One year on and no WCA assessment - UC claimant

Hello all,

The background to this case is a UC claimant arguing LCW&WRA;. A tribunal was scheduled for September 2020 with me as rep.

Prior to the appeal, I’d assisted with a fairly comprehensive and points-focused MR. When I contacted the claimant to draft a submission, it became apparent that she might not be the most reliable witness, and she essentially refuted half of the evidence submitted in the MR herself.

I advised that her chances of success appeared very slim, and that from her newer testimony it didn’t appear that she actually would have ever qualified. On this advice the claimant wished to withdraw the appeal.

However, she had meanwhile experienced a genuine change of circumstances health wise, including some major surgery. As a result, the claimant had been sending in new fit notes, and had secured an award of PIP at the standard rates of both components.

In fact by this time she had been submitting fit notes for 8 months (!) with no sign of a follow up UC50. I assisted her with writing a journal request to query this. The initial UC response asked about her appeal date; my best guess is that they’d decided to await the tribunal decision, despite this being a substantially new and different condition.

In any case, a UC50 was eventually received early November 2020, 10 months after the sickness was reported and following 10 months of fit notes. I helped her fill and return this by mid November.

There has then followed a process of me checking back with the tenant every few weeks, and finding no progress, messages to the work coach, and eventually an acknowledgement of receipt of UC50 on 18th January this year, advising it will be a few weeks to process.

Claimant has chased again this month to be told that May is now looking likely as the DWP have ‘just so much on’.

Now in this case I believe that the DWP have confused themselves with the overlapping appeal issue, but that dealt with a past period and should have been treated as such. The ‘self-cert’ period for LCW is supposed to be around 13 weeks is it not?

So my question to anybody kind enough to get through this is: Is there anything I could do further and if so, should I? Or do we just accept that this a by-product of a Covid-19 backlog and sleep sound in the knowledge she’s not having much conditionality at the moment?

Thanks for reading.

Hi - I think it is sadly typical for DWP at the moment. However, it’s been a long time and if you want to put pressure on you could always try using the CPAG judicial review pre-action letters - JR 47 is particularly relevant for you - even if she’s not getting much conditionality she’s still missing out on a large chunk of money if she is LCWRA

I suspect that the case manager did not parse that your client was asking to be re-assessed when initially submitting fit notes so the WCA process was not started until November. It’s fairly common for claimants to submit fit notes during an appeal where they are not asking for re-assessment mainly in order for the work coach to limit conditionality whilst the appeal goes ahead.

Apologies both, I actually did a long winded response this time last week but alas, IT problems saw it perish, so you’ve probably been saved reading a bunch of waffle!

Daphne, Regards the JR scenario, whilst it looks like that letter was almost written for the case, we don’t really have the teeth to back it up so I’d have to get into finding a solicitor etc. Having spoken to the claimant she’s no real desire to do it.

We do have some links into regional DWP management which I haven’t pursued (it seems to have become less effective over time to be honest) but ultimately claimant is just happy to/wants to wait, so I’ll respect those wishes.

Elliot, no doubt you are spot on in your assessment of events, to me it was a substantially different condition and if they knew their own rules should have triggered the process alongside the appeal.

Lesson learned, push that fact from the off if the scenario arises again.