The Labour government will not be responding to the plan to replace PIP with vouchers, Stephen Timms has announced, in what appears to be the death knell for the proposal - at least for now.
Timms, minister for disability, was answering a question from Lib Dem MP Wendy Chamberlain who asked whether the DWP “plans to respond to the consultation entitled Modernising support for independent living: the health and disability green paper, which closed on 22 July 2024.”
Timms replied on 14 October: “We do not intend to publish a response to the previous Government’s consultation. We will be considering our own plans for social security in due course and will fulfil our continued commitment to work with disabled people so that their views and voices are at the heart of all that we do.”
In response to a similar question from independent MP Alex Easton, Timms added that “ We will be considering our own plans for social security in due course. As we develop proposals, we will consider the potential impacts of reform on disabled people.”
Whilst Labour have already said they would be producing their own proposals for social security, this is the first time they have confirmed that the Tory green paper is effectively dead.
This does not rule out the possibility that Labour could come up with similar ideas in the future, but it makes it much less likely. It is very improbable that the government would decline to respond to a consultation on PIP vouchers and yet very soon afterwards unveil their own plan to introduce exactly the same thing.
Other proposals in the Tory green paper included replacing PIP with:
- A catalogue/shop scheme
- A receipt based system
- One-off grants
The document also raised the possibility of changing the criteria for PIP by, for example,
- removing the points for aids and appliances and for prompting,
- removing some PIP activities
- stopping claimants who get a lot of low scoring descriptors from being eligible.
It would be preferable if Labour would simply say outright that it has no plans to replace PIP cash payments with a voucher scheme. But the party seems addicted to saying as little as possible about anything that concerns disabled claimants, instead preferring to leave people uncertain and distressed.
For the moment then, this seems the closest we are going to get to a denial. But there really does seem little likelihood that this month's budget or DWP white paper will contain a plan for PIP vouchers or for any of the other wholesale changes to PIP put forward by the Conservatives.
