Personal Independence Payment: Hearing Impairment

(asked on 12th October 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many applications her Department has received from deaf people aged 16 to 25 for personal independence payments in the last 12 months; and (a) what the outcome of each claim was and (b) how many of those applicants have requested a mandatory reconsideration or appealed to the social security tribunal.


Answered by
Sarah Newton Portrait
Sarah Newton
This question was answered on 22nd October 2018

In the application process, claimants’ main disabling condition is only recorded for collation by the Department at assessment. It is not recorded at the point of application. The Department does not therefore hold data on the number of all applicants or outcome of all applications to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for people with a primary disability of deafness or hearing impairment.

For those who have undergone a PIP assessment, information on the number of initial decisions in 2017/18, and mandatory reconsiderations and appeals, for people aged 16 to 25 with a main disabling condition of a hearing disorder are shown in the table below.

Initial decisions, mandatory reconsiderations and appeals

Number

Initial Decisions

Total

1,450

Awarded

620

Disallowed

830

Withdrawn

#

Mandatory Reconsiderations

Registrations

410

Clearances

400

New Decision - Award Changed

60

New Decision - Award Unchanged

340

Decision Not Revised

0

Withdrawn/
Cancelled

#

Appeals

Receipts

160

Clearances

60

Decision overturned

40

Decision maintained

20

Data has been rounded to the nearest 10. Components may not sum to totals due to rounding.

'#' fewer than 5 decisions in this category.

The data relates to initial PIP decisions in 2017/18 and any MRs and appeals relating to those initial decisions recorded up to June 2018 (the latest published data on appeals). Claimants who have received benefit decisions more recently may not yet have had time to complete the claimant journey and progress to appeal.

PIP data includes normal rules and special rules for the terminally ill claimants, and is for both new claims and DLA reassessment claims.

Data is based on primary disabling condition as recorded on the PIP computer system. Claimants may often have multiple disabling conditions upon which the decision is based but only the primary condition is shown in these statistics.

Appeals data is taken from the DWP PIP computer system’s management information. Therefore this appeals data may differ from that held by Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service for various reasons such as delays in data recording and other methodological differences in collating and preparing statistics.

Some decisions which are changed at mandatory reconsideration, and where the claimant continues to appeal for a higher PIP award, are then changed again at tribunal appeal. Therefore the number of people who had a decision changed at mandatory reconsideration and the number of people who had a decision changed at tribunal appeal cannot be added together.

Decisions overturned at appeal may include a number of appeals that have been lapsed (which is where DWP changed the decision after an appeal was lodged but before it was heard at Tribunal).

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