pip

Ian

The informal observations will have been made before and after the assessment, for example they will know how far it is from the nearest station or parking space to the front door of the assessment office, how far to reception and how far from there to each interview room. They will have watched as your partner walked to the interview room to see what difficulties they had walking and how they were when they got to the room.

You can certainly argue reliability but be aware that there is no requirement for the walk to have been pain free and even for your partner to not have experienced breathlessness, it is only when the walk is limited by these that it should be taken into account.

It's not unusual for the assessor and DM to ignore issues of reliability but be aware, some of the associated metrics, for example the time between repeats, are not defined and you will need to argue a reasonable case.

There's a guide to the DLA walking test in the DLA section, although not entirely applicable to PIP it does have some useful information about the issues.

Gordon

Ian wrote: Hi, it was a home assesment and my partner didn't move off the sofa

Then you can add this to your arguments, it certainly should negate any opinions from the "informal observations" but you still need to show that your partner cannot reliably on the majority of days walk more than 20m.

Gordon