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Free Disability Rights UK workshop
Check out Disability Rights UK’s free Appeals and Mandatory Reconsideration workshop ...
We are holding a free workshop for support workers and advisers and anyone in the voluntary sector who is advising and assisting claimants with challenging decisions on social security benefits.
The workshop will take place -- on Tuesday 10 December 2013
- from 2pm to 4pm
- @ Disability Rights UK, 12 City Forum, 250 City Road, London EC1V 8AF
- with guest speaker, Martin Williams, CPAG welfare rights worker; hosted by Robbie Spence and Ken Butler, welfare rights advisers at Disability Rights UK.
Martin Williams of Child Poverty Action Group will speak about mandatory reconsideration (see our updated appeals and mandatory reconsideration factsheet for more details). We’ll consider how this affects employment and support allowance claimants and, if time allows, possibilities of challenging decisions about other aspects of welfare reform.
This is a free event and places are limited. You can book your place online at https://crm.disabilityrightsuk.org/civicrm/event/register?id=59&reset=1 You will need to confirm that you are working in the voluntary sector and your role includes advising and assisting claimants with challenging decisions on social security benefits. Please could you also tell us what you’d like to get out of attending the workshop? If time allows, we’d like to cover ways of challenging decisions in other areas of welfare reform and this will help guide us about which other topics to cover.
If you cannot get a place when you book online please add your name to the waiting list so that we can keep you let you know if a place becomes available and keep you informed of any future events.
We gratefully acknowledge support for this event from Trust for London.
If you have any queries please contact Robbie Spence, Tribunal Support Unit Advisor, Disability Rights UK, phone 020 7566 0128 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
[ Edited: 12 Nov 2013 at 04:28 pm by shawn mach ]
Update - Both Mike Spencer, CPAG solicitor, and Martin Williams, CPAG welfare rights adviser, will speak at the event and we’ll be focusing on the possibility of challenges to the mandatory reconsideration rules, especially for ESA claimants.
There is an updated news page at http://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2013/november/appeals-and-mandatory-reconsideration-workshop
In light of Tony’s post here and also the increasing likelihood of seeing people who are either too late for MR application, or more pertinently perhaps, too late for a subsequent appeal, any guidance on possible tactics here would be very helpful.
Whilst I do agree that it will be ESA claimants who will face the biggest headaches (at least it seems that way), I do think the issues above will be quite possibly of a much wider relevance for many more clients, particularly with the difficulties many people are facing in simply getting some independent advice about what to do in the first place.
Disability Rights UK are running their free Mandatory Reconsideration workshop for advisers again on Tuesday 18 February, this time as an online webinar -
The workshop is for support workers and advisers and anyone in the voluntary sector who is advising and assisting claimants with challenging decisions on social security benefits.
The main focus is on what you can do as an employment and support allowance (ESA) claimant when your ESA stops while the DWP do the mandatory reconsideration before you appeal. The other main topic is what you can do if you are late in asking for a revision and the DWP refuses to allow it and you are then barred from taking your case to the independent First-tier Tribunal.
To find out more see http://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2014/january/free-challenging-decisions-webinar
Disability Rights UK webinar for advisers on Mandatory Reconsideration
There is now a recording on our YouTube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/DisabilityRightsUK1 - of our webinar in February. See also news item at http://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2014/march/disability-rights-uk-webinar-videos-available
The webinar covers:
1. the rules about mandatory reconsideration
2. problems with mandatory reconsideration
3. potential remedies and challenges to these problems
It is designed for support workers and advisers and anyone in the voluntary sector who is advising and assisting claimants with challenging decisions on social security benefits.