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Localtion of PIP medical assessments
I understand that ESA and PIP assessment centres are being kept separate, irrespective of how convenient or inconvenient it may be to attend.
Our DWP liaison worker told us that they were being kept separate so that claimants did not have negative perceptions about attending after all the problems with the LCW assessments!
That’s right. We were told that WCA MUST be conducted on DWP premises. This is not the case for PIP. (The Atos PIP contract must contain an element for renting venues?). Here the work has been sub contracted to the local NHS Trust at the base for their physiotherapy service. We are concerned that this means that PIP assessments are being “crowbarred” into vacant physio appointments. It must certainly represent a further potential blockage in the process. We have also noticed that some are reporting that they were assessed by an NHS Trust HCP whilst others are being seen by an Atos HCP.
Got one client now at month 13! His assessment had been cancelled four times by Atos. Can’t find out what the problem is. DWP sending regular letters saying “We now have all the information we need…...etc.
Is it worth using the DWP complaints process?
Call me shockingly cynical, but there’s always been a perverse incentive to make the assessment centres as difficult to travel to and as inaccessible as possible.
The harder the location is to get to, the more evidentially damaging the fact of attendance is to the claimant. When they have no choice but to attend no matter what pain or distress it causes, for the DWP it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Yes, it’s certainly been one of the issues for clients of ours who have been made to travel to Slough.
I’ve also come across quite a few PIP decisions now where the ER of the MC has been refused on the basis that according to the HCP it is ‘approximately 50 meters’ from the car park to the assessment centre and the client has managed to make it from the car to the building.
We had quite lot of this with ESA, with widely varying estimates of the distance across the car park. The most notable recent one was the assertion that the claimant’s taxi dropped him in a street 200metres away and the claimant walked the rest. They have not identified the street and in any case the chap only lives 1200metres from the assessment centre- why on earth would he get the taxi to only take him four fifths of the way?!