09th July 2025
bbc.co.uk/accessall
Access All – Emergency Episode 03
Presented by Emma Tracey
EMMA- Hello. This is another emergency episode of Access All with me, Emma Tracey. The bill that’s now known as the Universal Credit Bill was debated in the House of Commons this afternoon, it was voted through this evening and could become law one month today. As it stands, future claimants of the Universal Credit health top-up from April next year will receive £50 per week, and that’s instead of the £97 per week that current claimants get. And that will be frozen, so it won’t go up with inflation. This bill has caused a lot of heartache and debate over the last few weeks, so we will gently walk you through what it means as it stands after today’s happenings. Here is just a flavour of what happened today in the House of Commons.
[Clip]
MALE- This isn’t compassion. We owe it to these individuals and to the welfare state’s founding principles to fix this problem. We cannot avoid change or fall back on impractical slogans, that would abandon those who most need help. Yet that is what these amendments do.
MALE- We acknowledge there needs to be reform of the welfare system. We need to chase down the cost of this. But this is not the way to do it.
[End of clip]
EMMA- Let’s start by talking to Isabella McRae, a journalist who writes about welfare reform for The Big Issue. Hi, Isabella.
ISABELLA- Hi.
EMMA- The government won the vote tonight, didn’t they. So what are the next steps for this bill?
ISABELLA- Yeah. It’s my understanding that this bill will be certified as a money bill by the speaker, and that means that effectively it will surpass the House of Lords’ scrutiny, and that means that peers will have no power to ask MPs to consider amendments. The bill will become law a month from today after a full sped up lords’ passage. If it was going through the normal process, by comparison it would have gone to the House of Lords for a first reading, second reading, committee stage, report stage, and then eventually a third reading with it gaining royal ascent after any ping-pong on amendments from the lords. But regardless of that, it is important to note that the changes themselves aren’t going to take place until next year. Those key Universal Credit changes are happening in April next year, is my understanding of it.
EMMA- Right, okay. There were some amendments to the bill, there were some changes to the bill last week.
ISABELLA- Yes.
EMMA- So that must mean that disabled people won’t be affected very much now by this current bill?
ISABELLA- I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. The real concern is the Universal Credit cuts to the health element, they will only affect new claimants. But new claimants will see their benefits, their specific part of the health element, slashed in half and then frozen for the next four years after that. And claimants who are new under the age of 22, will also lose their support entirely. Now that’s expected to affect 750,000 people by the end of the decade, and these people will lose an average of £3,000 a year. So there really are concerns that it still will impact disabled people in the long-term.
EMMA- And you work for The Big Issue, so this is a really important thing to your readers and the people who you work with as well, isn’t it?
ISABELLA- It is. It is. It’s so important. We’ve had hundreds of readers write into us over the last year expressing their fears. It’s really been quite harrowing to speak to people about their concerns. I’ve heard things about sleepless nights, the real fear that’s impacting their mental health, their physical health. I think we talk a lot about the devastating impact that these cuts will have and could have had if they went in the full-blown sense of the original cuts. But we don’t talk enough about the devastating impact that it’s had on people over the last year. And I think it’s also eroded trust in the Labour Government too.
EMMA- What kind of stories have you been hearing from your readers?
ISABELLA- I mean I started reporting on the disability benefits’ system a couple of years ago, and even then I was hearing such stories of the traumatic impact the assessment process was having, going through appeals being rejected. These were people with severe health conditions already, amputees, stroke survivors, and then there were being told that their benefits could be stripped away from them. They face such uncertainty all that time.
EMMA- We’re talking to Rethink a little bit later. I know that lots of your readers and people you work with have been impacted by homelessness. Are people worried about if their health gets worse? So maybe they’re managing at the moment the unstable situation that they might be in, might make them worry that their health gets worse in the future and then they wouldn’t get the benefits that they would have done before?
ISABELLA- Oh, absolutely. There’s such a fear that they would have lost their benefits. And of course now there’s relief these PIP changes have been shelved for now, which is great news. But there have been so many fears over the last year. And you mentioned homelessness there. I have been told by a number of people that they were worried they were going to lose their homes. It’s really scary, and people rely on PIP in order to survive.
EMMA- Fear is such a huge one, isn’t it? We’ve got the Timms Review coming up now, which is a review of the assessment process for Personal Independence Payments. How does that figure now after today, after the vote going through, after all the different amendments and changes? Where are we with the Timms Review and what that will actually do?
ISABELLA- The TIMS Review is set to be co-produced with disabled people and groups. It’s thought that it’s not going to be expected to conclude until autumn next year at the earliest, so what that will look like remains to be seen. But we do know that Stephen Timms confirmed today, he agreed to an amendment from Marie Tidball, and she suggested that the government commit to working with a disability co-production taskforce. And that would have a majority of representatives who either had a disability or were from disabled groups, and Timm seemed quite supportive of this idea. So it sounds like that should be happening, which hopefully would mean a more compassionate system, and the outcome of this review hopefully will lead to that compassionate in the PIP process.
