Ben Chu
speaker
290 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 17 Aug
Ben Chu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But as Alex was saying, I think the tone of it was really outlining that this is a system which is outdated, that's not keeping up with the way that disability...
people's registered disabilities are changing and doesn't take account of what they can and can't do and some perhaps unintended consequences of the design of the system so I wouldn't be surprised if it is quite radical whether it's entirely scrapping the system or perhaps and this is what some people have speculated on sort of changing it by what you can get by age because as I mentioned before a lot of the people who are claiming for neurodiversity conditions or mental health
conditions tend to be younger.
So one suggestion is perhaps if you're younger, instead of getting cash, which you get through PIP, you may get a guaranteed offer of therapy or help or assistance in another form rather than cash.
And just linking this to what he was saying about and others have been saying about the nature of PIP, you don't have to be out of work to get it and there's no work conditions in it.
But there's a striking statistic in the report itself which says that actually of the people claiming PIP, only about a fifth, 20%, are actually in work.
So there is a fear that actually, as he was referring, it could be a barrier to people taking on work because the argument is if they're working, then when it comes to a reassessment, the argument will be, well, if you can work, then you don't necessarily need PIP.
So people think I can't enter the workforce, otherwise I'll risk losing my PIP.
So I can see reforms along those lines, A, by age and B, by talking about those work incentives to try and make the system work better for disabled people and society as a whole.
Yeah, it's quite interesting, isn't it, given all the headlines about the soaring cost and the figures I mentioned earlier.
And I think it is important to take a step back here, Adam, and look at not just disability and sickness welfare costs, but the overall costs of working age, i.e.
non-pensioner welfare.
Because it's quite interesting that though the sickness and disability costs have been rising really rapidly, both in cash terms and as a share of the economy over the past decade or so,
If you look at the overall bill, it's quite stable at around 5% of GDP in recent years.
And it's actually down from where it was back in 2010.
Because overall welfare, you'll remember, was squeezed by George Osborne quite considerably in the austerity years.
But what he squeezed was non-health and sickness-related welfare, so sort of universal credit, housing benefit.
He froze it and found considerable savings in that way.
And this is something really important that the TIMSS report points out, that you can't just look at PIP in isolation.
You have to look at how it interacts with the rest of the system.
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