More than half of the 4.1 million people claiming Personal Independence Payment are aged 50 or over, according to the latest official figures. It is a number largely missing from a welfare debate increasingly focused on the young.
PIP is a non-means-tested disability benefit in England and Wales, designed to help with the extra costs of a long-term physical or mental health condition. Entitlement does not depend on how much the claimant earns, how much they have saved, or whether they work at all.
In July, the number of people entitled to it reached 4.1 million, a record high and up by 260,000, or about 7%, on a year earlier. Of those claimants, more than half are 50 or older. Just under three in ten are aged 30 to 49, and 17% are aged 16 to 29.
The cost has climbed faster still. Total PIP expenditure was around £15bn in the financial year ending 2020, £13bn of it for working-age claimants, in 2026-27 prices. As of spring this year the Department for Work and Pensions forecast that it would pass £41bn by the financial year ending 2031, around £34bn of that for working-age claimants.
That trajectory sits on the desk of a prime minister whose instinct is to talk about the young. Since taking office in July, Andy Burnham has put youth unemployment at the centre of his domestic agenda, announcing £287m for more than 22,000 extra college places and an apprenticeship bursary worth up to £4,500. The government is extending the Jobs Guarantee from this autumn to eligible 18 to 24 year olds on Universal Credit who have been looking for work for 18 months, and Alan Milburn, the former health secretary, is leading a review into youth worklessness that reports this autumn as well.
Those problems are real. Nearly 60% of young people who are NEET are economically inactive rather than looking for work, according to Milburn’s interim report, and forecasting conducted for that review suggests the NEET rate could rise above 16%, or more than 1.25 million young people, within five years. The growth in disability claims among the young, particularly for autism and ADHD, is well documented.
The arithmetic of the benefits bill points somewhere else. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has modelled the options, and its conclusion is blunt: reform aimed only at the under-30s cannot address most PIP spending.
“Even if you were to fully remove PIP from all under-30s, that would only save about 20pc of the spending on it,” says Eduin Latimer, a senior research economist at the IFS.
“A large share of PIP claimants are over 50, so if you want to make significant changes to PIP, that’s likely to affect people in that age group.”
The welfare debate has spent years looking at the young. The invoice is addressed to the middle-aged.
These are people below State Pension age, many living with conditions that affect their ability to work. The share of 16 to 64 year olds claiming a disability benefit rose from 5.5% in 2019 to 8.2% in 2025, with large increases across the age range rather than only among the young.
Sir Stephen Timms, the social security minister, said in his interim report in July that PIP was “no longer fit for purpose”. This month his review published a set of emerging recommendations, which are now being tested in 15 workshops across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland after nearly 4,000 people registered to take part. The final report lands later this autumn.
One option modelled by the Institute for Fiscal Studies is to tie the size of an award more closely to the points a claimant scores in their assessment. The review’s own emerging recommendations do not propose it. At present, PIP is scored on the difficulties a claimant has with daily living tasks and with mobility, and everyone who clears the threshold for a component receives the same amount. On the IFS’s figures, 53% of claimants reach the 12-point threshold for the highest daily living rate, 26% score 16 or more and 5% score at least 31. All of them are paid the same.
As the IFS puts it: “Someone who cannot wash themselves and needs assistance dressing their upper body would currently get the same level of support for daily living as someone who cannot wash themselves, cannot dress themselves at all, cannot talk and cannot read.”
Under that model, older claimants lose on average. The IFS calculates that claimants whose main condition is chronic back pain would lose around £850 a year, and those with arthritis around £750, with older claimants worse off on average by up to £300 a year. The arithmetic runs the other way for people with learning disabilities or conditions such as cerebral palsy, who tend to score much higher: 12% of 16 to 19 year old claimants score at least 31 points, against 5% of all recipients.
“The biggest winners would be those whose main condition is a learning disability or a condition such as cerebral palsy, who tend to have very high PIP assessment scores,” the IFS concluded. “Claimants whose main condition is musculoskeletal would lose the most, since they do not tend to score very highly on the PIP assessment.”
Ministers have said the exercise is not simply about saving money. The review has said PIP should remain a flexible, non-means-tested cash benefit, which rules out the largest single saving on the IFS’s list: its modelling suggests that folding PIP into Universal Credit would deliver an initial saving of up to £8.2bn, 33% of PIP spending, before any change in behaviour by claimants. That is an option the IFS has costed, not government policy. The review is also required by its terms of reference to keep PIP within the Office for Budget Responsibility’s projections for spending on the benefit.
A Department for Work and Pensions spokesman said: “The Timms Review interim report made clear that PIP is no longer fit for purpose. The recommendations from the final report, due in autumn, will pave the way for sustainable reform.”
Claire Bullivant, chief executive of Great British PAC, said:
“Britain’s welfare system plainly needs reform, but ministers must stop pretending this is simply a problem of young people claiming benefits.
“More than half of PIP claimants are over 50, many of them people who have worked and paid into the system for decades before ill health or disability changed their circumstances.
“The answer is not arbitrary cuts based on somebody’s age. It is a rigorous, fair system that protects people with genuine disabilities, properly assesses individual need, tackles abuse where it exists, and does far more to help those who are capable of returning to work.
“Taxpayers rightly expect welfare spending to be sustainable, but they also expect a safety net to be there when people genuinely need it. Reform should be based on need, evidence and fairness, not whichever age group happens to make the easiest political target.”
When Timms reports, the government will have to settle more clearly what PIP is for and how support should be distributed. The IFS modelling shows the trade-off starkly: targeting more support towards those assessed as having the greatest needs would create winners and losers within the existing caseload. On the model examined by the IFS, older claimants are more likely to lose.
Latimer’s point is not a political one. “It’s the case that over-50s remain much more likely than people in their 20s to claim PIP,” he says.
The Timms report will not make those trade-offs any easier. It will only make them visible.
