PIPS descriptor 9d)- definition of ‘other people’

Just raising this for some debate.

On a strict reading 9d)( ‘cannot engage with other people due to such engagement causing etc ect.’) would seem to preclude anyone who has a partner, family, carer (paid or unpaid) or anyone like that from entitlment.

on the other hand,as a matter of common usage, many claimants may take ‘other people ’ to refer to anyone outside their immediate family group.

There is nothing in the PIPS Assessors guide which clarifies this and I just wondered what anyone else’s take on this might be.

I think it is somewhere in between and will depend on the facts of each case.

I don’t think that you can restrict ‘other people’ to just people unfamiliar to the claimant, or even to just people outside the claimant’s family group.

However a claimant will still be able to satisfy this descriptor if they can engage with other people sometimes but not reliably or to a reasonable standard. I would say that this would certainly be the case for somebody who is unable to engage with anyone apart from their immediate family.

I think that probably somebody who can always engage with people they are reasonably familiar with but never with anyone unfamiliar are in a bit of a grey area - can somebody be able to say they can engage with other people reliably and to a reasonable standard if they cannot deal with anyone they have not met before. Where people can ability to engage both with familiar and unfamiliar people fluctuates I guess it would come down to estimating whether the person is unable to do this for more than 50% of the time (and whether for the times when they are able to engage they are doing this with social support or prompting)

Might be useful to think about it (and argue it) slightly differently;

One would expect that what constituted ‘engagement’ for a non-disabled person to differ depending on context, depending on who they were engaging with - so whilst engagement with unfamiliar people would not be in any way difficult, it would only be with close family members and close friends that one would expect to see the greatest degree of intimacy, mutual trust and support and the greatest sense of being relaxed and totally at ease…..

For myself, I would find it extremely difficult to envisage a situation in which 9 d (i) or (ii) were true of a person when trying to engage with unfamiliar people, whilst at the same time they were able to engage with close family members and friends in an entirely unproblematic way i.e. as well as you or I could.

Engagement has to surely mean real or meaningful engagement - and that has to be judged against who you are engaing with. If, for example, a disabled person can ‘cope’ with a visit from their mother in the sense that they do not experience or exhibit ‘overwhelming distress’ but nevertheless remains more or less monosylabic throughout, or is perhaps unable in any way to share their thoughts or feelings, then I’d argue that the descriptor is met - it’s arguably not engagement at all and it’s certainly not engagement when measured against any reasonable yardstick of what one would normally expect of such a relationship.