The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is once again proving that the Timms review into Personal Independence Payment is an absolute farce.
DWP — Timms Review was never genuine
The Timms review was launched after the Labour government failed to cut PIP last summer. Thanks to a massive push back from disabled people and a Labour rebellion, the DWP had to take PIP cuts out of the welfare cuts bill. Hower, as a last ditch attempt to still get some cuts through and not look like a total failure, the minister for disabled people announced that there would be a consultation on PIP if MPs voted for the bill.
This completely threw universal credit claimants under the bus, as cuts to that went through, but to MPs these were seen as more justifiable — Universal Credit is an out-of-work benefit and all that. But it also meant PIP cuts weren’t stopped, just kicked further down the road.
The Timms review has, from the outset, been absolute bullshit. After an almost four-month wait, Timms finally revealed the terms of reference. The terms set out that PIP would become the only way to access out-of-work disability benefits, despite it not being an out-of-work benefit. It also revealed that the review would be overseen by just 12 whole disabled people.
Most shockingly, it also just casually dropped that in an effort to rush the review through, it wouldn’t be subject to parliamentary debates. Meaning there can be no pushback or interference from MPs this time.
Call for evidence
Finally in March the call for evidence was released, which once again proved how seriously the DWP was taking it. By calling it ‘call for evidence’, the department could forgo the mandatory 12-week consultation time, making it just 10 weeks. As Hannah Sharland reported at the time:
At best, it will take forward a few good changes, but use them to package more brutal cuts. One notable sentence confirming this concerns what the review says it’s “particularly interested in”, states that:
‘the assessment criteria for both Mobility and Daily Living elements of PIP – including activities, descriptors and associated points – and whether these effectively capture the impact of long-term health conditions and disability in the modern world (from the Terms of Reference)’
It’s hard not to see this as a sly to justify constricting the PIP criteria to exclude people. Of course, this is precisely what the DWP previously tried to do to slash people’s access to PIP with its egregious 4 point policy.
And if the review already felt like a total stitch-up that didn’t actually care about, it then came out that the panel wouldn’t even be reading responses, they’d be summarised by AI. This was just weeks after the DWP led a press campaign against disabled people who used AI to complete PIP forms.
Want a meaningful consultation? Do it yourself
And now, as Benefits and Work reports, the department’s latest effort to look like they give a fuck about disabled people’s opinion is just that.
Instead of holding accessible, meaningful consultations the department has said it will give DDPOs ‘Workshop in a box’ resources kits to run their own consultations. This means the burden of organising, funding, dealing with upset and concerned disabled people and then feeding this potentially triggering information back to the DWP will fall squarely on disabled people’s shoulders.
Alongside these, the DWP has also said it will run evidence sessions with experts. The problem here is that the department will get to decide who they include in these sessions. Evidently, the Timms Review is doing everything it can to block out disabled people who will have their lives upended if these cuts happen.
The reality seems to be that the Timms Review is doing everything it can to avoid a genuine, mass consultation with disabled claimants. Instead, it is stalling for time by releasing scant information about events to be held at unspecified dates in the future, with most of these not even open to most disabled claimants.
All of this means it’s vitally important for as many disabled people as possible to fill in the Timms Review Call for Evidence. We need to give the panel as stark a picture of life without PIP as we can. The call for evidence closes on 28th May at 11:5pm
Featured image via the Canary
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