Calderdale DART

BENEFITS AND WORK NEWS

ALARMING INCREASE IN PIP DISQUALIFICATIONS
42,000 claimants lost their PIP award in 2021 because they allegedly failed to return their AR1 PIP review form according to Tom Pursglove, DWP minister for disabled people.
This is an unexplained increase of almost 300% in just two years.
It seems very possible that many disallowed claimants are returning their forms on time, but an increasingly overwhelmed and broken DWP is either losing them or taking far too long to record that they have been received.
Other claimants may have failed to return the review form because of the effects of a physical or mental health condition.
A tragic example of this is the death of Laura Winham, who we wrote about just last month. Laura’s disability benefit was stopped without any welfare checks after she failed to return her PIP claim form when being transferred from DLA. This is in spite of the fact she was known to have a severe mental illness.
Yet according to Pursglove, claimants with serious mental health or cognitive conditions or who are vulnerable in other ways should have their files ‘watermarked’ to show they need additional support.
DWP policy is that these claimants should not have their PIP stopped because of a failure to return a form.

Call for urgent investigation into DWP’s shocking PIP figures A minister has been told to carry out an urgent investigation after the number of disabled people whose disability benefits were stopped when they failed to return a vital form rose by more than 45…