In early May, we hosted a joint public consultation event with Central England Law Centre at the city centre’s Belgrade Theatre to help us gather anonymous experiences from Coventry people receiving the health and disability benefit ‘PIP’ (Personal Independence Payment).
The PIP benefit helps people with the additional day-to-day living costs of having a disability or health condition.
We were responding to the government’s call for evidence from individuals and organisations for the Timms Review of PIP, which was open until the end of last month.
The Review is designed to help shape the future of PIP; collecting feedback and insights from people across the country on whether PIP is fair, fit for the future and still working well in our changing world.
Lots of people came to see us on 6 May and we successfully submitted Grapevine’s 12-page organisational response to the Review in good time. Central England Law Centre did the same on behalf of their organisation.
Here we share a small selection of people’s thoughts, more of which we shared with the government, as well as our 11 recommendations under the Timms Review’s Theme 3 of ‘the experience of claiming PIP’.
Our detailed response was spread across the 11 sub-headings of this theme, interspersed with quotes from people we support in our work and those who attended our consultation event.
Our headline findings
Our organisational response to the Timms Review of PIP draws on contributions gathered through our public event held in Coventry on 6 May, including responses from disabled people and people with long-term health conditions, unpaid carers and other support organisations.
Contributors described a wide range of conditions including learning disabilities, autism and ADHD, mental health conditions, sensory impairments, physical disabilities, long-term and chronic illness and combinations of these.
The 11 sub-headings identified by the steering group for Theme 3 (the experience of claiming PIP) included: Customer trust in the process, the assessment process and experience, equity and inclusion in the process, the public’s perception and trust in the PIP system, communication and accessibility, professionals’ training and skills, use of external assessment providers, the award review process and appeals process.
Across all sub-headings, a single overarching message emerged: the claim experience is deeply stressful, often retraumatising and weighted against people whose conditions fluctuate, are hidden or do not present in ways the assessment design recognises.
The current PIP claim process is experienced as “something to be survived — and survival depends heavily on whether someone happens to have access to a welfare rights advisor, a Law Centre, a charity worker, or a knowledgeable family member. Without support, people give up, lose entitlement or are forced through repeated tribunals to reach a fair outcome.
Our 11 recommendations to government
- Rebuild trust by removing perceived performance incentives on assessors that reward refusal, and by publishing assessor decision data transparently
- Replace the current tick-box assessment with a more conversational, holistic process that allows for nuance, fluctuation and lived experience to be heard and that records what claimants actually say
- Address the structural inequity facing people with hidden, fluctuating, neurodivergent, sensory and mental health conditions including through clearer guidance on fluctuating conditions and how ‘safety’ and ‘reliably’ are applied
- Ensure no claimant is disadvantaged by lack of independent advocacy: properly fund welfare rights and Law Centre support, and make assessors proactively contact existing professionals who know the claimant
- Make communication channel choice real: written, telephone, face-to-face and digital options should all be genuinely available, and the channel should not change mid-process without consent
- Strengthen assessor training in: hidden disabilities, neurodivergence, mental health, sensory impairment, fluctuating conditions, trauma-informed interviewing and reasonable adjustments
- Embed reasonable adjustments by default — processing time, breaks, channel choice, accessible buildings, deadline flexibility — without requiring the claimant to request them
- Review the role of external assessment providers and the financial structures under which they operate, in light of widespread distrust
- Stop reassessing people with lifelong, stable or progressive conditions on short cycles; align review timelines with clinical reality
- Reform the appeals process to be transparent, less adversarial, and not held in court settings; and ensure that an award secured at tribunal is not routinely re-litigated at the next review
- Be cautious with technology and especially AI: any expansion must be optional, transparent, designed with disabled people and must not replace human judgement.
Next steps
Our response is now with the Timms Review steering group and while we await updates, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to our organisational response.
You can read a reflection written by one of the disabled people who attended our event, Coventry photographer and filmmaker Alan Van Wijgerden, by following this link.
We hope people also took some time to submit their individual perspectives to provide as full a picture as possible.
More about the Timms Review of PIP can be found by the clicking on this link.
