The founder of an organisation that supports thousands of disabled people in navigating Access to Work has come forward about the underhanded process by which the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is making “drastic cuts” to the crumbling scheme.

Crucially, she has revealed to the Canary that the department has repeatedly justified substantial reductions to disabled people’s awards by citing the scheme’s principle of only meeting a person’s “minimum needs”. However, the DWP appears to be doing this without ever assessing what an applicant’s minimum needs even are. And tellingly, this is because, as it currently stands, it actually has no formal process for doing so in the first place.

Access to Work: 9 in 10 facing cuts

Cathy Waller is the founder and director of Decode. The organisation – a partnership between Cathy Waller Company and Disability Arts Online – supports “hundreds, if not thousands” of disabled people navigate AtW applications. It also helps organisations utilise the scheme for their staff.

Waller explained that it was a project born out of personal experience. Notably, Waller herself has encountered the scheme’s systemic problems firsthand.

In May, the organisation blew the whistle about the dire situation it was observing in the AtW awards.

Alarmingly, a survey of the organisation’s clients found that the DWP had reduced AtW for nine in 10 people renewing their awards. On average, it identified how the DWP had reduced awards by 53%. Similarly, the DWP was granting 86.5% of new applicants less than they had requested. Waller detailed how, until last year, it was the “complete flip”.

She told the Canary how:

in our previous years of operating over, you know, two to three years, we had about 10 percent of people who didn’t get what they asked for with Access to Work.

Waller also emphasised that the 10% who received the award they asked for did so with Decode’s support. And, as an organisation, it knows:

the guidance inside out and really work to the guidance and what is correct.

In other words, the DWP is making devastating cuts across the board to AtW awards.

However, this is not the story the department itself is telling.

DWP is trying to hide the reality

For months, DWP minister Stephen Timms has been refusing to admit the DWP was overseeing a programme of sweeping cuts to the scheme. The minister repeatedly fell back on the claim that the department had made no policy changes to AtW. For instance, in response to a written question by Liberal Democrat MP Steve Darling, in September Timms explicitly stated (our emphasis):

In the past, some guidance restrictions have not consistently been implemented. The guidance is now being applied more consistently. For the last year, work has been underway to improve Scheme decision-making by applying the guidance with greater consistency, to provide a fairer process. This may mean that some awards change at the point of renewal, but there has been no change in Scheme policy, or instruction to reduce support levels.

However, at Labour’s recent annual conference, Disability News Service’s (DNS) John Pring forced Timms to acknowledge he had signed off on instructions greenlighting just that.

What’s more, government figures seem to obscure the reality. By comparison with what Decode has been finding, recent DWP statistics show a 10% reduction in the number of people the DWP approved for AtW provision. Specifically, there was a marked drop from 68,730 people receiving any AtW support in the financial year ending March 2024 to 61,670 in the financial year ending March 2025.

DWP doesn’t know how many people it’s cutting AtW awards for

It’s obviously quite a substantial disparity compared to Decode’s data. This showed that the DWP were granting only 13.5% the award they had requested. Of course, these are slightly different parameters. The DWP’s data only looks at how many people are receiving any AtW award. Meanwhile, Decode’s drilling down into whether the DWP is giving them the support they’ve actually requested—and, in fact, likely need.

What the department’s statistics also do not show is a picture of the decreases the DWP is making to the awards themselves. Previously, the Canary made Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to obtain this information. We asked for the number of award reviews that resulted in reductions to the overall grant for the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years. We also asked for the average reduction for both years. However, the department refused the FOI. It came back explaining how the DWP does not:

Record the specific outcomes of award reviews (i.e. whether they resulted in increases or decreases in grant amounts) in a way that can be extracted.

The response stated that to obtain the data, the department would have to “manually examine” the customer records of those for whom it has conducted award reviews. Consequently, there’s no centralised official government data to illustrate how it’s likely decimating AtW awards.

Cuts are hitting those with the highest needs the most.

Nevertheless, Decode’s data does provide a vital snapshot. And indeed, other organisations have been raising the alarm over a sudden wave of anecdotal accounts echoing much the same. Waller explained how the organisation had decided last year to start gathering data:

To prove to ourselves, to make sure that what we were seeing was actually correct in the data.

Crucially, Waller also floated what might account for the vast difference between Decode’s data and the DWP’s:

The people we work with —clients —tend to need more than £10,000 or more than £20,000 in Access to Work funds.

So we don’t tend to work with many people who need a bit of software and equipment around the £1,000-£2,000 mark.

But she said that most people on the scheme will receive lower awards. As a result, Waller highlighted how this would “skew” the data:

The people who go to Access to Work and say, ‘Can I have a thousand pounds?’ and they go, ‘Yes, ’ that’s not the reduction they’re making.