EMMA- And Marie Tidball of course is a Labour MP who’s disabled herself and who we’ve had on the podcast before. Also this week we’ve had some chat about changes to special needs’ provision to the SEND system, and some talk about potential changes or getting rid of EHCPs, Education and Health Care Plans. It’s interesting, isn’t it, the anxiety and the fear around changes to the SEND system, because many, many people, parents, teachers, government, the opposition, feel like there need to be changes to the system. So, you know, a lot of people feel like reform is needed, but it’s the horror of getting through the reform and what that will be, isn’t it, for some people?
ISABELLA- Yeah. And it is again that uncertainty, I think. Disabled people have been through it before with the welfare bill, and as I said earlier, that trust has been eroded. So how can they trust that these reforms are going to be positive for them if they’ve seen so many cuts and attacks on their rights from their perspective?
EMMA- Isabella McRae from The Big Issue, thank you.
ISABELLA- Thank you so much.
JINGLE- We’re not just a podcast. Find Access All on social media, and read our articles on the BBC news website.
EMMA- Now to Lana Hempsall. Lana is a Conservative councillor in Norfolk. She’s visually impaired, and she has been pretty vocal about welfare reform and this bill, she’s been writing in The Spectator, and she is with me now. Hi, Lana.
LANA- Hey, Emma. How are you?
EMMA- I’m well, thank you. What do you make of today’s debate?
LANA- Well today’s debate was a complete dog’s dinner. I’m just really disappointed with the way this whole welfare reform bill has gone, it just had so much promise and so much opportunity. Listening to the parochial debate in the commons today just makes my heart sink, that nothing’s ever going to get done that’s going to help us at the end of the day.
EMMA- And what were you disappointed by? What were you hoping for that didn’t happen?
LANA- I went to the Royal National College for the Blind, which was a great set-up in its own way and not so great in others. But what it did, it really drummed into every single one of us there that we were preparing for a life of work, a life of opportunity, a life where we would succeed. This welfare reform bill had that opportunity to make absolutely certain that people with disabilities could enter and remain in the world of work and just build their futures, build hope and aspiration into what we have, and it failed catastrophically in achieving that and I’m gutted, I’m genuinely gutted.
EMMA- Would you have voted for the bill last week when it was having its second reading before all the concessions were made? Would you have voted it through before the concessions?
LANA- Good heavens, no. Absolutely no. Because it achieved nothing. Liz Kendall, she said the welfare spending is out of control, we need to do something about that, we need to get more disabled people into work, etc, etc. Really high minded, really worthy intentions of what she wanted to do. And then, honestly if I didn’t know better, I would think somebody set her up, they said, “Here’s how you save £5bn out of the projected 100 that we’re going to see over the next five years, and you can achieve this by changing the criteria in this way.” Honestly, you would have imagined that somebody would have done the number crunching for her, because by the time the think tanks got round to it, it turned out that she was not going to stop the onflow of young people with mild mental health problems onto the PIP system, and she was going to adversely affect about 70% of people in their 40s and 50s with muscular skeletal issues and chronic pain really badly. No wonder the Labour MPs revolted. Instead of saying, “This is what I want to achieve. I want this many disabled people in work. I want the severely disabled people to be supported better, and I want a better solution for people with mental health problems. Give me something that’s going to achieve that.”
EMMA- Tell me, your party Leader, Kemi Badenoch, she made some controversial suggestions this week on how reform of PIP could happen, Personal Independence Payments. To what extent do you agree with what she said? And take us through the kind of three major things she suggested.
LANA- I’ll just pick a few. So the first one ending “telephone consultations,” well that’s a no-brainer, you don’t even need legislation for that. Liz Kendall can do that tomorrow without taking anything through parliament.
EMMA- And why do you think that would make a difference then?
LANA- Because Emma, I’ve done some work into this. You have these people, people who specialise in advising people with disabilities how to get hold of PIP and sickness benefits in general. What you can get for a sum of money, you can get a script that will take you through the PIP process. And because people in assessment centres are more or less obliged to take you at your word when you say you cannot do things, and any challenge, any fraud, is pushed out to DWP, there is no way over the phone telling if somebody’s got that particular issue or not, because it’s impossible. We need gatekeepers to look after the public purse because this is taxpayer money, Emma. This isn’t money that’s suddenly flowed into the treasury, this is taxpayers’ money, and taxpayers need to know that what they’re paying in tax they’re getting back value for money. Allowing people to not demonstrate adequately that they are in need of a benefit, is not value for money.
EMMA- You’ve mentioned people with “mild” mental health difficulties, getting them away from PIP. How would you do that? And why do you think they shouldn’t get PIP when they feel like they need it to cover extra costs due to their mental health?
