Social Security Benefits: Stockport
(asked on 3rd December 2018) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answers of 3 December 2018 to Questions 196136 and 196137 on Social Security Benefits: Stockport, and with reference to the Answers of 10 September and 19 July 2018 to Questions 172598 and 166221, if the Government will publish the corresponding data for Stockport that has been provided to the hon. Member for Easington and the hon. Member for Inverclyde.
Information about appeals to the First-tier Tribunal (Social Security and Child Support), including volumes, outcomes and waiting times, is published at:
www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics.
The information requested relates to average waiting times for appeals; and volumes of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) appeals for Stockport over the last five years to correspond with data previously provided for Easington and Inverclyde areas.
The published data, which can be viewed in the csv files at the link above, provide this information from 2015/16; data for the preceding two years is provided below.
| Stockport Tribunal Venue1 | |||||
PIP 2. | ESA.3 | |||||
Total Cleared4 | Number cleared at hearing | Number cleared without a hearing | Total Cleared | Number cleared at hearing | Number cleared without a hearing | |
2013-2014 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4711 | 3912 | 799 |
2014-2015 | 68 | 55 | 13 | 652 | 559 | 93 |
The average waiting time5 for all appeals from receipt to final outcome at the Stockport venue was 18 weeks in 2013/14; in 2014/15 it was 20 weeks.
1. Appeals for those people living in the Stockport area are heard in the Stockport venue.
2. PIP was introduced in April 2013 and replaced Disability Living Allowance.
3. Includes ESA and ESA (Reassessment).
4. Includes all cases cleared both with and without a tribunal hearing.
5. Waiting time is appeal receipt to outcome.
Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the details are subject to inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale case management system and are the best data that are available.
Latest figures (to June 2018) indicate that since PIP was introduced, 3.5 million decisions have been made, and of these 9% have been appealed and 4% have been overturned at Tribunals. For ESA, 3.5m ESA (post Work Capability Assessment) decisions have been made between April 2014 and March 2018 and of these 8% have been appealed and 4% have been overturned at tribunals.
Waiting times are calculated from receipt of the appeal to its final disposal. An appeal is not necessarily disposed of at its first hearing. The final disposal decision on the appeal may be reached after an earlier hearing had been adjourned (which may be directed by the judge for a variety of reasons, such as to seek further evidence), or after an earlier hearing date had been postponed (again, for a variety of reasons, often at the request of the appellant). An appeal may also have been decided at an earlier date by the First-tier Tribunal, only for the case to have gone on to the Upper Tribunal, to be returned once again to the First-tier for its final disposal.