The Committee consisted of the following Members:

Chair: † Wera Hobhouse

† Akehurst, Luke (North Durham) (Lab)

† Anderson, Callum (Buckingham and Bletchley) (Lab)

† Bedford, Mr Peter (Mid Leicestershire) (Con)

Cooper, Daisy (St Albans) (LD)

Duncan Smith, Sir Iain (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)

Olney, Sarah (Richmond Park) (LD)

† Pinto-Duschinsky, David (Hendon) (Lab)

† Ranger, Andrew (Wrexham) (Lab)

† Roca, Tim (Macclesfield) (Lab)

† Ryan, Oliver (Burnley) (Lab/Co-op)

† Siddiq, Tulip (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)

† Smith, Rebecca (South West Devon) (Con)

† Stewart, Elaine (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)

† Timms, Sir Stephen (Minister for Social Security and Disability)

† Walker, Imogen (Hamilton and Clyde Valley) (Lab)

† Wood, Mike (Kingswinford and South Staffordshire) (Con)

† Woodcock, Sean (Banbury) (Lab)

Rob Cope, Committee Clerk

† attended the Committee

The following also attended (Standing Order No. 118(2)):

Milne, John (Horsham) (LD)

Sixth Delegated Legislation Committee

Wednesday 24 June 2026

[Wera Hobhouse in the Chair]

Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026

I beg to move, That the Committee has considered the Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (S.I., 2026, No. 457). It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I appreciate that it is incredibly warm in here, but bear with me, because this is an important debate. I want to sound the alarm about the statutory instrument: it hands the Government sweeping discretionary powers, with too few safeguards and too little scrutiny, by allowing the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to extend the length of fixed-term personal independent payments. The measure is intended to tackle the backlog of award reviews following covid-19, but we believe it takes us backwards, not forwards. Under the previous approach, people’s awards were regularly reviewed to ensure that they received support that reflected their actual circumstances, yet under the new approach, most claimants will get only two checks in 10 years—one review period will last four years, with subsequent reviews lasting six years. That is just not good enough. Taxpayers deserve confidence that support is being targeted correctly. Previously, 77% of PIP awards were for up to two years, according to the Department for Work and Pensions, so many people will experience substantial extensions to their review periods. We must acknowledge the serious problems with PIP caseloads, which shot up after covid. At best, however, this secondary legislation is a blunt tool to fix a difficult situation; at worst, it grants the Secretary of State discretionary powers that are wide open to future misuse. It moves us away from proper oversight towards a system where awards can continue for ever longer periods without appropriate checks—in simple terms, more benefits, less scrutiny. The Government’s answer to that objection appears to be little more than a reminder letter. If reviews are pushed further apart, Ministers will rely more heavily on claimants to self-report changes in their circumstances, but given the longer timeframes, will people have a genuine incentive to report changes that could lead to their award being reduced or withdrawn? It is easy to loosen the system, but far harder to tighten it. Once rules have been relaxed, people adjust their expectations—the horse has bolted. One day, the backlog may be cleared—we hope—and the Department may seek to increase the frequency of reviews again, but if that happens, I worry that claimants will quite understandably resent the return of more frequent checks. There has been no public consultation on this secondary legislation, because it is supposedly a mere administrative tweak to support the delivery of PIP. Labour is in effect using this opportunity to extend assessment periods by the back door. Responsible welfare reform means building a system that works as best it can for those who need it most. For many, PIP is a lifeline; it helps them to live independently, to stay connected and, for some, to remain in work. In many cases, people with the most severe and lifelong disabilities already receive longer awards, where appropriate—the system already contains that provision. To maintain confidence in the system, PIP and other welfare entitlements must be accurate and fair. People’s health situations change, circumstances evolve and some conditions naturally worsen, but others improve. For those with less serious needs, this measure will reduce the opportunities to review whether the support being offered is still appropriate. That is not reform; it is retreat—a retreat to the la-la land of ever more state handouts and ever less oversight. I know that some will say that regular reviews create anxiety, and I understand that. Of course, no one wants unnecessary stress, but we must remember what reviews are for—they are there not to catch people out, but to ensure that support is going to the right people, at the right level and for the right reasons. In fact, for people who continue to have genuine needs, reviews can provide certainty by extending existing rewards. In cases where someone’s condition has deteriorated, they can also lead to higher levels of support. We believe that this statutory instrument is merely a symptom of a wider problem. As my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) has said, we are becoming far too quick to sign people on to welfare and far too slow to help them into work. We are seeing a passive and permissive approach from this Government when what this country needs is an active and ambitious one.

