25 Mar 2025 4 min read

They want to cut PIP

I don't write about politics much on here. It feels stressful to do, I don't want to misrepresent something, and pulling at one thing brings up a whole load of other issues.

But, maybe here's a little tangle of connected things I can briefly spin through.

The government wants to claw back money for the budget, and they're sticking to not raising taxes to do so, even as it becomes increasingly impossible for them to do so. One of the measures they're taking is to cut down on the people receiving Personal Independence Payments. This seems pretty fucked, as someone whose health sometimes prevents me from working, and who very much feel my fortune to have gotten ill at a time in my life where I have a financial buffer and a well paid career which I can do lying down and working inconsistent hours. I could easily be depending on the charity of family to survive, scraping money together from these kinds of benefits.

But aside from my own feelings of fear and anger (told you this stuff was stressful to write about), I want to point you at an article where some people who might lose out on PIP are interviewed:

You can see that each is in a complicated situation, but that a common thread is that thing of being a carer for a family member. They talk about how, if these cuts do happen & they lose PIP, they might fail to cope or need expensive council-provided care.

Now, the thing here is that PIP is funded by central government, and care is funded by local government. In fact, the majority of local government expenditure is goes to adult and child social care. So, we have a situation here where the central government are going to try to cut expenditure. But maybe those costs are instead going to shift to local government instead[1].

And the thing is, that council tax actually mainly goes to paying for care is not an obvious political fact. Here's a survey from Wales:

When respondents were asked to name services funded by council tax, the most commonly named services were bin or refuse collection (50%), police (42%) and roads or road maintenance (31%).

So people see money going out for council tax, and they see potholes in the street, and they wonder where the money is going. (around 4% of local authority expenditure goes on roads and transport)

Which was why I had a contrary take on the framing of this story:

Of 43 councils that replied to a Guardian request for data, all but eight were spending more on Send pupils’ transport than on their revenue roads budget, which is used for maintenance rather than capital improvements.

I thought it was an entirely reasonable bit to include. This is where the money goes! It's not where you thought it went!

Anyway, that brings me back round to another story I've seen recently:

Central government going - we need to make a visible improvement in people's lives. We need to Fix The Potholes. We're gonna give councils a bit of extra money so they can do this. But in return, we need them to keep track of how many they've fixed, we need reporting, we need to administer this stuff. We need some centralised control of the situation.

And I've been saying central government here, but these are political decisions being made by the current Labour government, led by Kier Starmer. A Labour government which put out a paper about how they wanted to change the relationship with local government. What's the first section? "Empowering communities to release Britain’s untapped strengths". Wait, that doesn't mean anything. Let's try a more specific bullet point from within it: "Use central government to cut costs for local authorities and free up resources for prevention, for example by ending Section 21 ‘no fault evictions’ that create huge temporary accommodation pressures on councils." Or how about this sentence: "Over the last fourteen years, councils of all political stripes have been left shelling out millions to plaster over the government’s mismanagement.". I get that government is hard it's just... I mean, it does seem a little bit like spoons on your wedding day, that's all I'm saying.

Anyway. Seems like a lot of people will suffer. It also seems like it's not going to actually save all that much money, overall. Just shift what part of government is paying, and under what circumstances. Income tax (which you pay more of when you earn more) won't go up, but council tax (which you pay based on what your house would have been worth in 1991) will instead. Or maybe councils will cut further those few things they're legally allowed to fail to do. Close a few more libraries. Just seems bad!

[1: Ok ok, that link only says 1/3 of the money will shift around, but it's unclear to me how that's calculated- if it's just a direct transfer for who pays for existing care, or if it includes increased demand for care because unpaid carers go back to work, or if it includes things like councils paying for emergency accommodation for people made homeless by the drop in income.]

Update from the end of the day: lol no, the OBR has said that the projections are bullshit, maybe for the reasons stated above. So now they're gonna cut some more things. Seems like a vicious cycle, but what do I know?