Welfare trends report: January 2019
The Office for Budget Responsibility has published their welfare trends report for 2019.
Documents
Details
This year’s (2019) report again focuses on disability benefits – payments that contribute to the extra costs associated with daily living and mobility for people with disabling conditions.
It has two purposes. First, to explain the evolution of spending on disability benefits over the past fifty years, with more emphasis on recent years. In particular, we look at trends in spending on working-age adults, where the system has been undergoing major reform as disability living allowance (DLA) is replaced by personal independence payment (PIP). Second, it evaluates the effects of PIP on the public finances, which have differed significantly from those envisaged at the inception of the reform, leading to systematic under-forecasting of PIP and working-age DLA spending since the former was introduced in 2013.