On-demand training:

Our online, on-demand, eLearning service, launched in July 2021, aims to provide claimants, carers, and professionals with the knowledge, skills and support they need to make effective PIP applications and challenges.

We're really excited about the potential online education has to up-skill our community and combat the disempowerment many people feel when dealing with the Department for Work and Pensions and private assessment providers like Capita and IAS.

About Benefits and Work:

Benefits and Work was launched in 2002 by advice worker turned barrister Holiday Whitehead and benefits writer and trainer Steve Donnison, to provide independent and accurate information about how to claim and keep your benefits for both claimants and professionals.

Benefits and Work has a proud record of offering expert and up-to-date guidance to members through their website and PDF guides. We also deliver training and webinars to claimants, carers and professionals across the UK.

To find out about how to become a member of Benefits and Work, get access to our popular guides, and get discounts on training, click on the subscribe link below.

SUBSCRIBE TO BENEFITS AND WORK

Benefits and Work is unique amongst benefits information providers in that it asks for no funding or support from the government, local authorities, grant making trusts or large companies. Every penny of Benefits and Work's revenue comes from its subscribing members.

This complete independence means that Benefits and Work is free to publish information that makes it deeply unpopular with the Department for Work and Pensions, multinationals with an interest in benefits - such as Atos Healthcare, Unum Provident and Capita - and even other advice providers whose dependence on state and corporate funding may have made them reluctant to tell the whole truth.

Who we are:

Steve Donnison

Before launching Benefits and Work Steve worked in the voluntary sector for over 25 years, mainly with disadvantaged children and homeless adults.

He has been a welfare rights worker for more than a decade and continues to represent clients at social security tribunals for a local advice agency. He also trains advice workers, social workers, housing workers, health professionals and others who deal with welfare benefits in the course of their work.

Steve has written about welfare benefits for a wide range of disability organisations, including: Disability Alliance; National Association for Colitis and Crohn's disease; Spinal Injuries Association; Multiple Sclerosis Society; Cerebra, the foundation for brain injured children; Parkinson's Disease Society.

Holiday Whitehead

Holiday began her working life as an ancillary worker in an NHS hospital, where she became involved in trade union work for NUPE (now part of UNISON). Following a diploma course at Ruskin College, Oxford sponsored by the TUC and her trade union, Holiday went on to do a law degree at the University of East Anglia. At the same time Holiday began volunteering for an advice centre and, following her degree, became a full-time welfare rights worker and then an employment law specialist.

In 1998 Holiday returned to university to undertake her Bar finals and was called to the Bar in 1999.

Holiday practised as a barrister until January 2004 when, entirely frustrated with the lack of progress towards direct access to barristers made by the Bar Council, she ceased practising and became a freelance employment law consultant. Holiday is the co-author of all the guides on the site.