PIP disallowance affecting ESA and Housing Benefit

AL

Let's get the easy things out of the way, don't worry about SSCS1 form at the moment, you cannot make an appeal until an MR has been completed.

Questions: Was this a new claim for PIP with no award of DLA in place. What ESA are you receiving, Contributions Based or Income Related?

You can only receive ESA(IR as a full time student if you are receiving DLA or PIP, if it is ESA(CB) it should not be an issue. If you do receive ESA(IR) then you must inform the ESA department that your DLA will be stopping.

If you ESA stops then your Housing Benefit will stop as well, but you can contact your Local Authority and it should be possible to continue to receive HB as a nil income claimant.

As to your PIP claim.

An unplanned intervention is a Change of Circumstances reported by the claimant against an existing award, this is why this has not been accepted,

The first stage to challenging a Decision is for you to request a Mandatory Reconsideration, this needs to be done in writing to the DWP, within one month of the Decision, to the office that dealt with your claim, have a look at our PIP MR & Appeal guide for details of the process and template letters that you can use to make the request with.

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

You say you have the PA4, that was quick, are you sure it is not the Decision Makers Statement of Reasons? If it is then phone thee DWP for a copy but again follow up the request in writing.

Your primary task is to show that you meet the criteria, 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.

Make sure that you fully understand the criteria against which you are being assessed, many of the PIP Activities have multiple elements and you must meet all of these for an award.

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

Gordon

AL

Thanks for the additional information to try and answer the points you raise.

Unless the college offers the course you are doing as a part-time option as well as a full-time one then you may struggle to classed a part time. It is not the number of hours that matters but how the course is defined from the outset.

What you are trying to do is to show that you meet the criteria to score the points you believe that you should get for each activity, you may have already done this on your PIP2 form and the attached evidence, so it may be just a matter of drawing the DM's attention to the relevant section, once you are happy that you've shown why you should score points you can then address the issues raised in the PA4, but where you can, stick to easily corroborated facts rather than the assessor's opinions, if you do have to do this then you need to show why the opinion is invalid.

Both the assessor and the Decision Maker should read all of the evidence available for the claim and make a balanced judgement as to what is reasonable and what is not, unfortunately this does not always happen. However even if they do read it, it does not mean that they will assign your information with the same weight that you do. Any complaint you might want to make about the process should be handled separately from any MR and/or appeal.

Your concerns about being assessed by a physiotherapist may be valid but you would need to show that this had materially effected the quality of the assessment that was produced, this cannot be assumed just because they have no medical training in mental health issues. All assessors will have successfully completed a DWP defined training course and test in Disability Assessment, meaning that a physio is at least in principle, trained to assess you for PIP whatever your conditions.

For the Going Out activity have a look at the PIP appeal section, there are several documents that refer to the DWP's perverse use of "prompting" to deal with all the issues that a claimant might experience when leaving their home.

You haven't expanded on Engaging with other people, if you were marked as needing prompting for this then you need to have a look at the Claim guide, this activity is a good (bad) example of how the criteria can change as more points are offered.

As to Washing and Dressing, these things need to done reliably and for the majority of days, so you should be able to argue that being clean and kempt of one day when for the rest of the month (or whatever the period is) you are not is not a reasonable assumption.

The assessment centre may well have CCTV but this would not have been in any of the assessment rooms, so unless there is something you are concerned about while you approached or left the building them I would not expect it to be of any value. If you want it you will have to issue a Subject Access Request for a copy.

Gordon