The Department for Work and Pensions has started dwp introduces new rules for extending personal independence payment awards by testing new assessment rules on about four per cent of claims nationally. The pilot sits inside the department’s secret Transform Decision Making programme and has already been rolled out to more than 150,000 disabled people.
Under the trial, healthcare professionals who assess personal independence payment claims are limited to basic information gathering. DWP case managers now handle which descriptors apply, justify those descriptors and decide entitlement.
Transform Decision Making programme
The pilot is part of the wider Health Transformation Programme, which was introduced under the last government to improve the PIP system and develop a new assessment process. DWP is also exploring whether it could extend the approach to the work capability assessment process.
At present, healthcare professionals with years of clinical experience assess how a claimant’s impairment affects day-to-day life and produce a report for DWP. They consider 10 daily living activities and two mobility activities before recommending the level of support they think the claimant needs from PIP.
Disability Rights UK reaction
Disability Rights UK said the changes would “create chaos and injustice in the processes for claiming PIP and possibly the WCA” and called them “a recipe for disaster.” The group also said it was “absolutely astonishing” that DWP was introducing the programme at the same time as the Timms Review of PIP.
The review is being carried out in co-production with disabled people. That leaves the department testing a new decision-making model while the review that is meant to shape the benefit’s future is still under way.
PIP claims and the Timms Review
Disability News Service reported on 4 June 2026 that DWP was secretly testing the new rules through the Transform Decision Making programme, and this week the department said the pilot had reached about four per cent of PIP claims nationally. The programme does not appear to have been mentioned publicly online or in parliament.
For claimants already in the system, the immediate practical change is that the assessment process now feeds into DWP decision-making earlier than before, with case managers taking over parts of the judgment that used to follow a healthcare professional’s report. The main issue now is how widely DWP pushes the trial beyond the current four per cent share of claims.
