”

Picture: Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivering last week’s budget