PiP Appeal Hearing - Advice Needed

sue1906 wrote: Hi, my wife has an Appeal Hearing for her PIP benefit she was awarded in March. We have submitted an initial submission but are now just bolstering our defence. The appeal is on September 11th.

We are querying the validity of the medical report made by the assessor. There are various sections where we have answered the question and the assessor has written something different. The advice from this website states that we should detail just the strongest issues for submission.

If anyone can help with some advice on this it would be greatly appreciated. Just want to make sure I submit enough correct information to help our case.

Welcome to the forum.

Your wife will only be awarded PIP if she can show that she meets the criteria for the benefit, so whilst it might seem sensible to attack the assessment report this will not, in itself result in an award.

I would start by reviewing our PIP Claim guide to make sure that she puts the best case forward to show that she is eligible and the PIP Appeal guide and other documents that will help you with the process.

www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/help-for-claimants/pip

Once she has done this you should give some thought to addressing the issues in the report.

First, there are many reasons you may have failed, you need to address each of these but don't get bogged down in criticising the assessment report unless you can clearly show that it is incorrect, it is a lot easier to argue the facts of the situation;

"the assessor recorded that I walked 50m, I did but they have failed to document that I had to stop every 10m for a rest due to breathlessness"

than their opinions

"based on my observations of the claimant walking I believe that they can reliably walk more than 200m.

Secondly, don't waste your time arguing facts that are not relevant to your wife's situation or where the issues are trivial, whilst the panel are required to read all of the documents included in the appeal, this could be a significant number of pages and you want to make sure that they pay attention to the important ones.

If you have any more questions then please reply to this post and we will do our best to help.

Gordon