By John O’Brien Benefits Adviser and Tribunal Representative
Alan Milburn’s interim review into young people and work has received a warmer reception than many expected. Some of that warmth is deserved. Unlike a good number of politicians and commentators who have weighed in on this subject in recent years, Milburn does not blame young people for being disabled, unemployed, autistic, anxious or mentally unwell. He acknowledges that genuine barriers exist and that the current system frequently fails the people it is supposed to support.
Unfortunately, having spent considerable time with Chapter Six, ‘A Welfare State Not Designed for Participation’, the report represents something far more significant than a review of youth employment. Beneath its measured language lies a direct challenge to what Personal Independence Payment was ever meant to be and, by extension, to the principles underpinning the wider disability benefits system.
PIP is not an employment benefit
I have been advising on disability benefits for over thirty years. In that time, governments of every political colour have come and gone, and one principle has survived them all: PIP is not an unemployment benefit. It is not a sickness benefit. It is not means-tested, and it was never intended to determine whether a claimant can or cannot work.
PIP exists to help meet the additional costs that arise directly from disability. Disabled people face additional costs whether they are in work or not. Wheelchairs, accessible transport, specialist equipment, care, heating, adapted housing and special diets — these expenses do not vanish because someone finds a job. They are the cost of being disabled in a world not built with disabled people in mind.
Throughout his report, Milburn criticises PIP for failing to focus on employment outcomes. He questions why claimants are not routinely asked about work. He criticises the absence of labour market monitoring. He asks whether the billions spent on PIP generate an adequate ‘return’.
Milburn is, in effect, arguing that disability benefits should be judged not by whether they reduce the financial impact of disability but by whether they increase participation in the labour market. Those are two different objectives and conflating them is not a technical detail. It changes the nature of the benefit itself.
There is also a constitutional point that deserves attention. Parliament did not create PIP as an employment programme. The legislation focuses on the additional needs arising from disability in daily living and mobility. Whether a claimant works, wants to work, or is capable of work is largely irrelevant to entitlement.
A wheelchair user who works full-time may face the same additional transport costs as a wheelchair user who does not. The underlying principle is compensation for disability-related disadvantage, not labour market status. Any attempt to redefine PIP around employment outcomes therefore represents a significant departure from the purpose for which the benefit was created.
The word ‘participation’ does a lot of heavy lifting
The word that runs through this report more than any other is participation. On the surface, most disabled people would agree with it. We want to participate — in work, in education, in community life and in public life. The removal of barriers to participation has been at the heart of disability rights campaigning for decades.
But participation means different things depending on who is speaking and what they want to achieve. For disabled people and their advocates, it means removing the structural barriers that keep them out. For governments under financial pressure, it can become a way of talking about reducing benefit dependency without saying so.
The distinction matters because Milburn frames welfare spending throughout this review as an investment that should generate measurable outcomes. He refers to approximately eight billion pounds spent annually on young people’s PIP and Universal Credit support while outcomes, he argues, continue to worsen.
When disability benefits are reframed as investments, attention inevitably turns to questions of return. Once that framework is established, pressure to reduce expenditure is seldom far behind.
The social model problem
Throughout the report there is a noticeable drift away from the social model of disability and back towards an individualised understanding of disadvantage. The social model does not argue that impairments do not matter. Rather, it argues that disability arises from the interaction between impairment and barriers created by society.
A wheelchair user is disabled not simply because they cannot walk, but because buildings, transport systems and workplaces are designed around people who can. Likewise, an autistic person may be disabled less by autism itself than by workplaces unwilling to accommodate sensory needs, communication differences and flexible routines. By concentrating so heavily on claimant behaviour and participation, the report risks overlooking the structural barriers that remain in place.
Misunderstanding Neurodiversity and Mental Health
The section dealing with neurodevelopmental and mental health conditions is where I find the report most troubling. Milburn observes, correctly, that conditions like anxiety, depression, ADHD and autism can fluctuate. Someone may cope well one day and struggle profoundly the next. He frames this as a relevant consideration when thinking about work capability.
I have sat in enough tribunals to know how this kind of observation gets used. The legal test for PIP is not whether a person can perform an activity occasionally. It is whether they can do so safely, to an acceptable standard, repeatedly and within a reasonable time. That four-part test exists because fluctuation is not evidence of mild or manageable difficulty. For many disabled people, it is the nature of the difficulty.
An autistic person may function adequately in one carefully structured workplace and be completely overwhelmed by another. Someone with severe anxiety may manage three days before a crisis undoes everything. A person with ADHD may thrive in the right environment and be unable to sustain performance in one that does not accommodate them.
Employers are missing from the picture
The report’s greatest weakness is its failure to examine the role of employers. Milburn spends a great deal of time analysing claimants. Milburn spends a great deal of time analysing claimants. He spends far less time asking why employers continue to exclude disabled people in such numbers.
In my experience, disabled people are not out of work because benefits are too generous. They are out of work because employers fail to make reasonable adjustments. Flexible working remains the exception rather than the rule. Recruitment practices disadvantage disabled applicants. Sickness absence policies penalise fluctuating conditions, while Access to Work remains difficult to navigate for those who need it.
Add in inaccessible public transport and workplace cultures that still treat difference as a problem to be managed, and the picture becomes clear. This is a structural failure with little to do with the benefit system.
Milburn asks why disabled young people are not entering employment. He pays much less attention to why so many employers are not ready to receive them. That imbalance shapes the report’s conclusions.
The return of demonising language
There is a phrase in this report that will be familiar to anyone who has followed welfare reform over the past decade or more: perverse incentives. Milburn uses it to suggest that some young people may find inactivity offers greater security and lower risk than attempting employment. I have heard this argument many times. I know what usually follows it.
Historically, when governments begin speaking about perverse incentives in the benefits system, the policy response tends to involve increased conditionality, more frequent reassessments, greater surveillance, reduced financial support, additional sanctions and intensified pressure to engage with employment programmes. Whether that is Milburn’s intention is not something I can say with certainty. What I can say is that the direction of travel is not ambiguous.
The Rights and Wrongs of the Report
Milburn is right that many young disabled people need support before they are ready to consider employment, and that part-time work, volunteering, work experience and supported employment can provide valuable stepping stones.
He is also right that transitions into employment should be gradual and supported rather than imposed on people who are not ready. Practical assistance, backed by adequate resources, can make a real difference. The difficulty is that support and compulsion are not the same thing, and the report at times struggles to maintain that distinction. Support opens doors. Compulsion closes them.
The question this report keeps circling is how to reduce the number of young people receiving disability benefits. That is the wrong question, and asking it leads to the wrong answers.
The right question is how to build a society in which disabled people can participate if they choose to do so. Achieving that demands stronger employment rights and better enforcement of the Equality Act 2010, a well-resourced Access to Work scheme, more supported employment, better public transport, better housing, better education and training, and workplaces that are flexible rather than paying lip service to the idea. In short, it means changing society, not merely changing claimants.
[Photograph of Alan Milburn is from Wikimedia Commons, here]