They’re making the reductions, and the people who need tens of thousands of pounds.

In short, the DWP seems to be making deep cuts to disabled people who need the most support in work. Of course, this is shameful in general. But it’s also obviously damning next to Labour’s repeated pledge to support disabled people to access employment.

Sneaking in changes through the staff guide

On a semantic level, what Timms has said about the department making no policy changes might well be broadly factually accurate. However, it’s blatantly apparent that the DWP is making cuts – just not in the public-facing arena of parliament. Instead, it’s carrying them out at the organisational level, making them almost impossible for the public to scrutinise properly.

The Canary wanted to understand just how the DWP have been getting away with this. Waller had some of the answers.

Waller first explained that the DWP had updated the AtW staff guide in 2023. According to the DWP’s staff guide webpage, the changes involved “numerous updates to Access to Work staff”. Notably, among a myriad of updates, this included clarifying the “Process for Special aids and equipment” and “Support Worker instructions including evidence required”.

Comparing older and newer versions of the guide, the Canary has identified several additional recent changes. Most of it is subtle wording edits and examples. These are likely to help improve clarity and consistency in case manager decisions, as Timms suggested. However, there are a few notable changes too. Some of the most significant ones revolved around AtW support for young people aged 16 to 24.

For instance, before a September 2025 update, the guide stated that a young person could obtain AtW support for a maximum of 12 months on a Traineeship (Scotland only) or 39 weeks in a Supported Internship.

Now, however, the DWP has specified that the support mainly revolves around Job Coaches. And secondly, it has reduced the maximum time to 26 weeks for both. On top of this, the guide now sets out how the DWP will taper off support “to a point” where it is “no longer needed”. Crucially, it stipulates how this must “take effect” within the first 13 weeks. In short, the changes mean young people in Traineeships and Supported Internships can now get less support on the scheme.

Changes creeping in

But notably, it was after the 2023 changes that Waller said Decode started to notice “subtle little discrepancies” and:

More discrepancies in the way case managers were handling claims.

Waller told the Canary that:

In our experience, Access to Work has always been inconsistent, and it’s been a potluck as to who you get assigned to. But in January 2024, in February, we noticed that what case managers were saying was further away from the staff guidance. So we noticed that the language started to change, and we were getting into a situation where case managers were denying the staff guidance in its entirety to mitigate against a decision.

However, the staff guide updates don’t fully account for the wide range of awards. The public obviously does have access to the staff guide changes. But the real driving force behind the sudden cuts is happening behind closed doors. From Waller’s experience, the real problems seem to be emerging between the policy and operations teams.

In May, an AtW employee leaked memos with “operational delivery” guidance changes to disability consultant Alice Hastie. This revealed a sweeping slate of changes to how the DWP was planning to instruct AtW case managers to interpret the staff guide.

And Waller said that one of the most significant outcomes from the revelations was that it:

Highlighted the fact that a system could be changed so dramatically without any update or policy going live, without any communication with current customers.

Rather than official changes to the staff guide, Hastie’s leak suggested the DWP is making these cuts through informal channels. In particular, this seemed to revolve around guidance. It included case studies and operational instructions issued by the department to staff administering the scheme.

The ‘waves of information’ that came out of the DWP’s method for the cuts

Waller has picked up on this. She described “waves of information” and “new rules” that have altered what AtW staff have said to her clients at different points:

For a long time, I don’t know how long, maybe a couple of months, it was like ‘you can only get support workers if you’ve had software and equipment first’. That was a thing that happened for a little while.

And then it was like, ‘Oh, you’re not going to be able to get any enabling hours. It’s all going to be job aid, because that’s just how it’s been for a while.

And it was for a while, ‘everyone needs to have an assessment’. And then that stuck for a while. And then it was, ‘Oh, you only need to have an assessment if we’re talking about software. ’

And then, for a time, it was like, you had an assessment, and then the case manager would really take that assessment and look at it and go, ‘right, I am going to give you everything I can on that list. ’ And now it’s ‘I’ll do what I want with that assessment’.

The way the department has issued this guidance has so far helped the DWP evade scrutiny. As it stands, there’s no way to pinpoint who or when in the department sent the changes that are now rippling into severe cuts to disabled people’s AtW awards.

Evading transparency, resisting scrutiny

Timms, about as much as he admitted, the DWP is counting on this fact. He told DNS’s Pring that the DWP would resist any FOI request to obtain the order on this. This was even though, as minister, he confessed he would have signed off on it.

The DWP has already dismissed one FOI request from the Canary around this. It concerned a senior civil servant who may have been responsible for the proposal. In this, we’d asked for staff guidance, including case studies on decisions regarding Job Aide and Support Workers. We made clear that the information didn’t have to constitute official policy changes and should include any guidance about the operational delivery of the scheme.

