You can drive therefore you can engage with other people face to face

It says so on this Statement of Reasons on my desk.

I am aware that driving has been linked to an ability to cook under DLA but cannot for the life of me think why the ability to drive would preclude someone from requiring social support to engage with others. There is nothing on the SOR about filling up with petrol, dealing with mechanics or parking wardens, or other possible interactions that may occur on the road. Merely that she was driving from her home to her hospital appointments.

“In our view driving lengthy distances…requires a mental competence which…does not suggest that she had problems engaging with other people.”

The “lengthy distances” were 4.1 miles each way, taking 11 minutes according to AA routeplanner.

Is there any justification for this?

I’d have said the opposite was true.

Driving avoids (or at least minimises) the risk of unnecessary social interaction that comes with other forms of transportation or ‘getting around.’

I think it would depend on the context - if your client says that they have severe learning difficulties and can’t engage with other people because of their cognitive ability, then an ability to drive may go some way to undermining that. If its more like depression, personality disorders etc then its harder to see the relevance.

I could accept that driving demonstrates an ability to string complex tasks together, communicate simply and non-verbally with others, make sensible decisions and follow a set of relatively complex rules but essentially its a fundamentally different activity to social engagement; for many the problem with social engagement is that they find it difficult to actually speak to people… Surely the tribunal has given some other indication of their thinking?

Lengthy distances is another issue, my walk to work is a roughly 4 mile round trip and I wouldn’t describe that as a particularly lengthy journey. Perhaps your client went on a road trip that you weren’t aware of?

I agree with Eliot.  Context is everything.  If a tribunal thinks that driving militates against the claimant then it has a duty to go beyond a simple piece of deductive reasoning, i.e. he can do x therefore he can do y.  It has to explain, not necessarily in great detail ,why driving when included in and balanced against other factors, tends to undermine, on the balance of probabilities, a claimant’s assertion that he cannot do, or struggles with, y.

Absolutely.

I have a client with substantial and highly complex mental health issues but who can still drive. (albeit only over local distances). Indeed, the client finds the car a ‘safe’ place and driving over a familiar local distance is of a therapeutic benefit (not at all unusual in my experience). The PIP tribunal had no difficulty in accepting this (and awarded the client points in relation to engaging with other people).

I agree with John Birks. Driving says nothing with regard to needing social support; prompting to engage; having overwhelming psychological distress or behaviour resulting in a substantial risk. One could undertake a journey by yourself from start to end without engaging with another person and, given that’s the case, there would have to be something very specific about the journey rather than the act of driving itself.

In this case I suspect this is a badly drafted SOR and the key detail may turn out to be the hospital visit at the end of the driving rather than the driving itself. I can’t see that the distance would be relevant other than from a cognitive perspective as already suggested above. So, person goes to hospital by themselves. At the hospital they could have zero interaction with anyone unfamiliar to them. It would turn on the facts.

I have had recent experiences where I have gone for NHS physio. locally. I can walk into the centre; up the stairs past the walk-in reception and then check myself in on a screen without talking or needing to talk to another person. The person who I then see has seen me every week for the previous 4 months. However, I wouldn’t know that process or person without having done that at least once and having to figure it out. Soooo…

A lot harder to get through a hospital without that engagement though, even when I know exactly where I’m going. Pretty much every hospital I’ve been to in recent years (Salford, Wigan, Leigh, Manchester, Cardiff, Nottingham and Leicester) either has a friendly receptionist who won’t tolerate a moments tardiness in their area and engages rapidly to ensure that everyone knows you’re lost even when you’re not, or, those JCP stylee floor walkers who collar you just as you’re about to enter your NHS number in a self-service machine!

Regardless of their logic on the driving I suspect addressing the purpose of the journey will ultimately be more important.

Not exactly the same thing, but I had a client in the past who was refused ESA points on social engagement because he could cycle around Regents Park, even though he had made the point quite forcefully apparently to the HCP that the reasons that he did this were (1) because it was the only way he could leave the house as he couldn’t stand being around other people, and (2) therefore this offered him the ability to try and overcome his agoraphobia and social unease, whilst also trying to stay fit and healthy to some degree.

I think it’s ballpark Paul. I had a client who would drive locally as it gave them comfort and was a way to get out of the house. They would only fill up at self-service/pay petrol stations very early morning so they could explicitly avoid engagement. Another case who scored well on ESA and PIP for social engagement. Same thing. Drove to the Trafford Centre but can take them 30 minutes to get out of the vehicle and they’ll only go early morning to minimise engagement. Often doesn’t get out of the vehicle at all.

I’ve just completed a PIP where the person has Asperger syndrome (or autism spectrum disorder to be more up to date) and he learnt to drive under the age of 10! He could also probably bring down NASA with his computer skills. Actually, he could probably combine those skills and build a space-car. Go to the shop and buy something that’s not been on his set shopping list for the last ten years, not very good at all. God knows what he’s deemed capable of then! Another person recently could drive but has to change journeys if a street name has a certain combination of letters within it and ends up all over the place if the journey wasn’t set out like a military operation with no road works etc. I do wish the DWP would stop lumping, if that’s what’s gone off here, into one big blob of mental health, but look at the individual.