Personal Independence Payments: Merseyside

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) on a powerful and passionate opening speech. She has addressed the injustices and spoken up on behalf of her constituents. We know that disabled people and those with long-term health conditions are much more likely to live in income poverty and significantly less likely to be in employment, and that they face barriers to participating in wider society and therefore to being able to lead active and independent lives. Personal independent payments and their predecessor, the disability living allowance, can be a lifeline for disabled people and their families, but, as my hon. Friend set out, all too often our constituents come to us in a state of great distress, having encountered an array of difficulties during both the application and assessment process for PIP.

The feedback from my constituents and from organisations working in my constituency is much the same as that set out so fully by my hon. Friend. Claimants say they have little trust in the application process; they find it unfriendly, distressing and opaque. They experience difficulties completing the application forms and understanding the basis on which they are being assessed. Many say that the staff conducting the assessments for Atos and Capita frequently lack the expertise to make accurate decisions on claims involving a wide range of mental and physical health conditions. Claimants often find that their assessment reports include basic factual errors and omit relevant details, and they are therefore ultimately a misrepresentation of the assessment.

I want to highlight the case of a constituent who has schizophrenia and a personality disorder. She struggles with every aspect of daily life, including maintaining her tenancy and her home, paying essential bills and maintaining a relationship with her son, who is in care. Because of paranoia and panic attacks, she is not able to use public transport, but she is physically healthy. In her assessment, she was able to perform activities such as standing up from a chair and touching her toes, and she also told the assessor that she occasionally went jogging to support her mental health. As a result, she was awarded nil points. She was also refused PIP at the mandatory reconsideration stage. My experience of reconsideration is much the same as that of my hon. Friend—very few receive a reconsideration that results in a different decision.

On appeal, my constituent was represented by my fantastic constituency caseworker at the tribunal. She was awarded the standard mobility rate and the enhanced daily living rate of approximately £400 a month, which is a life-changing amount of money for her. However, during the period when she was not entitled to PIP, she was forced to use food banks on several occasions. She was unable to visit her son because she could not afford to pay the taxi fares. As my hon. Friend set out so clearly, it simply takes too long for appeal decisions to be made.

As we have already heard, the latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show that the average time to appeal a PIP decision successfully has more than doubled since 2014-15, to a national average of 31 weeks, while the average time is longer for the Liverpool tribunal venue, at 38 weeks. Those delays force some of our most vulnerable constituents into isolation and destitution. They are left struggling to pay for food, rent and bills. Indeed, benefit delays and changes are the main reason why people are referred to food banks on Merseyside, and the Trussell Trust has warned repeatedly that benefit changes are forcing people to turn to food banks, as I know from my own experience volunteering at the North Liverpool food bank at St John’s church in Tuebrook. I pay tribute to the selfless and dedicated individuals who work at food banks across the city, and across the country.

My constituency of West Derby has a PIP claimant rate of 8.6%, which is the 13th highest PIP recipient rate of all the constituencies in Great Britain. The case of my constituent is by no means unique; we have heard the cases cited by my hon. Friend. I am struck by two observations—first, the high proportion of claimants who are eventually successful in winning their PIP appeal and, secondly, the particular difficulties faced by individuals with mental health issues.

As my hon. Friend said, around three quarters of all PIP refusals that go to appeal in Liverpool are successful. That appeal rate comes as no surprise to me, my casework team or charities in Merseyside, who have worked tirelessly to help local people receive the support they are entitled to. I thank the numerous organisations across Merseyside that support our most vulnerable constituents to navigate the complex benefit system. I mention in particular St Andrew’s Community Network in north Liverpool, and Merseyside Welfare Rights, now known as the Merseyside Law Centre.

I anticipate that the Minister will say that decisions are overturned because claimants submit more evidence at appeal stage than they did earlier. I appreciate that that is a factor, but surely something is fundamentally wrong in the system when the figure for successful appeals is so high. We need to look at both the assessment and reconsideration processes for reform.

I finish by saying something about the disadvantage and challenges faced by people who are struggling with mental ill health when navigating the PIP process. For those who have mental health issues, the assessment process can be a doubly challenging experience, with the stress of undergoing an assessment exacerbating existing health conditions. Research by academics at York University released earlier this year found:

“Overall, claimants with a psychiatric condition were 2.4 times more likely than a claimant with a non-psychiatric condition to have their existing DLA entitlement removed following a PIP eligibility assessment.”

Mental health conditions are very common among PIP applicants, but our benefit system appears to continue to discriminate against people with mental ill health. We have a long way to go to achieve parity of esteem in the social security system for physical and mental health.

Today I received an example from one of the charities working on behalf of my constituents. It has

“been supporting a gentleman who is coming to us for life coaching. He had previously been awarded High rate DLA for life due to his injuries from an accident in work, his mental health & Type 1 diabetes. He had to go to an assessment for PIP and…made to walk the whole length of the building to the assessment room even though he asked her if there was a closer room as he was struggling only to be told no and to hurry up!!! He said the interview was very rushed…he felt really uncomfortable and made to feel like he was making his illness’s up. He wears a monitor on his arm”—

because of his diabetes—

“so his blood sugar’s can be read constantly and when the report was sent it stated he had a gadget on his arm but not sure what it was,”

even though he had explained that during his interview. The charity’s letter continues:

“He then received a letter stating that he was going to be getting a drastically reduced rate as he didn’t need special care and that his mobility was fine so he would also be losing his mobility car. The report also stated his pain medication was moderate!! Did the examiner have the medical knowledge & Qualification to make that assumption?

He has since slipped into a total depression and on our last coaching session he just sat and cried and said he didn’t know why he was even bothering. He hasn’t had the enthusiasm to see his 3 young boys, which he used to see daily on the school run. He is terrified that once the car is repossessed he won’t be able to see them at all as they have recently moved.

He has sent off a mandatory reconsideration with the help of us and PSS however some people don’t have this support and wouldn’t know where to go for this kind of help. This process has totally turned his already unhappy life totally on it’s head and his self harming is more apparent than I have seen in the last 12 months.”

The letter finishes with the rhetorical question:

“Why when a person was awarded DLA for life should they have to be reassessed???”

As the local charity said to me today in an email, this story has a number of policy implications. They include the question of reassessment when an award had previously been made for life; the way that interviews are conducted and how that leaves claimants feeling; the perceived lack of appropriate medical qualification, especially in complex circumstances such as the example that I have described; and the eventual reconsideration on appeal, which, in the words of the local organisation,

“will end up costing a fortune and is likely to reverse the original decision.”

Time and again, the PIP process lets down some of our most vulnerable constituents. As a result, trust in its administration is in desperately short supply. I hope the Minister will listen to these concerns and the example cases we raise through our speeches, so that we can work together to ensure that in the future we have a PIP system that really works for all disabled people.