It quickly came back, and ignoring this entirely, the DWP’s bare-bones response read only:

We can confirm that there have been no changes to either the policy or the guidance supporting the delivery or application of the Support Worker Job Aide.

DWP staff will ‘try anything’ to limit support

When it comes to these cuts, Waller can highlight a few areas where the DWP seems to have issued operational guidance to restrict people’s grants.

Firstly, the “main” driver has been a “funnelling in Support Worker categories”. As a result, the DWP appears to be reclassifying Support Worker roles as Job Aides. In doing so, it can cap grants at 20% of employees’ hours. Specifically, it can do this on the basis that the Job Aide is replacing the work rather than enabling it, as the staff guide sets out.

Waller said case managers will:

Try anything they can to funnel what you’re asking for into a Job Aid support.

She said they have applied this to clients who “fit exactly” into their Staff Guide examples that require a Support Worker. And worryingly, despite the staff guide clearly spelling it out, Waller said:

We’ve had people say that support isn’t available, ‘you can’t get that on Access to Work’, even though the specific examples in the guidance might have been precisely matched to the client.

The second problem has arisen around rates of pay for Support Workers. Waller explained how the DWP made a “legitimate” change to this in the staff guide in 2023. However, she detailed that the guide still stipulates that there’s flexibility for an applicant to demonstrate the need for support that comes at a higher cost. The official guidance explicitly states that case managers should use regional “cost bandings” for Support Workers as a “guide,” rather than a hard-and-fast rule for awards.

But in her experience, this is not what case managers are doing in practice:

It’s like ‘these are the rates, full stop’.

The result has been the DWP refusing disabled people the grants to cover the specific level and types of support work they need.

Bartering of disabled people’s needs

Compounding this, Waller said the final major issue has revolved around the “bartering of hours”:

We’ve handed over documents and said, You know, this client needs 20 hours of support. They’ve gone, ‘how about eight?’ And then you say this person is going to lose their job, and they go, ‘How about nine or ten?’ So there’s been a bartering system happening. And the only reason that’s happening is because they’ve been instructed to do so.

Appallingly, Waller described how:

There’s no question about what would happen if they dramatically cut someone’s hours. And can you still do your job?’ That’s irrelevant.

In her long experience of supporting AtW clients, Waller had never seen such blatant bartering before last year:

I think, yes, there were obviously case managers going, ‘why do you need 20 hours? Can you not do 10 hours?’ But it would be more of a question. It would be, ‘Why do you need so many hours?’ It wasn’t, you know, on the phone, them going, ‘how many hours do you want?’ You say 20 and then they go, ‘How about eight?’ There wasn’t this instant bartering without any mitigation against why they want to reduce those hours.

And over the last year, the justification case managers have made to her and her clients has revolved around a particular phrase in the staff guide. Specifically, at the very top, the ‘principles’ of AtW set out how it’s there for “meeting minimum needs”. Now, case managers seem to be weaponising this to deny support:

We’ve now received justifications at the reconsideration and case manager levels, explaining why we haven’t given you X: Access to Work only supports your minimum needs.

However, Waller explained how problematic this is, not least because AtW never actually assesses an applicant’s minimum needs. Currently, there’s no formal process for this—the DWP has no assessment criteria in place.

So when Waller has asked case managers what they mean by it, they’ve not been able to explain:

Now, I’ve asked eight to ten case managers: ‘What do you mean by” minimum needs”?’ And no one has been able to answer the question.

Disabled people are losing livelihoods, health, and homes

Ultimately, Waller said that the confluence of all this means it is “completely pot luck” from case manager to case manager. But, as she emphasised:

The problem, obviously, with that is that we’re not talking about potluck, like how much money you’re going to win in the lottery. It’s how accessible you can work. Can you keep your job? Are you going to have to move jobs? Can you keep paying your rent or mortgage if you suddenly can’t work anymore? It’s enormous, life-changing things.

To put it simply, the consequences for disabled people have been devastating. Waller described how some AtW cuts have sent Decode’s clients to the hospital. This has been because the stress and anxiety of losing their award has exacerbated their health conditions. In another shameful case around the cuts, a disabled person:

Had to sell their house because they couldn’t afford the mortgage, because they lost their job, because they lost Access to Work.

At the end of the day, these are the realities of the department’s cuts to the scheme by stealth. Disabled people’s livelihoods – and lives – hang in the balance. Yet the DWP and its ministers haven’t the decency to be upfront with AtW customers about the very real changes they’re making—and without consultation.

The government can hide behind convenient “not official policy” excuses. However, it’s patently clear that it is instructing AtW staff to make de facto cuts. What it can’t hide is the very real result. Because disabled communities won’t stop speaking out and exposing the government’s sham excuses for all they’re worth.

Featured image via the Canary

By Hannah Sharland

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