An account from a frontline support worker
The headlines about the proposed changes to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit are bad enough, but there are also subtleties happening in the sidelines that we all should pay attention to.
The changes to disability benefits drawn up in Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working Green Paper are meant to be part of a government consultation. That the most impactful changes are actually not up for consultation at all should ring alarm bells for everyone. Changes to PIP scoring and cuts to the Limited Capability for Work Related Activities (LCWRA) awards on Universal Credit – the two main proposals – have not been put up for debate. Only our MPs voting against it can prevent these from becoming law.
The two main proposals of the government consultation aren’t up for consultation.
Another issue rarely talked about is how difficult it already is to access PIP and LCWRA. We’re told of cases where people have managed to ‘game the system’ to maximise these benefits for life, living it large at the expense of the taxpayer. The reality is that going through a PIP application or a Work Capability Assessment is incredibly hard, and applicants rely on specialised support to even start filling in the forms.
Services such as Citizens Advice Bureau, HARC UK (Hastings Advice and Representation Centre), and the Advice Centre run by Possability People provide support for those starting a new application or going through a review. However these are increasingly struggling to keep up with demand, and the bureaucracy you have to follow to even use them seems designed to fail more often than it works.
Let’s consider a typical experience applying for PIP. This might start with a call to one of the services listed above, where the claimant is asked to call the PIP helpline and order the physical forms for their application. Then the timer starts – within a month from the date on a letter accompanying the forms, you need to return them to DWP. You might not get this letter for days, or even weeks, and an appointment with one of the advisory services can’t be made until you have the forms at hand.
When the form arrives, the claimant can call the service back to book an appointment for support filling it out, but by then be there might be no more appointments available in that timeframe. This happens so often that the advice is to ask for a time extension when you first apply for the forms, provided you have a good reason (no support to fill it in might be one), to get a fighting chance to send them back on time.
At the appointment, the claimant will have to deal with DWP’s own vocabulary, which sounds and reads very much like words we use every day, but has very specific meanings that might affect how someone answers a question. The services listed above are trained on how to go about these questions, and without them, few people would be able to express the reality of how their disability affects them.
Forms filled in, it’s time to compile evidence. The strongest possible are medical records, reports from health professionals, and the ever-so-important ‘Private Letter from the GP’, a service offered by surgeries where a GP will attest to how a condition affects the claimant. The catch: surgeries in our area talk of 28 to 42 days’ turnaround on getting this letter ready. One glance at the deadlines to return the PIP forms will show that this is unworkable. Most surgeries will allow for special requests for urgency, but a lot of claimants don’t feel they can or know to ask for it. Also, these letters cost anything from £25 to £35 in Hastings/St Leonards (they don’t come under the NHS) and many people applying don’t have that money spare. To top it all off, the claimant is asked to tell the GP what to write in the letter – and yes, it stands to reason that this would be the case, given that the GP can’t write just any generic information – but without support many don’t know where to begin. I know I wouldn’t!
And all that I just described is only to send the forms back for an original claim. If the claim is refused (there might be a phone or in-person assessment in between all this), there is a process called ‘Mandatory Reconsideration’ available upon request. Again, there’s a one month deadline from the refusal letter date (which could mean less than three weeks by the time the letter arrives) and no supporting evidence sent in the original claim will be accepted. Despite that, any service supporting a claimant will advise them to try for it, because even though awards following Mandatory Reconsideration have been decreasing year-on-year for a long time, the next stage is a tribunal appeal. The appeal is yet another round of bureaucracy, stress, and time without money, but more than half of the refusals get overturned. In other words…
Over 50% of applicants should not have been refused.
The should frankly be infuriating to anyone, whether in receipt of PIP or not. The amount of time, money, and resources wasted in this process is beyond belief. And it’s hard not to believe there’s an unfair weight against applicants when original claims are being assessed.
Applicants for PIP and LCWRA are not lazy people, they are suffering, mentally or physically. Some of them might even be under life-threatening pressures while making an application. Every time they’re refused – perhaps just for missing an inflexible and impractical deadline – it’s not only frustrating or depressing, it’s another meal they have to skip, another health appointment they can’t travel to, another essential mental health support they can’t receive.
Support is available, but the services that offer them are often overwhelmed with demand, when not fighting for funding to keep the provision alive. The teams tasked with this kind of support are highly specialised and of life-changing impact to our communities, yet their funding is cut as often as it’s increased.
The idea that people have found a way to rig the system in their favour is beyond a fallacy. It’s more like a well-designed piece of propaganda that permeates society slowly but surely, creating a commonly accepted lie that some are taking more than they deserve from the welfare system. Anyone who thinks disabled folk are the ones doing the ‘taking,’ has no idea of how difficult it is to have to prove your disability to a DWP decision maker… and it is about to get way more difficult if these proposals become law.