The DWP very quietly published a series of damning disability benefits related reports at 4pm on Friday 2 May, on the eve of a bank holiday and on a day when the news was dominated by the results of the local elections held the day before.
Had it not been for the ever vigilant staff at Rightsnet spotting them, the documents would have undoubtedly sunk without trace.
The reports show, amongst other things that:
- additional work coach support makes almost no difference to disabled claimants employment prospects, in spite of being one of the main tools for getting people into work as set out in the Pathways To Work Green Paper;
- Employment and Health Discussions also make almost no difference to disabled claimants, in spite of being another of the pillars of the Pathways To Work Green Paper employment drive;
- few claimants find out about PIP from the media or social media, undermining the claim that “sickfluencers” are at the heart of a rise in PIP claims.
Additional work coach support
In a report entitled “The Experience of Additional Work Coach Support”, researchers carried out in-depth interviews with claimants on the “universal credit health journey” who had been given extra appointments with a work coach.
The experience was a positive one for many claimants,: “Many customers saw improvements to mental health and wellbeing because of the consistent, empathetic support they received from their work coach.”
Ironically, one of the ways work coaches improved their customers lives was by “helping with claims for Personal Independence Payment
However, the report found that “Feeling meaningfully closer to work was an outcome for only a minority of those interviewed.”
The researchers found that claimants with limited capability for work-related activity “were less likely to report an improvement in their work motivation and confidence following support from a work coach. This was mainly because their health condition(s) continued to be their over-riding concern.”
Work coach intervention had no effect where physical health was concerned: “While support from a work coach often improved mental wellbeing, there was little change in the customers’ ability to manage physical health conditions. For those who saw their physical health as a barrier to work, this generally remained the case despite work coach support.”
Given that 72% of claimants facing the loss of their PIP under the Green Paper cuts have physical health conditions, this suggests there is little chance that increased support from the DWP would make any difference to their employment outlook.
Paragraph 228 of the Pathways To Work Green Paper boasts that additional work coach support raised the employment rate of LCWRA claimants from 8% to 11%.
There are two issues with this.
Firstly, it is a very small increase: if 1.3 million claimants lose their PIP daily living component, then a 3% improvement in employment rates would see just 39,000 of these claimants find work.
Secondly, the Green Paper made no reference to the fact that additional work coach support only appears to have any positive effect at all for claimants with mental health issues, whilst the overwhelming majority of threatened PIP claimants have back problems, arthritis, other musculoskeletal problems, respiratory disease and heart disease.
Employment and Health discussion
The Employment and Health Discussion (EHD) involves a conversation between a UC claimant with a health condition and a healthcare professional.
The purpose of the conversation is to identify the range of barriers affecting the claimant’s ability to work, identify solutions and put them together in a Workability Action Plan that the claimant can use to move towards work.
A report evaluating the EHD was one of those quietly slipped out by the DWP before the bank holiday weekend.
The report found that when surveyed immediately after completing the EHD, around half of claimants(48%) reported feeling more positively about work and (57%) reported that they were more likely to take up support offers such as training or volunteering. Smaller proportions reported feeling more confident about getting into work (40%) and that work was more important to them (35%).
However, according to the report, these feelings were not sustained: “When a small sample were surveyed 6 weeks after completing the EHD, few reported continued improvements to their workability scores after the EHD, even when they had taken the suggested steps in their Workability Action Plan.”
The report went on to say that “in practice it appears solutions are not always best matched to obstacles in Workability Action Plans. Similarly, the full range of barriers within the biopsychosocial model may be underexplored in some cases.”
In layman’s terms then, EHD’s make claimant’s briefly feel more positive but the solutions they produce don’t work and fail to address may of the barriers to work that disabled claimants actually face.
Yet paragraphs 217 to 223 of the Pathways To Work Green Paper are devoted to the introduction of “a new support conversation” which will “enable people to get help early, providing access to more rapid and timely support.”
Except that, according to their own research, the support conversation won’t have any lasting effects at all.
Triggers to claiming PIP
In another buried report, “Triggers to claiming Personal Independence Payment” researchers found that: “People were recently made aware of PIP through contact with formal services (including Jobcentre Plus) friends and family. Few participants mentioned media or social media.”
The report was commissioned after a rise in PIP claims that took place in October 2021 and so may be out of date, but it does raise the question as to why the DWP have waited until now to publish it.
More importantly, it means that the DWP have no evidence to support the claim that young people are being introduced to the idea of claiming PIP by YouTube and TikTok “sickfluencers”.
In fact, the only actual evidence they can produce about what prompts people to claim PIP says exactly the opposite.
The buried reports in full
When he became disability minister, Stephen Timms claimed that he would create a new era of transparency at the DWP, as part of an effort to restore trust in the DWP.
Yet his department deliberately buried reports that cast enormous doubt on the two main tools to be used to move claimants, who have had their benefits cut or stopped, into work.
They kept this evidence from MPs just weeks before they are due to vote on the Green Paper.
Perhaps you could share news of the reports with your MP, given that Mr Timms is so reluctant to do so?
You can download all the DWP’s research reports from this page.
The reports that were all published on the eve of the bank holiday are:
Applicants’ Journeys to Claiming PIP: Research
Additional Support Needs in the Personal Independence Payment Claim Journey
The experience of Additional Work Coach Support: Findings from qualitative interviews with customers
