Tue Dec 18, 2018 2:49 am
One in four people in Coventry receiving disability benefits have had their payments stopped by assessors, as part of the roll-out of a new system
Charity Scope said that many disabled people are "losing out on vital support" under the new system, which it says is beset with problems.
Since 2013, the Government has been moving claimants from Disability Living Allowance to the Personal Independence Payment.
The DWP decide how much to award based on a "how your disability affects you" form and a points score from the face-to-face assessment, as well as any supporting evidence that the claimant provides.
In Coventry, 24 per cent of Disability Living Allowance claimants failed the assessment for PIP.
According to the Department for Work and Pensions, 8,115 people in Coventry have applied to switch from DLA to PIP since it was introduced, and 1,984 of them were rejected after a face-to-face assessment.
Since the beginning of the PIP roll-out, the DWP has also rejected 228 people for missing their assessment appointment.
A further 437 people were turned down because they did not send in the correct form on time.
Scope said that it regularly speaks with disabled people who are put off by the complexity and stress of applying for PIP.
A spokesperson said: “It is deeply worrying that so many disabled people are losing out on vital support when being reassessed for PIP.
"The entire system needs to be much more focused on the needs of the individual.
"With record levels of appeals against decisions successful, the whole decision making process is beset with problems."
In 2017, a survey by Disability Rights UK found that many claimants thought that the face-to-face assessment was "a punishing and traumatic process".
Survey respondents said that assessors were "ill-informed and not suitably knowledgeable of the disability they are preparing to assess".
Thu Dec 20, 2018 11:12 pm
DWP admits more than 4,500 people were wrongly stripped of their benefits
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has admitted that more than 4,500 disabled people have been wrongly stripped of their benefits.
Ministers admitted on Thursday that thousands of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) claimants who were transferred to the new Personal Independence Payment (PIP) were left without their benefits for failing to turn up for assessments, despite having a “good reason” to do so.
People who missed PIP assessments had their DLA terminated as a result, but the department has admitted that around 4,600 of those claimants were found to have had a “good reason” for not attending or participating in the assessments.
Buried error
The error was buried in the bottom of a written statement on the last day of Parliament before MPs go into recess for Christmas.
The claimants are expected to be paid back in the new year.
Fri Dec 21, 2018 2:16 pm
Mon Dec 24, 2018 1:33 pm
Mon Dec 24, 2018 2:01 pm
Mon Dec 24, 2018 4:29 pm
Sat Jan 19, 2019 5:40 pm
Unfit DWP should be axed, says thinktank
Ministers should consider abolishing the Department for Work and Pensions after its failure to help ill and disabled people out of poverty, a leading thinktank has said.
Most of the work of Amber Rudd’s department could be carried out more effectively by other Whitehall ministries, according to a report by Demos.
Tom Pollard, the report’s author, spent 18 months at the DWP on secondment from mental health charity Mind. By the end of his time there he concluded that the “DWP is institutionally and culturally incapable of making the reforms needed to achieve such a shift in outcomes for ill and disabled people, or for ‘harder-to-help’ groups more widely”.
The report concludes that while the DWP has been able to help people with minor difficulties into employment, the outcomes are “much poorer when it comes to supporting people with more complex needs”, such as the ill, disabled, older people, those with drug and alcohol problems, ex-prisoners and the homeless.
It calls for the DWP to be stripped of responsibility for these hard-to-help groups, with the health department and NHS helping the ill find work, local government taking over Jobcentre Plus, and benefits and pensions delivered by HMRC. The charitable sector could also be given a bigger role.
“If the removal of these functions from the DWP proves to be a success, a more comprehensive approach could see the department abolished altogether,” the report concludes. “If the department as it stands remains at the heart of employment support for ‘harder-to-help’ groups, we will face further years of well-intentioned reforms and programmes yielding disappointing outcomes, because of how they will be formulated and how they will be received.”
It accuses the department of seeing claimants through a “benefits lens”, in which conditions were placed on their payments as a way of forcing them into work. He warns that the department’s reputation among many groups is now so bad that it may prove impossible and expensive to improve. “A bad reputation is far harder to lose than a good one,” he writes.