The reassessment changes that we are introducing through this statutory instrument and other measures will save something like £2 billion by the end of the Parliament. I am sure we all agree that would be welcome, given the increasing size of the welfare bill. Why is the hon. Member opposing that saving, and how would she fill the gap instead?

Of course we want to save money, but we do not think that this statutory instrument is the right way to do it. We think that it will just reduce the opportunities for people to have those reviews—the assessments that need to take place. Arguably, more money can perhaps be saved if those reviews happen within a quicker timeframe, because there are many people who, if the right things happen, can be moved off benefits much more quickly than we believe the statutory instrument allows for. Over 4 million people of working age are now on sickness and incapacity benefits, nearly half a million of whom are under 25. One in four people in the UK now report as disabled. At the same time, the Secretary of State has made it clear that the Timms review of personal independence payment is not designed to deliver welfare savings, something that I find extraordinary. How can that possibly be an effective review if it refuses to tackle the elephant in the room—our ballooning benefits bill? Real compassion means not abandoning people to a life on benefits. State support must act as a springboard, not a destination. As the official Opposition, we believe in supporting the vulnerable, but we also believe in fairness to taxpayers—fairness to those who get up every morning, go to work and expect the welfare system to be properly managed. The Government’s own rationale regarding work disincentives is also deeply inconsistent. PIP awards will be extended only for claimants aged 25 and over. The Department argues that unemployment can have “long-term scarring effects” on younger people. Therefore, those whose health has improved should not remain on PIP any longer than necessary. Of course, younger claimants are more likely than older claimants to see improvements in their functional capacity, which helps explain why they are exempt from these longer review periods, but the logic just does not hold up, because unemployment can have scarring effects at any age. If regular reviews are important for younger claimants because circumstances can change, why should that principle suddenly cease to apply when someone reaches 25? Either regular reviews matter or they do not. The Government cannot have it both ways. Speaking of work incentives, Members are being asked to trust the Government with a significant new power under the statutory instrument, but why should we place that trust in Ministers when they cannot even tell us the scale of the backlog in Access to Work? I have been told by the Department that it does not hold information about average waiting times between the approval of an Access to Work application and when support actually starts, because—so it says—it would require a painstaking manual review of individual records. If the Government cannot easily access that kind of basic data, is it any wonder that they have been so reluctant to grasp the nettle on other areas of welfare reform?

I encourage hon. Members to bob if they wish to speak. Hon. Members can still decide to contribute, even if they had not already been considering it— a good debate is a good debate.

We hear lots of talk in politics and the media right now about the need to cut benefits. Of course, control of spending is always a priority, but the first question that we should ask about any benefit is whether it is doing the job it is supposed to. A PIP is a lifeline, not a luxury. It is designed to support disabled people with the extra costs of daily living resulting from their disability. It is not specifically an in-work benefit, but in practice it does help many people keep their jobs, which is, of course, what we want. That is why, as Liberal Democrats, we believe that any change to how PIP awards are managed must put the needs of the claimant first, not the administrative convenience of the Department. We are deeply concerned by the DWP’s admission that it has been extending PIP awards on an ad hoc basis without clear statutory cover—that was potentially unlawful. Disabled people deserve a system that operates within the law with proper safeguards, not one that has been quietly patched up in a Heath Robinson fashion, and which is only now being regularised through secondary legislation. The regulations were introduced without a vote in Parliament and without referral to the Social Security Advisory Committee. Yet changes of such significance, which affect hundreds of thousands of disabled people, deserve proper parliamentary scrutiny, not secondary legislation slipped through without a vote. We welcome Government assurances that the regulations cannot be used to shorten existing awards or to cut the rates paid, and we welcome the retention of appeal rights, but the fact that the regulations are necessary at all is not positive. If we had the proper capacity to carry out PIP reviews on schedule when they were required, there would never be a need for extensions.

The hon. Gentleman talks about the types of assessment and the way in which the assessment is done, and he is right to talk about capacity. Just before the election, the previous Government signed new contracts that said 80% of new assessments would be done virtually. The changes to reassessment in these regulations will save money and move more of those assessments from being virtual to face to face, which will better serve people on PIP. Does the hon. Gentleman not support the introduction of more face-to-face assessments?

I agree with the hon. Member and entirely accept that the issue is not of this Government’s making, although as ever it is this Government’s obligation to sort it out. The regulations are a positive move in the right direction, but I am lamenting the state of affairs in general, not necessarily blaming it on Labour Members. The SSAC has rightly raised concerns about the impact on claimants who have worsening conditions. Such claimants may now go longer without a reassessment and could therefore miss out on a justified increased award. That is why simply taking no action is not a satisfactory position; we have to do something. We have consistently called for PIP assessments to be made more transparent and for unnecessary reassessments to be stopped. Properly implemented, longer award periods could reduce claimants’ anxiety and the bureaucratic burden on them, but only if there is a clear and accessible route for people whose needs have changed to request a reassessment without potentially having to wait years for it. In conclusion, we support the measure, as a matter of legal necessity if nothing else. It will put PIP extensions on a legal basis, although we regret that that was not already the case years ago.

