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OBR expresses concern re pace of PIP reassessments

shawn mach
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This is from the Office for Budget Responsibility yesterday:

‘In response to the latest evidence from DWP, we have revised our assumption about how long it will take DWP and its contractors to complete the reassessment of DLA cases during the managed migration to PIP. We have reduced assumed volumes of reassessments in 2016-17 by around 35,000 a month (around 45 per cent lower). That means that PIP reassessments will not be completed until 2018-19, a year later than assumed in our July forecast. Because of the savings expected to arise from reassessments, this change raises spending between 2016-17 and 2018-19.

It is a concern to us that the revisions to our spending forecasts on DLA and PIP echo the pattern of revisions to our forecasts of spending on incapacity benefit and ESA during the reform of the incapacity benefits system ... Considerable uncertainty remains, given the assumed savings associated with reassessments during the migration to PIP. Based on the results of a small scale trial of 900 DLA cases that opted in to the PIP assessment, our forecast assumes that only 74 per cent of DLA claims reassessed would be successful in a PIP award. So with around 1½ million claims assumed to be reassessed through managed migration, that implies that by 2018-19 just under 400,000 managed migration claims will not receive a PIP award, reducing spending by around £1.8 billion in that year. With managed reassessments yet to commence, the only evidence we have to test the success rate assumption is from natural reassessments. These have been running close to the 74 per cent assumption, but these cases may differ from the larger number of managed reassessment cases due to take place over the next three years. Our forecast will therefore remain sensitive to any changes to this assumption as new evidence becomes available, as well as to the assumptions we have made about the pace at which reassessments will take place.’

See paras 4.94 and 4.95 6 @ http://budgetresponsibility.org.uk/pubs/EFO_November__2015.pdf