Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
A few months ago, I argued on this site that we should scrap the triple lock. It is an expensive transfer from working people to the wealthiest generation in British history, upheld by a mechanical ratchet that raises pensioners’ incomes faster than the incomes of the people paying for them. None of that is wrong.
I still worry about the strain it has on our public finances, the unfairness of it more generally and whether we will be able to afford any state pension by the time my generation reaches pension age. But I now worry there is something more urgent to address.
According to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, claims for Personal Independence Payment in the mental health and neurodevelopmental categories have roughly doubled in the last five years. Anxiety and depression are up 109 per cent. Autism is up 137 per cent and ADHD is up a staggering 234 per cent.
PIP and the Disability Living Allowance it replaced cost £33.7 billion in 2024-25. By 2030-31 the OBR expects this figure to reach £54.4 billion. That is a £20 billion increase in six years, which is larger than the cost of the triple lock. And what makes it worse than the triple lock is that no minister has to defend or announce its rise in cost. The costs skyrocket every day as more and more people are labelled as being ‘unwell’.
A parallel this has with pension reform is the problem of optics. When you suggest pension reform, people jump to the image of the old lady in a cold flat who has worked her whole life. When you suggest any type of disability benefit reform, people picture, intentionally or not, a wheelchair user or veteran who has lost a leg. But this is not who I am talking about.
Psychiatric conditions now account for 39 per cent of PIP claims on average across constituencies. I do not want to claim that these people are inventing distress. The DWP does not record severity, so nobody can say with certainty either way. What I will say is that a cash payment, paid indefinitely, is a strange response to conditions that are common, that fluctuate, and that in many cases can be improved by treatment.
Motability is a prime example of this disconnect between what people imagine the money goes to and what it actually goes to. Of the 589,550 claimants using the scheme as of April 2025, roughly 73,000 have a mental health or neurodevelopmental condition such as anxiety, autism and ADHD. I am not suggesting that these claimants do not need a car, but the reality is that a car is not a treatment for anxiety. And any attempt to change the rules, even slightly, leads to outrage.
Around the time of last year’s Budget, for instance, the Motability scheme dropped BMW, Mercedes and Audi from their programme, and the Treasury changed the VAT treatment of top-up payments. The outrage was immediate – any change at all gets read as punishing those who are truly disabled.
Yes, the triple lock is a large ballooning transfer. It is expensive, and many, including myself, think it is a badly designed and unfair policy. But, the length at which it is paid out is shorter than other disability claims.
For example, a claim of PIP for ADHD at the age of 18 has four or five decades in front of it. The IFS found that over two-thirds of people who began a PIP claim in 2017 were still claiming the benefit five years later, and that 89 per cent of the reassessments carried out in 2025 continued their claim.
An 18-year-old claiming anxiety on the standard daily living rate with the standard mobility component will cost roughly £273,000 in today’s prices if paid up to retirement age. On the enhanced rates, it is closer to £496,000. This means that, if we don’t fix this soon, we will have a large chunk of this generation who will claim for their whole adult lives, and in higher and higher numbers.
One thing to note is that PIP is not an out-of-work benefit. You can claim PIP while still working, and many people do. But we do have a problem in this country of young people out of work. Almost one million 16-24-year-olds are now out of work, education or training (NEETs).
Of this number, more than a quarter of them give ill health as the reason for being out of work. If we are not careful, we are going to teach an entire generation that you are defined by what you can’t do, not by what you can do. And that your challenges are not things that can be worked on, but are things that define your identity. This means that this is a problem not only of public finances, but of moral duty to our young generation.
Jeremy Hunt has made the case ahead of the Budget: “Healey should remove anxiety and depression as a reason to claim benefits and offer people treatment instead. It would be better for the individuals and a fraction of the cost.” I think he is right, and it is a shame he did not do so as Chancellor.
Putting people on indefinite benefits for common and treatable mental health issues is neither compassionate nor constructive when treatment costs a fraction of what lifetime payment would cost. But the political cost of disability benefit reform, like pension reform, is steep.
I still think we should scrap the triple lock. But to the relief of some ConservativeHome readers, several X users and my Mother, I will probably go on about it a bit less.
Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
A few months ago, I argued on this site that we should scrap the triple lock. It is an expensive transfer from working people to the wealthiest generation in British history, upheld by a mechanical ratchet that raises pensioners’ incomes faster than the incomes of the people paying for them. None of that is wrong.
I still worry about the strain it has on our public finances, the unfairness of it more generally and whether we will be able to afford any state pension by the time my generation reaches pension age. But I now worry there is something more urgent to address.
According to the TaxPayers’ Alliance, claims for Personal Independence Payment in the mental health and neurodevelopmental categories have roughly doubled in the last five years. Anxiety and depression are up 109 per cent. Autism is up 137 per cent and ADHD is up a staggering 234 per cent.
PIP and the Disability Living Allowance it replaced cost £33.7 billion in 2024-25. By 2030-31 the OBR expects this figure to reach £54.4 billion. That is a £20 billion increase in six years, which is larger than the cost of the triple lock. And what makes it worse than the triple lock is that no minister has to defend or announce its rise in cost. The costs skyrocket every day as more and more people are labelled as being ‘unwell’.
A parallel this has with pension reform is the problem of optics. When you suggest pension reform, people jump to the image of the old lady in a cold flat who has worked her whole life. When you suggest any type of disability benefit reform, people picture, intentionally or not, a wheelchair user or veteran who has lost a leg. But this is not who I am talking about.
Psychiatric conditions now account for 39 per cent of PIP claims on average across constituencies. I do not want to claim that these people are inventing distress. The DWP does not record severity, so nobody can say with certainty either way. What I will say is that a cash payment, paid indefinitely, is a strange response to conditions that are common, that fluctuate, and that in many cases can be improved by treatment.
Motability is a prime example of this disconnect between what people imagine the money goes to and what it actually goes to. Of the 589,550 claimants using the scheme as of April 2025, roughly 73,000 have a mental health or neurodevelopmental condition such as anxiety, autism and ADHD. I am not suggesting that these claimants do not need a car, but the reality is that a car is not a treatment for anxiety. And any attempt to change the rules, even slightly, leads to outrage.
Around the time of last year’s Budget, for instance, the Motability scheme dropped BMW, Mercedes and Audi from their programme, and the Treasury changed the VAT treatment of top-up payments. The outrage was immediate – any change at all gets read as punishing those who are truly disabled.
Yes, the triple lock is a large ballooning transfer. It is expensive, and many, including myself, think it is a badly designed and unfair policy. But, the length at which it is paid out is shorter than other disability claims.
For example, a claim of PIP for ADHD at the age of 18 has four or five decades in front of it. The IFS found that over two-thirds of people who began a PIP claim in 2017 were still claiming the benefit five years later, and that 89 per cent of the reassessments carried out in 2025 continued their claim.
An 18-year-old claiming anxiety on the standard daily living rate with the standard mobility component will cost roughly £273,000 in today’s prices if paid up to retirement age. On the enhanced rates, it is closer to £496,000. This means that, if we don’t fix this soon, we will have a large chunk of this generation who will claim for their whole adult lives, and in higher and higher numbers.
One thing to note is that PIP is not an out-of-work benefit. You can claim PIP while still working, and many people do. But we do have a problem in this country of young people out of work. Almost one million 16-24-year-olds are now out of work, education or training (NEETs).
Of this number, more than a quarter of them give ill health as the reason for being out of work. If we are not careful, we are going to teach an entire generation that you are defined by what you can’t do, not by what you can do. And that your challenges are not things that can be worked on, but are things that define your identity. This means that this is a problem not only of public finances, but of moral duty to our young generation.
Jeremy Hunt has made the case ahead of the Budget: “Healey should remove anxiety and depression as a reason to claim benefits and offer people treatment instead. It would be better for the individuals and a fraction of the cost.” I think he is right, and it is a shame he did not do so as Chancellor.
Putting people on indefinite benefits for common and treatable mental health issues is neither compassionate nor constructive when treatment costs a fraction of what lifetime payment would cost. But the political cost of disability benefit reform, like pension reform, is steep.
I still think we should scrap the triple lock. But to the relief of some ConservativeHome readers, several X users and my Mother, I will probably go on about it a bit less.