Pipped off: the problem with PIP

For months now, more people have come to Citizens Advice about Personal Independence Payment (PIP) than any other benefit issue. It’s such an important lifeline for so many people, but the way the benefit is delivered creates unnecessary problems. With PIP set to take on an enhanced role in upcoming reforms to disability benefits, these issues will only grow if left unresolved.

As it stands, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is getting it wrong too often…

When you speak to our advisers about PIP, one of the first things they’ll tell you about is the huge number of people they see who are entitled to the benefit but are denied it when they first apply, even in those cases where they’ve been supported by our advisers to complete the application.

Over 1 in 7 of all initial decisions made by DWP not to award the full amount of PIP go on to be overturned. That’s a huge error rate and leads to many people investing time and effort challenging those wrong decisions. Some of these disputes are resolved between DWP and claimants, but over 90,000 people a year end up at a tribunal. The vast majority (68%) win and have the initial decision overturned in their favour.

This causes claimants huge stress now, but in the future these assessments will not only decide an individual’s eligibility for PIP payments themselves, but also whether they’re entitled to the health and disability element within Universal Credit. Long, drawn out disputes will damage claimants’ relationship with the DWP, with any energy they might have been able to invest in looking for work instead spent in fighting for their benefit payment.

…and these bad decisions are in part a result of bad evidence

Mistakes are happening in part because the application process isn’t producing good quality evidence. DWP make their decision on the basis of 3 kinds of evidence — an application form submitted by claimants, supporting medical evidence, and an assessment report — but there are problems with each of these.

• According to our advisers, completing the application process is the most common reason why people come to Citizens Advice for support. Almost all of our advisers say that people aren’t confident applying on their own, and over half say people have difficulties understanding the process
• Medical evidence can support an application, but it can be difficult to access and isn’t always helpful. Many GPs charge fees for letters and often aren’t able to provide the necessary detail to help determine eligibility
• Private contractors carry out a health assessment and provide a report to DWP, but these are often of poor quality. Claimants are the most important source of information about how their condition affects their day to day life but the way assessments are carried out doesn’t give people the opportunity to get this across

…or a result of placing too much emphasis on the assessment

Our advisers see cases where people submit strong applications with all the right evidence, only to find it ignored in favour of a poor quality assessment report.

And that’s a huge part of why so many decisions are overturned. 1 in 3 of those decisions overturned at tribunal are because of “cogent oral evidence”. In other words, people were able to get their account across at tribunal in a way that the assessment didn’t allow for. And over half of cases get overturned because the tribunal came to a different conclusion on the basis of the same facts.

And there’s a wider cost of failure in the PIP application process

DWP’s own research into the work aspirations of disabled claimants highlights distrust as a key barrier to people taking up employment-related support in the future, due to the perception of a “hidden agenda of cutting benefits and costs”. With PIP’s application process set to become the most important touch point in the reformed system for disabled claimants, without action to improve the process it will be impossible to shift the dial on claimants’ trust in the system.