Disability benefit claimants ‘at risk of debt and poverty amid poor DWP service’

Some people are waiting more than a year to have their disability benefit claims processed amid “unacceptably poor service levels”, the Commons spending watchdog has found.

Long waiting times have sparked warnings from the influential Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that people can be pushed into debt and poverty as a result.

In a report published on Friday, the committee said the Department for Work and Pensions had failed to hit its target for new personal independence payment (Pip) claims being processed, and did not appear to have an “adequate plan” for reducing waits.

The committee said only 51% of claims were processed within the target timeframe of 75 working days in 2024/25, despite the department’s aim being to process 75% of new Pip claims within that time.

The report stated: “It is unacceptable how long some Pip claimants are having to wait for their claims to be processed, which can cause them to get into debt and push them into poverty.

“The Department does not have an adequate plan to improve this in the short term.”

MPs on the committee said they knew of “constituents who have waited a long time for their claims to be processed, in some cases over a year”.

Pip is a payment to help with extra living costs for people with a long-term physical or mental health condition or disability who have difficulty doing certain daily tasks.

The committee noted that while the department said the experiences they described “were not showing in its statistics”, the DWP “acknowledged that it was obviously a genuine situation that it needed to address”.

The department added that it was testing an online application process in some areas which has cut the time taken to process claims by 20 days.

The committee also noted that a target previously announced by the DWP to process up to 20% of Pip claims using the new online service by 2026 had been pushed to 2029 and branded this “far too long for claimants to have to wait to get a better service”.

Among its recommendations and asks, it has called on the DWP to provide more detailed data on waiting times, including the longest wait recorded in 2024/25.

A U-turn in summer 2025 saw changes to Pip eligibility stripped out of the Government’s welfare legislation, amid warnings from rebel Labour MPs of the impact on disabled claimants.

An ongoing review into Pip, led by social security and disability minister Sir Stephen Timms, is expected to report by autumn – although the Government has said an interim update expected before then.

Other findings and recommendations by the committee included a concern that the DWP “does not have assurance that shortening the first meeting a universal credit claimant has with a work coach to 30 minutes (from 50 minutes) will not adversely affect the support it provides”, and said it should set out how it will monitor the impact of the cut.

It also called for greater transparency about how job centres perform in order to “enable effective local scrutiny”, and noted that while welcoming of plans by DWP to address risks associated with its legacy IT systems, “implementing these plans over the next three years will be highly challenging”.

The report stated: “We are concerned that the department may not be able to deliver on schedule, and that unacceptably poor service levels could continue for some time.”

PAC chairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said the committee’s report had found disability benefits claimants “may now expect a reliably poor service” from DWP.

He added: “Our committee received reassurances three years ago that improvements would have manifested by now; we are now told that they are a further three years off. This is simply not good enough for our constituents, who we know risk being pushed into debt or poverty by a department unresponsive to their needs.

“The summer of last year was consumed by debate around proposed changes to the benefits system, with Government insisting changes to Pip would be mitigated by support for disabled people and people with long-term conditions to get back into work.

“Our report exposes the incoherence with which Government made these arguments, while cutting the all-important support provided by work coaches which could help those same people access the labour market.

“Our focus will remain trained on what mitigating action will be taken by DWP on this issue, as well as its overall efforts to modernise its services by reducing its reliance on out-of-date technology. For claimants who rely upon this system’s proper functioning, this programme of transformation cannot come quickly enough.”

The DWP has been contacted for comment.

Published: 09/01/2026 by Radio NewsHub