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. Thank you for permitting us to take our jackets off. I thank hon. Members who have spoken in the debate. As we have heard—my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley made the point absolutely correctly—this statutory instrument amends regulations to enable the best use of the assessment resources that we have available. It will help us to repair the broken system that we inherited, which needs to be repaired, and provides a much-needed safeguard against potential future challenges, in order to protect payments to vulnerable people. As mentioned by my hon. Friend, under the contracts with assessment providers that were negotiated by the last Government, we can call on only a finite volume of assessment capacity. We could, as the last Government did, use a large chunk of that capacity for frequent reassessments of PIP claimants whose circumstances most likely have not changed at all, or we can use that resource in a more productive way. That is what we have chosen to do. We want to do two new things. First, we want to recommence, properly, reassessments for the work capability assessment, which provides a gateway to the health premium in universal credit. The situation we inherited is that work capability assessments are carried out when somebody makes a new application, and after a period that person is due a reassessment. The number of reassessments that it has been possible to carry out has been lamentably low. The hon. Member for South West Devon commended PIP reassessments—if only the Conservatives had carried out the work capability reassessments. We want to switch some of the assessment capacity that was being used ineffectively by the last Government, so that it will be used effectively in future. The second thing we want to do, as my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley referred to, is to increase substantially the proportion of assessments that are carried out face to face. Almost all of them used to be face to face, then came the pandemic, and for reasons that we all understand, they switched to being phone-based or occasionally video-based assessments instead. But once the needs of the pandemic had passed, face-to-face assessments were never properly switched back on. Telephony was retained as the main channel, with just a small number of face-to-face assessments restarting in 2021. In our view, that is not good enough.

As the Minister knows, I sit on the Work and Pensions Committee. About a year ago, we heard evidence that in fact there was little statistical difference between the approval rates for face-to-face interviews and for remote interviews. The figures may have been updated since, but that is the evidence we heard then. I am in favour of face-to-face interviews—they seem intuitively better—but there may not be quite the difference that everyone might reasonably expect; that is what the figures show.

There certainly has been data along those lines; I think it was data along those lines that made the previous Government think that they need not start face-to-face assessments again. I agree with the hon. Gentleman: to build confidence in the system, not least on the part of the people being assessed—I was speaking to somebody yesterday who said, “I wish that I’d had a face-to-face assessment”—and to make sure that the correct decisions are being made, we do need face-to-face assessments. By the time of the general election, only about 7% of work capability assessments and PIP assessments were being carried out face to face. We want to do a great deal better than that. It was not just that the resources for face-to-face assessments were not provided in the assessment contracts, although that was certainly part of the issue; the other factor was that the previous Government walked away from large amounts of the assessment estate so there were no longer enough places where face-to-face assessments could be carried out. That is a pretty fundamental problem. The hon. Member for South West Devon spoke about la-la land, but frankly, that is where the Government who she supported left us. We are therefore mounting a major rebuilding task to regain the capacity for face-to-face assessments that the last Government threw away, because our view is that these assessments should be done properly. We have started to rebuild the capacity that the previous Government threw away. We have increased the proportion of work capability assessments and PIP assessments carried out face to face, and we are on our way to achieving our target that at least 30% of both will be face to face. To achieve that, we need additional assessment resource; this measure is a key step in enabling us to obtain that.

