Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to help ensure that Personal Independence Payment assessments make an adequate assessment of claimants’ (a) physical symptoms and (b) medical evidence and (c) other supporting evidence.

PIP assessors give due consideration to all available evidence when completing their advice to the Department. DWP decision makers also consider all available evidence when making entitlement decisions on PIP.

The Department closely monitors all aspects of the process including the performance of the assessment providers and the quality of assessments. All providers work with the department on plans to continuously improve assessment quality through a range of measures including audit, clinical observations, tailored training and development plans, providing feedback and in the support available to assessors.

We set out in the Pathways to Work Green Paper our intention to improve the experience for people who use the system of health and disability benefits. This includes exploring ways to improve PIP assessments through digitalising transfer of medical information.

We announced in the Pathways to Work Green Paper that we will, in future, record assessments by default, unless the claimant asks that the assessment should not be recorded. This will give us the means to check what happened when an assessment is found later to have been incorrect, and, we expect, an effective lever for improvement