In March 2025, we uncovered the scale of teenagers who lose their disability benefits on the cusp of adulthood.
We found teenagers with incurable conditions were among hundreds a week being stripped of disability benefits after their 16th birthday.
Our analysis of DWP data revealed that nearly a third of those who received Disability Living Allowance in childhood had their initial claims for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) rejected when trying to move to the adult benefit.
Among 124,000 affected between 2013 and 2024 were young people with incurable conditions including cancer, psychosis, epilepsy, blindness and deafness.
Disability charity Scope said a "complex, adversarial and difficult to navigate system" contributed to the rejections.
The story came as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer called the current welfare system "unsustainable, indefensible and unfair".
For our investigation, we created tables from the Child DLA to PIP Reassessment data available at the government's Stat-Xplore data hub.
Our analysis of almost 12 years of data focused on the outcomes of initial claims only, so that findings were not distorted by the outcome of any subsequent appeals.
We combined the ‘Award increased’, ‘Award unchanged’ and ‘Award decreased’ columns to get a figure for claims that were allowed and similarly combined all columns representing disallowed claims to come up with a total sum for rejected claims between April 2013 and October 2024.
We analysed the figures at a local authority level and, separately, by condition to establish the proportion of disallowed claims and the primary reasons for the claims being disallowed, i.e. failed assessments or failure to attend appointments.
We also analysed the data by condition - i.e. the “main disabling condition” the claimant had received support for under Child DLA rules - to establish which disabilities were most likely to be associated with a rejected claim.
Using Stat-Xplore, we created a month-by-month table and combined that data to allow us to analyse trends by financial year.
We obtained and analysed comparable data from Northern Ireland and - in recognition of the DWP data excluding Scotland from March 2022 due to the introduction of Child and Adult Disability Payments there - we also analysed the latest available data at an age level for Scottish benefits claimants.
We produced this story pack and this dataset
The story was used across the BBC and by partner outlets including:
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BBC Newsbeat
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Radio One
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BBC South East Tonight
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BBC Sussex News
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BBC Nottingham
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BBC Stoke
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BBC London
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BBC Norfolk
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BBC North
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BBC Jersey
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BBC Newcastle
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BBC Berkshire