Disability Benefits: Assessments Debate
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Gill Furniss
Main Page: Gill Furniss (Labour - Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough)Department Debates - View all Gill Furniss's debates with the Department for Work and Pensions
Disability Benefits: Assessments
Gill Furniss Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
The hon. Member has made some fantastic points. Figures show that only 11% of applicants are successful in challenging the PIP award as part of the mandatory consideration process. Applicants who take their appeal to tribunals, where a judge makes a decision, are awarded their enhancement nearly 80% of the time. Does that not say that judges are becoming the doctors? Surely that is the wrong way round.
Elliot Colburn
I am grateful to the hon. Lady; she makes a good point. She has glimpsed a bit further into my speech, but if she is happy to bear with me I will certainly cover that point.
Without adding too much to the list of asks for the Minister, what does he think about giving a greater role to specialists who are more known to the claimant?
I want to move on to talk about the assessment process and the wider system. Often, claimants, faced with something with which they have previously had little or no contact, will talk about a sense of interrogation or mistrust between them and the assessor—I have heard those words from claimants many times. As I say, almost every conversation I have had with a constituent or one of the petition creators has been prefaced with a line about nervousness, stress or other emotions in the lead-up to the assessment, alongside any physical or mental difficulties that a claimant may have. All too often, perhaps unintentionally or unwittingly, they are left feeling like they are a case number rather than a person.
Let me bring up another example, which is also about a PIP claimant with mobility-based problems. They turned up for their assessment and the lift in the assessment centre was broken. Despite their mobility issues and fearing that if they were not able to attend there might be consequences, they attempted to climb the stairs. After a significant amount of time, they managed to arrive for their assessment, but it had caused them a great deal of pain and a lot of stress, and the fact that they were able to get up the stairs was then used against them in the report.