As the Minister is reading out his list of achievements, may I add to it? Does he think it is a good thing that we have put nearly £1 billion into support for the sick and disabled? That will partly come from savings from this and other measures, which we hope will save £1.9 billion by the end of the Parliament. As he says, the act of government is about making these difficult decisions and trade-offs in order to provide people with more support in the long run.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I have not yet got to that bit in my list, but I am coming to it—I am looking forward to that part of my speech. The Conservative party is telling us that it would maintain its failed approach, with hardly any assessments being carried out face to face. That does at least have the benefit of consistency, I suppose, but we do not think it is good enough, and we will make the changes necessary to do far better. As my hon. Friend correctly highlighted, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, this change that we have announced will reduce benefits spending by almost £2 billion—£1.9 billion—over five years. We inherited an assessment system that was not equipped to do the job. The previous Government agreed contractual limits that meant at most 20% of assessments would be face to face. That was written into the contracts they signed, but there was not nearly enough capacity even to meet that level. We are having to fix a broken system, and we are making good progress, with the measure we are debating being an important step. The purpose of this straightforward change is to provide the Secretary of State the power to extend personal independence payment awards in a limited set of circumstances, where it is deemed necessary to do so to safeguard the efficient administration of benefits. Before the amendment, a decision to extend an award of PIP required either a new claim for PIP, evidence of an error or mistake in the first decision, evidence that the claimant’s circumstances had changed, or the completion of a report by a healthcare professional appointed by the Secretary of State. In many cases, that would involve a claimant undergoing an assessment. Where such a decision could not be taken before an award expired, claimants would cease to be entitled to PIP until a further decision was completed. They would remain so until a further decision on entitlement could be made. The amendment grants a specific discretion, making it possible to extend only the length of an award, and only where doing so is necessary for the administration of the benefit. As well as allowing the more efficient use of assessment resources, the discretion protects vulnerable claimants who would risk losing entitlement to PIP if, as in the pandemic, circumstances threatened to limit the state’s capacity to administer it. We are ensuring that the Department can lawfully maintain benefits payments to the most vulnerable people. The new power will be used initially to increase the length of existing awards in line with the policy on award lengths for new awards, for which the Secretary of State already has the power. Existing claimants’ awards will be extended so that most first-time awards for those over 25 will be reviewed after three years, and most subsequent awards will be reviewed after five. Only awards deemed to be appropriate for those durations will be extended. The Committee may well be interested to know that the average annual increase in the PIP caseload has slowed under this Government: it fell from an increase of about 13% a year in 2019-20 to 2024-25, to a forecast average of about 7% a year over the subsequent five years. The hon. Member for Horsham made a point about the Social Security Advisory Committee. I think he said that the committee had not looked at this; that is not correct—the committee has looked at it. It looks at all the regulatory changes that we propose, and it does a very good job. It plays an important role, and we welcome its scrutiny. As the hon. Gentleman said, the committee asked questions, and we were happy to set out the purpose of the regulations and the reasons for them. The committee accepted the information that we provided, and it chose to take the regulations on formal reference. I think the hon. Gentleman can be reassured about the committee’s view of this change. I am grateful for the points that have been made and the opportunity for scrutiny that the debate has provided. The changes we are making enable the Department to make more efficient use of limited assessment capacity, to reduce assessments where they are not needed in order to focus on where they are needed, and to allow PIP awards to be extended in an emergency or crisis, as emerged during the pandemic, thereby protecting some vulnerable people from unnecessary hardship. This is a measured amendment to ensure the effective administration of the benefits system. I hope that the hon. Member for South West Devon will not press the motion to a Division, but I fear she probably will—her party issued a press release before this Committee to say that Conservative Members would vote to annul the amendment, possibly before they realised what exactly was going on. If that is the case, I urge the Committee not to vote against the amendment.

I assure the Minister that we did know what was going to happen. We will not change our minds on the position that has already been set out. We believe that this instrument moves us in the wrong direction. I appreciate the points that were made by the Minister and, indeed, by the hon. Member for Horsham, who highlighted that there was apparently little difference between in-person and online reviews. That highlights that the issues that we have raised have not really been addressed—the Minister certainly has not.

The hon. Lady makes an important point. Will she clarify her party’s position? Does the Conservative party think that more than 7% of assessments ought to be carried out face to face, or is it not really bothered about whether they are carried out face to face or over the phone?

Clearly, face to face is good, where possible. The 7% figure that you commented on was from the pandemic and from when you picked up. We know that we had a huge backlog to deal with—

Order. Please remember to address the Chair.

Did I say “you”? I am sorry, Mrs Hobhouse. Obviously, where possible, face to face is good, but we are not convinced that it is the right trade-off—that it makes it acceptable not to see people as regularly as there should be an ambition to see them. As I highlighted, and the Minister has not addressed this, certain people will no longer need any support from PIP within that three-year period, and some might need more. If this instrument is purely about administrative convenience and enabling the backlog to come down, rather than having proper oversight, we feel that that is watering down the system and weakening the public’s confidence in it. It is also true to say that the regulations lack real ambition, because they have no end date; they just give the Secretary of State completely discretionary powers with no finish point. There is no ambition to say, “By x date, we want to have dealt with this backlog and then we will refresh.” Indeed, they give powers for a future emergency, when we seemed to manage perfectly well in the previous emergency, so we think it is not right to use that as a reason for these unending powers. We also believe that the measure risks locking more people into welfare, when we should be helping more people into work. I know that the Minister thinks the same, so I am surprised that this is the tool being used. For those reasons, we urge the Government to think again and we urge Members to reject this statutory instrument. Question put.

Resolved,

That the Committee has considered the Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (S.I., 2026, No. 457).

Committee rose.