Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate he has made of the number of people who decided not to pursue an appeal for personal independence payments due to the length of the waiting time for an appeal.

There is no administrative data held that could determine the reasons why an individual, if dissatisfied with the decision received after their MR is completed, might not choose to pursue an appeal with HMCTS.

There is already some data in the public domain that may be of interest. The Personal Independent Payment (PIP) Official Statistics holds information on the volumes of Mandatory Reconsiderations (MRs) registered (Table 7A) and cleared (Table 7B), and can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-independence-payment-april-2013-to-april-2019

The Ministry of Justice Tribunal Statistics Quarterly publication contains the number of PIP cases for which an appeal is lodged with Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) (Table SSCS1), and can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tribunal-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2019

HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HCMTS) is taking positive steps to reduce the waiting time for appeals to be heard in the Social Security and Child Support (SSCS) jurisdiction. In 2018, 232 medical members and 118 disability-qualified members were additionally appointed to the SSCS jurisdiction and an extra 129 fee-paid judges have recently been appointed. The SSCS jurisdiction will also benefit from 100 salaried judges and 170 fee-paid judges being recruited across tribunals more widely. In addition, HMCTS is developing a new digital system with a view to enabling speedier processing of appeals and a better service for all parties to the proceedings. Case-management “triage” sessions are also being conducted, with the aim of reducing the number of cases that need to progress to an oral hearing.