PIP and Carer’s Allowance – new impact assessment published

Please find attached a short Carers UK briefing on the DWP impact assessment published on Friday on the impact on Carer’s Allowance of the introduction of Personal independence Payment.

In short:

• In contrast to the impact assessment published in May last year which indicated that PIP ‘will not affect’ the Carer’s Allowance claimant count, this now shows that, by 2015, 5,000 fewer existing claimants will receive Carer’s Allowance.
• They are asking for more detail on the topline figures given for existing claimants which show that 25,000 carers will lose Carer’s Allowance but that DWP expects 20,000 to gain entitlement as a result of reassessment – resulting in the 5,000 net reduction. This ‘churn’ is significant as they do not know, of those losing Carer’s Allowance, how many will lose entitlement as a result of the condition of the person they care for improving and how many are losing out because of PIP’s tighter eligibility. So behind the 5,000 figure may be substantially larger numbers of existing claimants who lose out even though they are still providing full-time care. The fact that this is partially offset by DWP’s assessment that others will gain elsewhere will be of no comfort to those families.
• When new claims before 2015 are taken into account, by 2015, there will be 10,000 fewer people entitled to Carer’s Allowance under PIP, compared to the projected DLA/Carer’s Allowance caseload would have been.
• For existing claimants losing Carer’s Allowance, this will obviously be a double blow as it will come at the same time as the loss of DLA as a result of their PIP assessment.
• These 2015 figures also just represent the impact of the first third of DLA reassessments so they would anticipate thousands more carers losing Carer’s Allowance when the bulk of reassessments take place after 2015.

Carers UK has just launched a Caring & Family Finances Inquiry to examine the impact of benefit changes (including PIP, bedroom tax, council tax benefit etc.) on carers, alongside the wider costs of caring, so they are going to be doing further analysis on this.