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Personal Independence Payment (PIP)
[ch 3: pages 56-57]Personal Independence Payment (PIP) replaced Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for new claimants from June 2013. It is currently being rolled-out and the reassessment of existing claimants living in certain post codes started in October 2013 (see box page 59).
Chancellor George Osborne announced £4.4 billion welfare savings over the course of the Parliament by cutting Personal Independence Payments (PIPs). However, the government abandoned these cuts in the wake of Iain Duncan’s Smith’s resignation.
DLA is a benefit for children and adults aged under the State Pension Age who, because of disability or illness, need help with personal care or with mobility. PIP helps with some of the extra costs caused by ill-health or disability. According to the government, “the rate depends on how your condition affects you, not the condition itself.”
How much can you get?
PIP payments are made up of a daily living component and a mobility component. You could get money for one or both parts, at either a standard or enhanced rate. People who are terminally ill and whose death can reasonably be expected within six months receive the enhanced rate of the daily living component.
| Daily living component | Mobility component | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | £55.10 | £21.80 |
| Enhanced | £82.30 | £57.45 |
PIP is normally paid into your account every four weeks. How much you get depends on how your health condition or disability affects you.
If you currently get DLA, you will continue to get it until the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) writes to tell you about when it will end. The letter will invite you to apply for PIP and tell you what to do next.
New claims
New PIP claimants need to phone the DWP to make a claim (0800 917 2222, textphone: 0800 917 7777). The DWP will then send you a form asking you to describe how your long-term health condition or disability affects you. You can also write asking for a form to send the above information by post: Personal Independence Payment New Claims, Post Handling Site B, Wolverhampton WV99 1AH.
Most people will be asked to attend a face-to-face consultation with a health professional as part of the claim. The DWP will decide whether you’re entitled to PIP and how much you should get, based on the advice of the health professional and any other evidence you supply.
Your claim will be reviewed regularly “to make sure you’re getting the right support”.
PIP assessments criticised
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) started to introduce Personal Independence Payments (PIP) to replace Disability Living Allowance (DLA) (received by 3.3 million people) from April 2013. Up to the end of 2018, 1.7 million people in receipt of DLA are due to be assessed for PIP, along with 1.9 million new claimants.
The previous coalition government predicted savings of £2.2 billion by May 2016 compared to projected spending under an unchanged system. Some charities have warned that around 600,000 people would eventually lose their financial support because of reassessment and stricter eligibility criteria.
In most PIP claims, Atos Healthcare and Capital Health and Wellbeing have carried out the assessment of need.
In June 2014, the Public Accounts Committee published a report into PIP, branding its implementation a fiasco. Committee Chair Margaret Hodge set out that:
• many people had to wait more than six months for their claims to be decided;
• by October 2013, the Department had only made 16% of the decisions it had expected to have made by that time;
• terminally ill people were having to wait on average 28 days for a decision, 180% longer than expected;
• some claimants were forced to turn to food banks, loans and charities to support the extra costs of living associated with their disability; and
• four in 10 claimants in Atos areas had to travel over an hour to be assessed when it had promised that between 75% and 90% of claimants would travel less than 30 minutes to an assessment centre.
Many charities criticised the DWP’s decision to continue rolling out the benefit following pilots despite the huge backlog of claims.
In June 2015, the High Court ruled that delays of at least nine months for paying PIPs to two disabled people was unlawful, but said that their human rights were not breached, meaning that they were not entitled to compensation. The BBC reported that there were 78,700 people waiting to hear if they could claim PIPs. More than 3,000 of these had waited more than a year to have their claims processed and 22,800 had waited more than 20 weeks.
In December 2015, a Work and Pensions Committee report on benefit delivery found that while evidence to its inquiry suggested that average waiting times for a PIP assessment were down to five to six weeks, there were examples of claimants still experiencing long delays for either an appeal date or their first PIP payment. The Committee pointed out that delays to PIPs have a knock-on effect to “passported” benefits such as Carer’s Allowance. It said that there was still “much work to be done to ensure that those claimants awaiting an appeal, or their first payment following a successful appeal, receive the correct decision and award in good time.”