PIP points for Communicating & Mixing with people?

I’m Appointee for my son who has ‘high functioning’ autism and anxiety. He had to move from DLA to PIP. He has just been awarded standard rate for daily living and same for mobility. He scored 11 points for daily living needs. He received 4 points for mixing with other people, but none for communicating. The decision letter says that ‘restrictions engaging with others are not considered within the communicating activity and have been considered within the engaging with other people face to face activity’. Which makes sense.

The decision maker then says as my son has no cognitive or sensory restrictions that affect his ability to express and receive verbal communication, she has decided he can manage this unaided. My son’s difficulties with verbal communication are because of his autism and anxiety and I explained this on the form - and that he needs support in communicating- from me or his placement support worker. Should the decision maker have considered this or can she just say that this support is for engaging with other people and not for communicating?

When my son is just with me he can generally speak and understand me, because I’m used to his needs. His difficulties with communication are greater with other people because of his anxiety. I gave examples on the form that because he takes time to process what is being said to him and he gets anxious about how to respond, he often loses the thread of what is being said to him. He can’t manage being asked several different things at once or being given too many options (eg Would you like to eat now? Or maybe just a snack and we’ll eat later?) He’d get flustered and not manage to respond at all. I don’t know if that counts as finding it difficult to understand verbal information. He likes to have instructions written down so he can look at them as he may have missed some of what was said. He struggles with verbal communication because he’s also trying to work out non verbal stuff like body language at the same time.

My son needs me to attend appointments like F2F assessments with him - he is anxious about engaging with other people and much of that anxiety is because of difficulties communicating with them.

Thanks Gordon. I’ve only got limited evidence of my son’s communication difficulties (in his EHCP) so I’m not going to challenge the award of no points for this activity . It just seems that the DWP’s definition of communication is limited to those with cognitive or sensory impairments, and it doesn’t recognise the very real difficulties individuals on the autistic spectrum can have.