Be interested to hear if this has happened to others:
I’m working at the moment with a man whose Disability Living Allowance was stopped in April this year.
He applied for Personal Independence Payment, but says he never received a letter or a text to tell him when his face-to-face assessment for PIP would be.
What he did receive a couple of months later was a letter to tell him that he wouldn’t get PIP because he didn’t attend the face-to-face meeting. As he says – he didn’t attend the face-to-face assessment because he didn’t realise that it was on. He didn’t get a letter or a text telling him where and when it would be.
So he applied again. A time and date for a face-to-face assessment was set up for last Friday. I was going to attend the assessment with him. Unfortunately, that assessment was cancelled at the last minute, because the assessor called in sick.
Two people have told me that they’ve recently had this experience. They received a letter advising them that they wouldn’t get PIP because they didn’t attend a face-to-face assessment – a face-to-face assessment that they say they were never told about. In these cases, the part of the comms which tells people they’re not eligible for PIP seemed to work better than the part which tells people when and where to show up for eligibility tests.
It seems unlikely that either person simply chose not to attend. Applying for PIP is a form-filling nightmare. I doubt very much that anyone would go through all that and then not attend the face-to-face assessment when given a date and then apply for PIP again for the lulz.
Has anyone else out there had a similar experience? If you have and don’t want to leave details in the comments, feel free to contact me here.
Am also interested to hear from people who had their face-to-face assessments cancelled at the last minute.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read about this on Fightback4Justice facebook page. Might be worth getting in touch with them?
Not the same, but I got a paper only reading for Tribunal as the letter they sent me telling me when the hearing was didn’t arrive (they didn’t up my care or mobility levels of PIP). My advocate applied for a Set Aside, and I got a hearing about a month later, where my care was raised from low to high level and moving around from low to high level. If it’s possible to Set Aside a Tribunal’s paper decision in this way and allow another hearing, why not for face to face assessments when mail gets lost?
Best wishes to you Kate.
What he should do, and I have been saying this for some time, is demand a watermarked copy of said letter, proof of postage and proof of receipt! You normally get at least 7 days clear notice, sometimes more, of attendance, all they can produce is a copy, not watermarked, and the phrase “We posted it on DATE A and you should have received it on, or about, DATE B!” or words to that effect. Anything else by them is fraud and an attempt to pervert the course of justice.
I’ve experienced similar problems with non-communication, not with PIP but other Benefit related bullshit. I was put on to something called the Community Work Programme, under the auspices of a profit-making Welfare-to-Work company called Interserve. I had already thrown a wobbly and stormed out of the Induction on day 1, & had assumed that because I hadn’t completed the Induction & because I’d sworn at the ‘tutor’ or whoever the fuck he was, that I was not yet on the Scheme. I thought I would have been kicked off & would probably be getting a Sanction, so I didnt attend as I had not been told to. A few weeks later I got a letter from them saying I had an appointment to work unpaid at an RSPCA shop about 5 miles away. The appointment had been for 10.00am that morning, but I had only just received the letter that same day & my post doesnt arrive until lunchtime, usually around 12.30pm, & it was 1.00pm when I opened the letter, too late to attend the appointment. It had only been posted the day before. I rang Interserve & the woman I spoke to was very cocky & clever about it, blamedme for not answering my phone, but I didnt even know I was still on the Scheme & wasnt expecting any appointments. Anyway, with her clever attitude I just lost it with her & swore a lot & Hung up. Never went back. Didnt get Sanctioned, got sent à different bullshit Scheme instead called ‘ Skills Conditionality: Transitioning Ahead’ at some other so-called “Training” company about 15 miles away for 2 months.
That’s nothing.
We have collaborators like Kelly Services, Savers and CTS come in and do so called interviews where jobseekers are forced to do and say whatever the employer wants under threat of sanction.
Because jobseekers really do well in interviews when they face the threat of sanctions for not being a good slave to the master
Cheers for the responses all and also to those people who emailed me. Much appreciated.
My face-to-face WCA for ESA was cancelled around then too, as you might remember – on very short notice. Not sure whether it was because they’d received additional information from someone about my health, but they did wind up just dropping me back into the support group. No explanation why they’d cancelled it or anything. As per usual. *sighs*
I find it extremely frustrating that I know from experience that WCA and f2f PIP exams are very much a postcode lottery. I don’t know many people living in Manchester or Salford who’ve ultimately had trouble with their assessments, or had to appeal more than the mandatory reconsideration, but Stafford? The West Midlands in general? The south-east outside London? A thorough-going mess.
Also, my 60-year-old dad (living in a village outside Stafford) has to travel 30 miles to his nearest assessment centre – and he seems to be reassessed every 6 months, I believe largely because his doctors claim not to know all of what’s properly up with him, besides his dx of alcoholism, cirrhosis of the liver, osteoporosis (possibly osteoarthritis, since early-onset OA is not uncommon as a secondary condition to all the joint wear and tear of EDS) and rheumatoid arthritis. (My sister and I, and my specialist, know damn well that he, too, has hypermobile EDS, but since he doesn’t like to think about the idea that we inherited it from him, his hospital doctors know nothing or less than nothing about it, *and* he’s still under the rural GP practice that changed my life drastically for the worse (by treating me like a hypochondriac for so long that I had no chance to get better by the time I finally did get an accurate diagnosis), he doesn’t have it on paper.)
He’s been kicked off ESA entirely on several occasions in recent years – this utterly in spite of the facts of his situation, mind you: that he’s been on some form of disability benefit since the early 1990s (I think he started to get Incapacity in ’93, when I was 7, when he was first diagnosed with osteoporosis); that he’s nearing retirement age; that he has minimal academic qualifications because he left school at 14, and only really has extensive work experience as a “brickie” and hod-carrier on building sites – which, due to his arthritis & osteoporosis and the gnarled swelling of his hands and knuckles, he obviously can’t manage now; and that he has next to no chance of ever being hired by anybody.
I suppose this shows you the ludicrous attitudes present in the DWP – as if you didn’t already know. I can’t help but wonder whether his situation is as it is partly because he has alcoholism listed as one of his conditions, and the government and mainstream media are notorious for their disgusting attitude towards disabled people who happen to number some form of addiction among their health issues. What do you think, Kate?