Obviously that depends on the number of people that it would be applicable to. Most people have children. Most people aren’t so disabled that they are eligible for PIP. Those who are do not always claim, particularly if they do not need to because it’s a degrading and humiliating process (unlike child benefit where claiming consists of filling in a form). People who have children are spread across all income deciles. Disabled people are disproportionately in the lowest two income deciles (predominantly the very lowest, due to the extremely high costs of being disabled in terms of monetary costs to meet additional needs but also the cost of the impact on lifetime earnings and opportunities). Therefore, there are far fewer people in higher deciles to reclaim PIP from via a means-test and it is well documented (even by the DWP in one paper I read) how it is cost prohibitive to means-test it. They would have to implement entirely new IT systems and processes because DWP and HMRC systems aren’t linked up. That would cost many billions of pounds (even if done well, which it wouldn’t be). They would have to employ approximately 8,000 new civil servants at a cost (including pensions and employer taxes) of over £50k per year each so that’s £400m cost in perpetuity. They’d also have to recruit them, train them, hire new offices for them to work in, pay the insurance costs for that and energy bills, buy the IT hardware etc they need, add HR functions and IT support, a complaints team to rectify mistakes, customer service staff and processes etc….
Then what basis would you means test it upon? Individual income? Household income? That could leave many very severely disabled people completely dependent financially and open to abuse. If individual income then even more pointless as it would save even less money. What about asset testing? If you do it will cost even more. If you don’t then it’s arbitrary and pointless anyway.
Either way it would save nothing close to the cost and take years to do. As well as undermining the fundamental purpose of PIP which is the level the playing field a little (by no means fully) between the significantly disabled and others due to the horrific impact and costs severe disability has on lives.
It is nothing like child benefit: child benefit is paid by HMRC, therefore, they already had the data on earnings so a simple update to their own IT system (not that you’d know it from how badly they messed it up, how much they spent on it and how many times even all these years later they still get it wrong). And even in that case, incidentally - a benefit paid to far more people across all income deciles originally and very straightforward to evidence - the economic data does NOT support that it’s saved money overall: the independent economic analysis on low UK productivity commissioned by Jeremy Hunt (alongside numerous other robust economic studies) identified this cliff edge in the tax system as being economically harmful and a significant drag on productivity and growth, alongside the universal credit taper rate being too high, and also of course the withdrawal of the personal allowance and childcare funding at £100k which can result in marginal tax rates of 20,000%! These cliff edges exist in no tax system anywhere else on Earth of which I’m aware, with marginal tax rates fluctuating up and down wildly as income increases for no intelligible reason, creating huge perverse incentives to economic actuvitiy.
Obviously many credible economists have advised this Government and the previous one to make the personal allowance, childcare funding and child benefit universal again because the evidence is that these punitive and nonsensical policies actually LOWER overall tax revenues, lower growth, leads to higher emmigration of skilled workers/ them retiring early/ cutting their working hours and therefore create skills shortages, which then necessitate higher immigration and lowers productivity further and therefore lowers living standards and salaries across the economy and harms the relative value of GBP also, creating higher imported inflation and more debt. That also means higher long-term welfare costs etc as people won’t have saved enough for retirement if they go part time mid-career to avoid the cliff edges. Oh and state childcare also pays for itself many times over. Withdrawing it from your most productive employees is insanity if you want growth.
Even the Guardian published an article about these economic studies, not just the FT and The Times etc. It’s not a left or right view, it is objective evidenced fact that such policies are one of the reasons for the economic doom loop we are in. This has been known for years, and evidenced very robustly in peer reviewed studies on large data sets. Is Reeves proposing to do anything to address this - one thing she could do to give an immediate boost to productivity and growth? Of course not. Probably because she knows people like you would rather be poorer themselves and continue to assert against all available evidence that this self-destructive means-testing is a good idea than allow a system that is fair to all and logical and not self-sabotaging to be implemented, and would be enraged by any attempt to fix the UK tax system if they perceived there to be any benefit if this to anybody who earns more than they do, even if it benefitted them too.
It’s a great example of exactly why this country is in such a mess and unlikely to improve in the short to medium term at least. Nothing will change until the large proportion of the electorate who prefer to engage in mud slinging grow up a bit and start to engage their brains and be willing to discuss evidence-based policy solutions.