The House of Lords is debating the Welfare Reform Bill, which could bring about the most radical upheaval in the country’s welfare system since Beveridge. Among the reforms under scrutiny, is the plan to abolish a vital benefit called Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and replace it with a new benefit: the Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

It costs more to live in our society as a disabled person. Both DLA and PIP are designed to help contribute towards these significant extra costs – costs like paying for private transport when public alternatives are inaccessible; purchasing specialist equipment; or installing adaptations to improve otherwise unsuitable housing. We know from our research and from our daily conversations with disabled people that DLA is a lifeline of support. PIP will be too.

But, Scope has uncovered a fundamental flaw in the government’s plans to introduce this new benefit: that is, it won’t be targeted at those who need it most. The government wants to ensure that PIP is an “enabling benefit that supports disabled people to overcome the barriers they face to leading full and independent lives”. However, as highlighted in our new report, The Future of PIP: a social model based approach, published today, the government wants to introduce a medical assessment that won’t help it achieve this otherwise laudable aim. Moreover, it could see a repeat of the problems it faced with another tick box medical test: the Work Capability Assessment, which determines fitness for work but has seen thousands of people appealing decisions by assessors; forty percent of these appeals are found in favour of the claimant.

Unless the PIP assessment considers the real social, practical and environmental barriers that disabled people face, thousands of people could be left with the wrong support and in some cases no support at all. Disabled people’s lives are too rich, too diverse for the multitude of barriers they face to be reduced down to solely the limitations caused by their impairment.

Ensuring that those who face the greatest barriers get the support they need is no easy task; we appreciate the size of the challenge it poses, particularly in an age of austerity. Parties of all colours are struggling with trying to set out a vision of a welfare system that encourages contribution and participation (and this is exactly what DLA does), while still protecting the most vulnerable. At a time when rhetoric about scroungers and ‘something for something’ seems ubiquitous, there is real risk of undermining the many, but often less visible, ways disabled people contribute to our society; people who contribute everyday – some by working and paying into the economy, but others by volunteering in our communities, getting involved in local issues, and caring for family, friends and neighbours.

With our economy still convalescing from the recent recession, and in the grip of public spending cuts, it is perhaps all too tempting to talk about contribution only in terms of those who are able to work. But doing so risks overshadowing the rewards we reap from disabled people and others who contribute to it in other ways. Not only that, but it skewers the balanced debate we need about what we want from our welfare system. Ultimately, it could undermine our obligations to provide support – in the form of benefits like PIP – to those who need it most in turbulent times.

Eugene Grant is public policy adviser at Scope