LANA- Because Emma, you will find it really difficult to find mental health practitioners who will tell you that after a bout of depression, you will be hard-pressed to find anybody who will tell you that getting work, engaging in some sort of activity that involves other people, isn’t good for you. I worked as a business coach over the pandemic quite a lot with people who struggle with their mental health. Without exception engaging with a world of work, getting a reward either in physical contact, social interaction, without exception those changes were good for them.
EMMA- Lana Hempsall, thank you for joining me on Access All.
MUSIC- Music.
EMMA- I’m joined now by Jeremy Bernhaut, Associate Director of Policy and Influencing at Rethink Mental Illness. Jeremy, where do people with mental ill health stand now?
JEREMY- It’s welcome that the PIP changes have been removed from the bill. There are still many people who will be affected by the changes to Universal Credit that have still been voted through. But overall, we’re hopeful that if the government does the co-production properly and meaningfully engages with people, then they can make some really good improvements to PIP that overall will be good for people severely affected by mental illness. [Dog barking in the background]
EMMA- Okay. And thanks also to your dog there for helping you out a little bit. I think lots of people don’t quite understand the connection between people with mental ill health and disability benefits. [Dog barking in the background]
JEREMY- People severely affected by mental illness- I’m so sorry, I’m going to have to shut my dog up. [Dog barking in the background]
EMMA- [Laughs]
JEREMY- Apologies. This is the culprit.
EMMA- Oh the dog! Jeremy, I’m blind, but my producers are telling me that you’re showing us the dog. Who is the dog?
JEREMY- This is Ziggy, and he is a border poodle.
EMMA- Okay. I feel like you had a lot to say about how people with mental ill health use benefit money. What do they need the health top-up of Universal Credit for?
JEREMY- Many people with mental illness, with severe mental illness, will be too unwell to work. But many people are able to work if given the right support to. But while they’re in the process of looking for work, and making all of those changes to their life that they need to make in order to be well enough to work and remain in work sustainably, people need that health top-up in order to get by. We’ve also heard of many cases where because there are 1.6 million people on waiting lists for mental health services, many people are actually using that money to either pay for private therapy, or to pay for treatment that isn’t yet available on the NHS.
EMMA- What do employers need to do to enable and support people with mental ill health to remain in work, or to get into a job?
JEREMY- Employers need a lot of support with this too. Many employers lack confidence in how to support people with mental illness, so there is a need for a lot of upskilling of managers and employers out there. Many people experiencing mental illness tell us that they’ve experienced stigma in the workplace, that often they encounter some really quite damaging assumptions about their abilities, and a lack of progression in the workplace. But with really good upskilling of managers and employers, and really clear guidance on what reasonable adjustments are needed. So for example, if somebody needs to adjust start and finish times to take account for the effects of their medication, or if there is another reasonable adjustment that can be made that is acceptable within the confines of the role that they’re doing, and is also what they need in order to stay well enough to perform in their role, then that employer and that individual needs to identify that reasonable adjustment and put it in place.
EMMA- The numbers of people getting disability benefits for mental health issues, they’ve gone up by 6% in the last nine years, and now 69% of new 25 year old claimants are receiving the benefits for mental health or behavioural disorders. Why are the numbers going up so quickly, and why are they so high?
JEREMY- We do need to be slightly careful about the statistics, because as you’ve said there, those are mental health and also behavioural disorders which are of course two very different things. But what we can’t get away from is that there is a huge need out there for mental health support. People have gone through a cost of living crisis, we’ve seen an erosion of public services, the news agenda often fills people with fear, and there are lots of different reasons why people are seeing a crisis in their mental health. What we really need is support from the government in order to get people access to mental health services so that they don’t have to wait a really long time in order to receive the support that they need. And really what we need is a cross-government and cross-societal approach to help people and make sure that mental ill health is prevented, and that people are able to live as full lives as they can and contribute as much to society as they can.
EMMA- But Jeremy, some might say that there needs to be a cut off somewhere?
JEREMY- I would say that if the aim is to help people who have a disability to live their life and be able to contribute to society and to be able to work, then that is a worthwhile investment for our society and for our economy too.
EMMA- But shouldn’t there be some talk about how bad your mental health needs to be before you get it?
JEREMY- Well, there is already a really rigorous assessment process. It would be a complete mistake to assume that people are currently getting Personal Independence Payments who don’t currently need that money. The process is already much harder than it needs to be, and people regularly tell us how difficult it is. It would be a mistake to assume that it’s easy for people to receive this money.
EMMA- Okay. Jeremy Bernhaut from Rethink Mental Illness, thank you for joining me from a very noisy household.
JEREMY- Thank you.
MUSIC- Music.
EMMA- Jeremy Bernhaut there and his dog, Ziggy, from Rethink Mental Illness. We have been in contact with the Department for Work and Pensions for comment, and we have asked for an interview with the Disability Minister, Sir Stephen Timms, but we haven’t heard back from them at the time of recording. If anything about this episode makes you want to get in touch with me, or you want to speak to me about anything at all, you can email accessall@bbc.co.uk See you soon. Bye.