DLA award closed

Hello
I have a client who has been in care since 2017 and has recently come out to live independently. When he went into care, he was in receipt of DLA, care and mobility. No one was looking after his affairs and DLA ended in 2020 according to the DWP. It would seem possible he was asked to make a claim for PIP but as no one was picking up his post, he did not receive the notification and so did not make a claim.
He is about to make a claim for Attendance Allowance. He will have missed out on the period since he left care in July. I don’t think there is any avenue to pursue this, or am I missing something?

No point speculatiing as to why DLA ended.  You need to know exactly why it ended

It may be that your client was not properly notified of a decision to terminate the award (or it may be it simply expired and was not renewed - or as you say the “invitation ” to claim PIP was not repsonded to)

I think your client should make a subject access request and ask for records of all correspondence and decisions relating to DLA

You can then decide what to do

Thanks Stainsby.

Should he go ahead and make the AA claim? It is taking the DWP months to reply to letters in my experience and he needs the benefit (and SDP) now. An AA decision could be revised if a DLA challenge was successful.

DWP only has a month to respond to SARs (I had to chase the last one, but received it only 4 days after the original deadline).

If I recall what happens in this circumstance: If he claims AA now and later gets DLA reinstated he can continue to get the mobility component (either DLA+AA or just DLA), so not worse off claiming AA now (though, I’m not sure I remember right).

Of course nowadays there would be an additional help marker to prevent this happening.

Thanks for your help. I have made a SAR request on cl’s behalf.

Hello
I have finally received a response from the DWP to my SAR for the client’s DLA records. The letter states that there is no record of the client ever having been in receipt of DLA and notes that all records are destroyed in full 14 months after the end of any award.

I am surprised by this. I just had a SAR back for another client from the Pension Service and they sent all details of his award from 2015-2016.

I had an appeal about four years back where DWP were adamant it was a first claim for DWP but the parent insisted there had been a previous award. SAR also said no claim. Then the parent produced the original decision letters.

There definitely was a past DLA award, it’s noted on his HB records. He has no paperwork himself.

It’s ludicrous. You are inevitably at the mercy of the competence of the person investigating the SAR. In my case I didn’t need to go any further as the award letters made DWP look incompetent. However, I did have another case where I suspected the outcome of the SAR was nonsense so I escalated to the ICO. The outcome went from zero documents to just under two hundred pages and a CD of phone call records.

Thanks Mike. I have requested an internal review prior to a possible complaint to the ICO.

Fingers crossed. This nonsense predates SARs. I used to do Supplementary Benefit appeals right up to about 1999 and a large part of that involved requesting Visiting Officers reports going back in some cases to 1966. It was amazing how many such requests produced zilch and a comprehensive sub stating why there was no record of any of that. Presenting Officer would then roll up on the day laden down with VO reports cheerily exclaiming “I thought I’d have another look and I found these.” as though somehow a minor miracle had occurred. At least one tribunal chair/judge pressed them on where these literally hundreds of pages were coming from. The answer was generally that the stuff was archived and that the person you asked had to know there was an archive and had to know to ask… and often simply didn’t.

The contents were inevitably damning of the then BA claims that they could not possibly have known of the additional needs of the claimant.

It doesn’t sound as if I’ll have much luck, from the Governments Personal Information Charter
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-work-pensions/about/personal-information-charter#how-long-dwp-keeps-your-data

Most benefit records (the detailed information you provide us with when you claim a benefit) and information provided for other DWP services are kept after the claim ends for the period necessary for any appeals, reviews and other activity to be completed. Payment records may be kept for longer, usually 6 years if they are relevant to the tax you pay.

Worth a punt

Definitely. Payment records can tell you a lot and, from previous experience, what they tell you they have definitely disposed of and what they’ve actually disposed of are often a mile apart.