Personal Independence Payment

Asked by: Katie White (Labour - Leeds North West)

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the length of time to undertake a PIP review.

Answered by Stephen Timms - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)

We continue to prioritise new claims to PIP to ensure claims are put into payment as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this means many customers are waiting longer than expected for their review to be undertaken.

We have been actively recruiting additional Case Managers to meet increased demand for PIP, which means we are now in a position to begin to deploy additional resource onto award reviews. This will increase the number of review cases we can complete ‘in house’.

We have just moved to a new contract for the delivery of health assessments and our new suppliers will be taking steps to ensure they have sufficient capacity to deliver the required volume of assessments. However, this may take time and there is an extensive training period for new Healthcare Professionals to ensure quality standards are maintained.

We have introduced processes to increase efficiency and move cases through the system more quickly:

• Where sufficient evidence/information is available, Case Managers can make decisions on reviews, avoiding the need for a functional assessment, which means many customers receive a decision faster.
• Healthcare Professionals now complete most assessments by telephone, which means the vast majority of customers who need an assessment do not need to attend a face-to-face appointment at an Assessment Centre.
• We’ve introduced a change for customers with the most severe conditions, on the highest level of support, who now receive an ongoing PIP award which is only subject to a light touch review every 10 years. .

For customers waiting for a review, we keep them regularly updated using SMS text messages. We also ensure all PIP customers awaiting a review remain in payment, extending awards for up to 12 months where necessary, notifying customers in writing to allay concerns.