PIP renewal application 11 months after successful tribunal award

This is a bit of a strange one that I’ve not come across with any of our other clients.

Client successfully appealed a PIP refusal and was awarded SRDL - client got a 2 year award that was backdated 13 months.

The weirdness is that the DWP supposedly wrote out 6 months after the tribunal and told the client they would have to reclaim PIP instead of them sending out the usual renewal application.

Client didn’t actually receive this letter - so when we visited claim ended the next day and we had to lodge a new claim.

Their reasoning for this was due to client being awarded PIP at tribunal with only 11 months left on the award they would not be able to send out a renewal application as they usually send these out 12 months before an award is due to end.

Has anyone come across this before? It left the lady with no PIP for 3 months while she was reassessed and in turn left her subject to the benefit cap and stopped her husband’s CA until the benefit was later re-awarded at the same rate.

Yes unfortunately this is commonplace. All short awards (under 12 months) don’t get a renewal pack as the pack is automatically generated 12 months before the end of the award. The cases where I’ve seen this the client didn’t even get a letter prompting them to reclaim, instead the award just ended and they and to work it out for themselves!

I raised this at our local DWP advice agency liaison meeting so we’ll see what they come back with next time…

A PIP award cannot be renewed more than 6 months before the expiry of an existing award - UC, PIP etc (C&P) Reg 33(2). We have yet to see a claimant who has been invited to make a ‘renewal claim’ by DWP. The concept of a ‘renewal claim’ is probably dead in PIP in practice due to ‘planned interventions’.

This can only be a re-assessement (a so called ‘plannned intervention’ - ‘PI’) under PIP Reg 11. Although as a matter of routine a PI is triggered administratively 12 months before the expiry of an existing award, the Regs allow for it to take place at any point.

We have seen cases where the PI is triggered immediately after a successful tribunal because the tribunal award (although for 2 yrs for example) runs to a date less than 12 months forward due to the time it takes to get a case to a hearing.

It does leave open the question of what the DWP will do in practice where a PI is not triggered (for whatever reason). Will they invite a claimant to make a renewal claim or, as you suggest, just leave it to the claimant / adviser to initiate? How in practice could a claimant initiate it?

You can imagine the reaction if a claimant phones the PIP new claim line / contact centre and says ‘I want to make a renewal claim’ under UC, PIP etc (C&P) Reg 33(2) - response ‘what - there’s no such thing’.