Engaging with other people - claimants with autism

If a claimant has autism and therefore cannot reasonably expect to be able to understand body language and form relationships just with the addition of prompting or social support, which descriptor applies?

This is becoming a theme of my PIP posts, but this situation is not covered by the structure of the descriptors. The structure assumes a closed set of situations, but the addition of a need for ‘overwhelming distress’ or ‘risk’ in the 8 point descriptor seems to leave the claimant scoring an undefined number of points between 4 and 8. I suppose the argument could be made that as the claimant doesn’t reach the threshold of the 8 points, 4 are scored, but regulation 4(2A) seems designed specifically to protect the claimant from this and does not allow for further derogations within the schedule.

In practice, HCPs are still adopting the crumbs-from-the-table approach across the activities, which is often leading to an award overall, but it almost seems as if each PIP regulation was written by a different person.

Sadly with the rewrite of the descriptor to cover simply “engaging with other people” and excluding “social” engagement I fear that your hypothetical autistic person who can hold a conversation might well not score much unless they’re prone to overloading and becoming distressed.

I’m pretty sure that “engaging socially” in the definitions is a drafting error.

You might find this decision helpful - deals with claimant with aspergers and looks at ‘engage socially’ definition - http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/welfare-rights/caselaw/item/meaning-of-engage-with-other-people-and-interaction-of-activity-9-with-regu