SERCO PIP assessment recording only available by phone, not video

I advise everyone to make use of the recording facility on online assessments. Now that we have had a rejection come through for my son's PIP renewal, I wish I'd stuck to my original intention and done so.

My son recently had an assessment for renewal of his PIP claim. He has ADHD and learning difficulties. I elected to have this done via video, as I thought it would aid communication in the meeting. However, when the meeting began with the Serco assessor, I was informed that we could only record it if we switched to a phone call. (I realised later that the letter had mentioned this, but hadn't quite realised at the time.) I declined the offer as the assessor seemed very pleasant and I thought the video setup would be better for my son in terms of communication.

The decision letter has now come through and my son has been denied PIP completely, despite previously qualifying under both criteria. I do now regret not having switched to the phone call option, despite the inconvenience and detrimental effect on communication, because at least we'd have an authoritative record of what was said. Nonetheless, we will go through the mandatory consideration and appeal process, as we have done before. When we did this previously, we won a great victory at the First Tier Tribunal, helped greatly by the Benefits and Work materials, so I am hopeful that a similar result can be repeated this time.