ESA - Appeal Advice Needed

Hi Guys

I am a new member and am looking for some advice if possible.

First of all, can I just say this is a great website and the advice and guides given here are fantastic. Please keep up the good work as I can see you are helping so many people on what can be described as stressful issues !!

I was hoping that I could get some advice from people in respect of a claim for my mother. I will give a short background to the case below.

My mother had been receiving disability living allowance and incapacity benefit for the past 3 or so years as she has mobility issues i.e. walking short distances causes back and leg pain and makes her become tired really quickly. We received notification that she needed to complete a new Employment Support Allowance application (as we assumed this was going to replace disability living allowance and/or incapacity benefit).

I completed the forms on behalf of my mother in July this year and sent them back off. I wish I had known of this website then as I can see you provide good guides on completing the forms etc !!!

We received a response to say my mother needed to have a face-to-face assessment with ATOS. I did some research and saw that they have received bad press, so we were both apprehensive about the assessment. The assessment was due for a Friday afternoon 3pm, so I took a day off work to accompany my mother. ATOS called in the morning to say they had to cancel the appointment as one of their staff was off ill. I explained that I had taken a day off and that it was not my fault that the person had become ill. The lady at ATOS then sarcastically commented that they would have to cancel someone else's appointment. At about 2.25pm, we got another call from ATOS to ask where we were and I explained that the appointment was at 3pm and that we only had to be there 10 minutes before. The Lady said she wanted to make sure we were on time for the appointment. We got to the assessment centre and the assessment started at 3.20pm (late as you can guess).

The assessment lasted about 25-30 minutes. We got a letter through about 2 weeks ago to say my mother was not entitled to ESA as she scored 0 points. Having read the explanation provided, I was livid as they had blatantly lied about certain points and their explanation of why 0 points were scored on various categories can be argued.

The intention is to appeal the decision and wanted to get your advice on the following:

- In my letter notifying of the appeal, should I cover each point I am not happy with (the above could mean about 4-5 pages of explanations and I wanted to see if this would be too long) or should the initial letter for the appeal be short?

- I could get my mother's GP to draft a letter on my mother's condition (or cover a specific point on a specific descriptor) – should I get this now or can I submit my appeal letter and then submit this afterwards (thinking about timing issues)?

Anything else you think I should cover in the letter will be much appreciated.

Apologies for the length of the post !!

Kind regards
BoomBoom

Gordon

Thank you so much for your reply.

I have gone through a few of the guides and will do so in more detail this weekend – from first reading, they are really good and very informative.

I forgot to mention that I had completed the GL24 appeal form.

I will go through the guide and if I have any further questions, I will ask on this post if that is ok.

Kind regards
BoomBoom