Welfare Reform Announcements - 18/03/2025

Important proposed changes to disability benefits and employment support have been announced by the Government today.  We do have concerns about how these proposed changes would affect people we support. 

We are digesting the Green Paper and will do all we can to ensure that those living with and affected by ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia and Long Covid are considered and represented in these changes. 

These proposed changes would not be brought in for at least 12 months and would affect new claimants first. 

There is also a live consultation on the proposals which we will share below. 

We have summarised the main proposed changes here: 

• Merging Jobseeker's Allowance and ESA into a new time-limited unemployment insurance benefit.

• Scrapping the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) and instead using the PIP assessment to determine additional Universal Credit support.

• Introducing a "Right to Try" work scheme, allowing people to test a job without immediately losing their benefits if it doesn’t work out.

• Rebalancing Universal Credit health payments, keeping the top-up fixed for existing claimants but reducing it for new claimants.

• Providing a permanent above-inflation rise to the Universal Credit standard allowance.

• Ensuring people with the most severe disabilities will never be reassessed.

• Overhauling the DWP's safeguarding approach.

• Changing PIP eligibility, requiring at least four points in one activity to qualify.

• Launching a review of the PIP assessment

We understand that people will be worried about any proposed change to their benefits and we will be consulting with our members and submitting a response to the consultation as a group in the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, if you do want to respond individually, the link to the form is below: 

Context and proposals in full: Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper - GOV.UK

Form to respond to the consultation questions individually Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working

If you are worried and do need to speak to someone, Samaritans have a number of ways to get in touch. Full details of the ways you can contact them can be found here: https://shorturl.at/C49P6