Responsibility for reissuing appeal bundles

Do people contact DWP directly if you or the appellant have not received the DWP evidence bundle? Up until recently, we would contact HMCTS who would contact DWP on our behalf. We are now being told to contact DWP directly as HMCTS is saying it is not their responsibility. Is this correct? If it is correct, are their particular teams in DWP to contact depending on the benefit involved. We have tried the various benefit helplines and many don’t know where to direct our calls.

Thank you

(assuming their response has been compiled, and just delayed/lost) the most straightforward solution might be to submit a SAR through the online form.

If there is much delay you can ask HMCTS to issue directions, but otherwise as I understand it it is incumbent on you to contact DWP to chase it.

The bundles tend to be stored electronically. i usually ask the tribunal service to email me a pdf of the response, and i print em off at my end. I stopped asking dwp for bundles 3 years ago, as they simply ignore the request anyway. ive informed tribunal service a million times that dwp wont send responses but that can cut no ice with some staff.
4 out of 5 hmcts staff are ok with emailing bundle, but i still get the odd one…...

An interesting one. Line has always been that DWP issue appeal papers whilst subsequent documentation goes to and is distributed by HMCTS. You find yourself like Alice through the looking glass though.

HMCTS write to you to tell you that they’ve asked DWP for papers and how long they’ve given them. Papers don’t turn up. HMCTS ask again or, better still, go straight to “send us what you’ve got so we can assemble some kind of papers”. Inevitably I (almost always) ignore these requests because, given enough time, DWP will produce papers.

If you’re lucky enough to get papers and you decide a written sub, is needed then you do that and send it into HMCTS to number and distribute. Increasingly this is a random process wherein they do both, one or neither. Nor do they distribute to DWP despite the revelation at a TUG that they had an email address to do just that but kept “forgetting”.

It becomes increasingly difficult to understand whether anyone at HMCTS is doing any administration at all. Imagine though if you were an appellant. Who should you be dealing with? Where should you send stuff? Why does this go there but later this goes there? For appellants it is an indecipherable omnishambles of a process not really deserving of the word “process”.

Thanks both for your helpful responses. Requesting an emailed bundle seems like something worth trying. Thank you. Our normal response from DWP is something along the lines of “what is this ‘bundle’ of which you speak?”

Stewart

Don’t start me on that one. Oh go on then.

There was a point at which the informality and inquisitorial nature of tribunals were recognised as massive assets to the benefits system. Then they fell under the DoJ. Chairs became judges. Salaried judges are increasingly recruited almost exclusively from the ranks of barristers. Papers become bundles. Venues cease to be community centres etc. and become part of things like Civil Justice Centres etc. DWP POs cease to exist as amicus curiae and their increasingly infrequent appearances tend to become adversarial to the benefit of absolutely no-one. They re-emerge in order to “defend” decisions and thus the inquisitorial principle is further eroded. Representatives once valued as making the lives of tribunals far easier are now viewed with suspicion by the majority of new judges. I would challenge anyone to see any specific gain for either the DWP or appellants in in this process.

So an informal, inquisitorial process has become formal to the point that referring to it as an informal tribunal is a joke really. Clients talk of “going to court” which sums it all up for me.

As a point of principle I will never use the phrase “appeal bundle” verbally or in writing to DWP or HMCTS. It is no such thing. To draw any kind of comparison with court bundles is embarrassing given the number of times we get papers thrown into an envelope with nothing to secure them; a wholly random order; sections that are unreadable; don’t include the law (or do include the law along with either irrelevant or out of date case law). Increasingly the papers barely feature in a significant number of disability related appeals and… I could go on all day.

Tribunals, for me, are very much on a precipice of extinction (to mix metaphors) and it seems neither DWP nor especially HMCTS are especially bothered by that.