The Costs of Disability

The publication of the Government’s Green Paper consultation ‘Pathways to Work’ announced on March 18th 2025 proposed serious changes to the eligibility and rates of disability benefits like PIP and LCWRA with a view to saving £5 billion per year from what the government call a ‘ballooning’ working-age welfare bill by 2030.

These benefits are meant to help with the additional costs that disabled people face due to their disabilities. Quite simply, life costs more if you’re disabled.

These benefits, chiefly PIP and LCWRA, are meant to reflect that; support from the government to help alleviate those additional financial hurdles. LCWRA applies where someone claiming Universal Credit is found to be unfit, and thus, unable to work whereas PIP is not linked to a person’s employment status but again, is meant to help with those additional costs.

Disability charity Scope estimates that a household where someone is disabled will need an extra £1010 per month to have the same quality of life as a non-disabled household.

Where might those costs arise? Well, as with disability itself, those costs can take various forms. Perhaps you have higher energy costs (something people up and down the country currently face). Perhaps you have issues with mobility and require taxis. Perhaps your condition affects your diet meaning you require particular foods. There are a myriad of ways these extra costs can manifest.

Scope themselves say that almost half of families where someone is disabled live in poverty. If these changes go ahead, they will have a devastating impact on disabled people’s finances and push more people into poverty. The Resolution Foundation estimate that between 800,000 and 1.2 million disabled people could lose their benefits, on average losing £1400, with some facing significantly deeper losses according to the Child Poverty Action Group.

Indeed, its difficult to see how these cuts square with the Government’s commitment of reducing child poverty. 870,000 children live in families were someone receives PIP of which 290,000 are already in poverty. Its difficult to see how these cuts simply won’t make an already grim picture even more stark and fatally undermine the government’s child poverty strategy, when it reports later in the year.

The needs of disabled people haven’t changed. Withdrawing government support in the form benefits wont suddenly make your fuel bills, your vital taxi travel or your food cheaper. It means people will go without. Without running vital medical equipment, without heating, without food, without engaging in their communities, without all of the things that make a life a meaningful life rather than just an existence.

What has changed is the ‘goalpost’; the threshold at which someone can become eligible for PIP or LCWRA. The government have consistently said that the welfare system should be there for those ‘with the greatest need’ or ‘those who need it most.’ But what use is this rhetoric when the criteria for ‘needing it most’ is subject to the whims of politicians? PIP was introduced in 2013, designed to replace Disability Living Allowance for Adults and was purposefully designed to be ‘harder’ to qualify for than DLA. By making it even harder still, if these changes go ahead, the government are withdrawing vital support from those who are least able to meet those costs themselves. If the aim of disability benefits like PIP and LCWRA is to help those ‘most in need,’ then its difficult to see how these changes amount to anything other than a government saying to everyone else when it comes to those costs ‘sorry, you’re on your own.’

For more information, you can find a link to the full Pathways to Work Green Paper here, outlining the proposed changes to PIP/LCWRA and wider employment support for people with health conditions and disabilities. The consultation period ends June 30th 2025 and you can respond here.

Society Matters offer CPD-accredited courses on Personal Independence Payment and Universal Credit (covering LCWRA among other aspects of UC). You can find more information on all our available courses here.