In July, the Government’s review into personal independence payments (PIP), a benefit to help people with long-term health conditions and disabilities cover extra living costs, found it is “not fit for purpose”. The bill is forecast to cost taxpayers more than £40bn by the end of the decade.

Critics say that people with some conditions shouldn’t be eligible, and that it’s unfair on those who need PIP to get by. Others say that without PIP, vulnerable people would be left unable to make ends meet.

So, should PIP be cut? Conservative councillor and personal finance expert give their perspectives.

When we talk about money, we talk endlessly about pensions, tax allowances and savings. We rarely talk about the fact that the benefits system is often the hardest part of the financial picture to navigate. Often, it’s the people who are most financially vulnerable that need that help the most.

Personal independence payments (PIP) are a clear example of this for me. The PIP form doesn’t really specifically ask how ill you actually are. What it does is ask whether you can do certain tasks reliably, repeatedly, safely and to an acceptable standard, on your worst days as much as your best.

Recently, a woman got in touch who told us she had been turned down for PIP. She had a serious, long-term condition and on paper she obviously qualified. However, when the form asked whether she could prepare a meal, she wrote “yes”. Because on a good day, she can.

But what she hadn’t written was that most days she can’t stand long enough to cook, that her hands shake and she sometimes burns herself, and that she’d stopped using the hob after a fire. She answered the form honestly. On the face of it, she just answered the question the way any normal person would read it, rather than the way the system needs it to be read.

That gap is what catches people out. I founded financialeducation.co.uk after years working in pensions and benefits, because knowing what you’re entitled to, and how to actually get it, is, for me, a basic financial skill.

There’s been a lot written about so-called “sickfluencers” who help people navigate the welfare system and answer questions in the way that the system rewards, and a lot of that has been negative. But I think helping people have more power over their money is the moral thing to do.

I don’t think people fully understand how their answers are seen by assessors, so they undersell themselves as they usually want to demonstrate that they are trying their best. They write “I manage” out of pride, and leave boxes half empty because reliving the worst of your condition for a stranger is something people probably feel uncomfortable with.

It’s easy to talk yourself out of a PIP claim without even realising. The form turns on how far you can walk in metres, but that’s hard to visualise; we think instead of the distance to the bus stop, or to the kitchen, or across the room.

So I tell people to picture something they can see. A large sofa is about two metres, a single-decker bus is around 10. If you’d have to stop and rest before you reached the end of the bus, that matters, and it needs to be on the form. Give someone a picture they can hold in their head and they describe their own life far more accurately. Doing this is really helpful for the PIP form.

And this is a part of what troubles me a lot. The reality is that succeeding at PIP has become a skill in itself. A system that rewards the articulate and the well-advised over people with the exact same needs isn’t testing need; it’s testing who can decode it. These aren’t, in my experience, people trying to cheat the system. They’re trying to describe a complicated reality against criteria that were never written in plain English.

There is help out there. Citizens Advice does excellent work walking people through the form, and disability charities such as Mind, Scope and Age UK are often superb, because they understand exactly how a condition maps onto the descriptors. But as you’d expect, this free help is stretched to breaking point, and demand vastly outstrips needs. So many people end up facing that form alone, at the worst moment of their lives.

Or, they turn to YouTube and watch videos like the one we have on our Retirement and Money show channel. That’s the space we try to fill, with plain English about what’s being asked and why. We do it so that someone watching at their kitchen table at midnight, no doubt stressed about getting it right, isn’t guessing.

I do think that there’s a real national debate to be had about PIP: how many people claim it, what it costs and whether the criteria are right. That conversation is legitimate. But whatever the rules become, they’ll only ever be fair if the people they’re meant to help can understand them and don’t feel like they need to play a game with the assessors.

Helping someone answer honestly, accurately and in full isn’t gaming anything. It’s making sure the door opens for the people entitled to walk through it.