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Overwhelming Psychological Distress decisions
Visited client to assist with AR1 and at the end he showed me a letter dated 22nd August reviewing mobility component in light of the caselaw around overwhelming psychological distress.
If he decided to ask for a late reconsideration, could they look at his whole award as is normally possible, or would they just focus on the mobility part given that the ongoing review of these cases focuses solely on mobility?
The LEAP exercise, as far as I understand it, is looking at whether earlier decisions need to be superseded because they have been shown by the more recent cases to be in error of law. The ground of supersession will only exist if the DWP wrongly applied the law to those cases. If the law was correctly applied, then no ground for supersession would exist and it would follow that the decision couldn’t be touched. So it wouldn’t be open to a DM or FtT to start taking away daily living points just because they disagreed with them - as there is no error of law to base this on.
It would still be open to the DWP to revise or supersede the decision on a different basis - e.g. if something appeared from the LEAP exercise which demonstrated that a claim was always fraudulent or something like that - but the garden variety “health warning” which applies on a normal revision application shouldn’t apply.
See also this thread: https://www.rightsnet.org.uk/forums/viewthread/14743/
Many thanks for that - very helpful