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Forum Home  →  Discussion  →  Decision making and appeals  →  Thread

Disability Qualified Appeal Tribunal Member(DQM)

Terry Craven
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Hope Advice Centre, Liverpool

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Joined: 6 May 2018

Increasingly, I am representing clients at hearings where the DQM is obviously a medical professional, e.g. physiotherapists, nurses, occupational therapists and psychologists. In Liverpool, there are very few “lay people’ sitting on tribunals. Recently, I discovered one DQM was employed by the DWP in a previous job. I doubt very much the impartiality of this individual!
I suspect that some of these DMQs are employed by the Independent Assessment ServicesI(AS) and the like. In an attempt to discover whether this was the case, I made a freedom of information request to HMCTS, asking the question. The response I received was to the effect that HMCTS does not hold that information.
Historically, EMPs used to sit on tribunals. The Commissioners held this was acceptable because EMPs are doctors and they would act professionally. Experience contradicted the ratio of the Commissioners.
Under an FOI request, I am pondering asking the assessment companies how many of their HCPs sit on tribunals.
What do others think about this or are there any other ways of getting the information, please?

[ Edited: 10 Feb 2020 at 12:01 am by Terry Craven ]
Mike Hughes
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Senior welfare rights officer - Salford City Council Welfare Rights Service

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Joined: 17 June 2010

Well it’s a question worth asking but I’d start by seeing if your colleagues in the area have noticed the same. I’m not sure I would ascribe so much significance to the need to have a lay person on there to begin with.

My wholly anecdotal experience over the decades has been that there is generally nothing worse than the lay DQM and their “well if I can do this then what’s your problem?” approach to matters. Indeed some of the very worst DQMs I have come across have been those with a disability themselves. It in no way gives them any competence nor especially independence. Far from it. Some have been the most prejudiced offensive tribunal members I have come across and it remains a significant failure of HMCTS that their recruitment doesn’t touch such major issues. Whilst I rigidly oppose what HCPs do in practice the fact is that a physiotherapist is not a medical professional as such and the functional approach, done properly, reveals far more about the day to day experience of living with a medical condition or impairment than a lay DQM usually does.

I’m also not sure that there’s a problem there. Plenty of ex WROs and social workers sit on tribunal panels as DQMs and often their sole experience is that they “worked with lots of people with disabilities”. In some cases that works really well. In others, much less so. My own, highly biased test on this is with sight loss/sight impairment cases. If they can’t tell you how many canes there are and their respective purposes; why registration might be wholly irrelevant and why medical evidence is equally irrelevant in such cases then I’m not really interested how many decades they “worked with disabled people”. You’re far more likely to have that insight from an OT than from a WRO or social worker I’m afraid.

I have long since nicked and adapted Nick Warren’s old intro to tribunals. You have one who ought to know the law; one who ought to know the medicine and one who ought to have a bit of common sense. The obsessive recruitment of barristers in recent years has seriously diminished the quality of judges as we increasingly come across those who wish to start hearings with very assertive statements about what’s wrong with our case before we’ve even spoken and just use such brash assertion to hide the fact they have no idea how the specific legislation works at all. We still have medical professionals who fall asleep but it was ever thus and quite frankly that has often made for better decision making.

[ Edited: 10 Feb 2020 at 11:06 am by Mike Hughes ]
HB Anorak
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Benefits consultant/trainer - hbanorak.co.uk, East London

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Small technical point: you cannot get information directly from private companies under FoI.  All they will do is direct you to the public authority with whom they have a contract.