Personal Independence Payments

Debate between Michael Connarty and Tom Clarke

Tuesday 28th October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clarke]

I am glad that my hon. Friend intervened to underline my assertion that problems exist throughout the whole United Kingdom.

The truth is that the picture is depressing, and it is not as if the Department for Work and Pensions has not been warned. The National Audit Office, which published a report in February 2014 entitled “Personal Independence Payment: early progress”, investigated the performance of the DWP as it introduced PIP. It found that

“the Department did not allow enough time to test whether the assessment process could handle large numbers of claims. As a result of this poor early operational performance, claimants face long and uncertain delays and the Department has had to delay the wider roll-out of the programme.”

The Department anticipated that it would take 74 days to decide on a claim, but the actual average wait is 107 days. For terminally ill claimants—I underline “terminally ill”—the process was taking 28 days on average against a departmental assumption of 10 days. That represents a wholly unrealistic assumption of the capacities of both the Department for Work and Pensions and Atos in Scotland. The end result is a system that would not work on paper, clearly does not work in practice and is further straining claimants’ finances and health.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said in response to the NAO report:

“The Department need to understand the causes of this backlog to develop a clear plan on how they are going to work with contractors to clear it, and ensure there are suitable processes in place to make sure this does not happen again.”

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I have experience in my constituency, as I am sure my right hon. Friend does in his, of people winning an appeal after a considerable amount of time. The person will receive their PIP allowance some six months after, but their housing benefit is not backdated to the point at which they lost their disability allowance. When the benefit is lost, the person also loses their passport to housing benefit, but local authorities do not backdate to the day when the person lost their disability or other benefit. People are therefore left with substantial debts in their housing account that no one will pay for.

[Mr Clarke]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. If I may say so, I am pleased that we have here so many Coatbridge-born Members of Parliament, including my hon. Friends the Members for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) and for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham). Not least you, Mr Gray, have close associations with Coatbridge—