Ending the Culture of Fear: Reforming the PIP assessment system to get decisions right first time
Much of the political and media debate about Personal Independence Payment (PIP) has focused on the idea that it’s too easy to qualify. A new report from Z2K – Ending the Culture of Fear: Reforming the PIP assessment system to get decisions right the first time – shows the opposite, explaining why decision-making is so often wrong and how it can be fixed. Nearly four in five (77%) PIP appeals are successful, highlighting the scale of poor assessments and flawed decisions that are leaving disabled people wrongly refused support and pushed into financial hardship. The Timms Review offers a vital opportunity to reform the system and get decisions right first time.
The punitive assessment system is holding disabled people back from trying work
This poor decision-making is not only trapping disabled people in poverty by preventing them from accessing the support they need. It is also holding disabled people back from entering work, which flies in the face of the government’s Get Britain Working agenda. We found that this punitive approach to assessments has created a culture of fear which is leaving disabled people afraid to take step towards work in case it is used against them by DWP at a future PIP assessment. Concerningly, we also found evidence of a real basis for this fear: our advice services have dealt cases with where the DWP wrongly removed PIP entitlement from someone because they had tried work, only for the decision to be overturned at tribunal.
Disabled people are being wrongly refused PIP
We identified three areas where the current PIP system is going wrong. Firstly, assessors are failing to apply the PIP eligibility criteria correctly, particularly the ‘reliability’ criteria and the rules around fluctuating conditions. Secondly, assessors are giving insufficient weight to medical evidence or interpreting it in a narrow way. Finally, assessors are often wrongly dismissing or ignoring the claimant’s own evidence about how their condition affects them, and instead placing excessive weight on their own poor-quality observations.
We need to move away from the broken assessment model
To fix this broken system, we are proposing that the government should overhaul the broken PIP assessment system. It should do this by:
- Improving decision-makers’ & claimants’ understanding of the eligibility criteria
- Introducing a fast-track route for claimants meeting certain prescribed medical criteria
- Moving away from the model of assessment as default
- Broadly retaining the eligibility criteria, which we find – as applied by a tribunal – do a good job of capturing the range of needs and circumstances of disabled people
Dialling up the meanness of our disability benefits system has been counterproductive. We are calling on the government to end the cycle of cuts and punishment by making a decisive break from the failed approaches of the past, towards a system that we can all be proud of, and which actually does what it says on the tin.