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£22m for new presenting officers for incapacity and disability benefit tribunals

shawn mach
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Guardian piece today further to the announcement in the March 2016 Budget of £22m for the recruitment of presenting officers across 2016/17 to 2017/18 to ‘support’ the DWP in ESA and PIP tribunals ..

Contrast the funding for the presenting officers with funding for advisers to help the disabled person going to tribunal. In many areas welfare rights officers have been cut, while legal aid cuts mean that people appealing against their benefit rejection no longer have the right to help (aid is only available for appeals of appeals based on points of law). For an insight into the impact of this, the Law Centres Network says that for the whole of 2015, there were only 254 new benefits cases helped by civil legal aid in England and Wales. This compares with 82,542 cases in 2012-13, the year before the cuts.

Meanwhile, alternatives, such as Citizens Advice bureaux, local mental health charities and disability organisations are left to shoulder an impossible burden with insufficient resources. With no access to free representation – and unable to pay for it – people dealing with disabilities, chronic illness, and mental health problems have to go up against the DWP alone.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/17/government-skewing-benefits-appeals-process-against-disabled-people

 

ClairemHodgson
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back in the day, PO’s actually knew whereof they spoke and could indeed be helpful to a client’s case.  whether the new breed will be useful is another matter, of course…... it’ll be a function of whether they in fact know the law, or not….

1964
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I must say I’m far from optimistic. But I am, of course, willing to be proved wrong.

Mike Hughes
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Seems to me that this will fund POs with the intent of them policing tribunals rather than the traditional, alleged, role of friend of the tribunal. I suspect the lack of knowledge of the law, caselaw and tribunal procedure will soon enough show itself and most tribunals will rip them to shreds.

We need to be clear that the driver for this is very much our new wholly politicised DWP genuinely not understanding how tribunals can continue to make decisions driven by sane interpretations of the law which are surely not what parliament intended through its ill thought out ideologically driven attempt to legislate social engineering. We’ve had demands on tribunals to give longer decisions explaining themselves and so on and we’ve had an increase in routine DWP applications to the UT. This is just the next step on that road. As ever, government is simply poorly advised and too stupid to realise that all their actions have unintended, but entirely predictable, outcomes. In this case, tribunals will come to see reps. as even more the sane voice after being endlessly confronted by POs trying to argue the intent of the law rather than the word and their guidance rather than the law. Fun times ahead.

ClairemHodgson
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1964 - 18 May 2016 08:39 AM

I must say I’m far from optimistic. But I am, of course, willing to be proved wrong.

quite

:-(

Elliot Kent
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If you all would excuse some rose-tinted naivety, I would like to hope that this is a move towards the government actually showing some respect to the FtT’s function and jurisdiction and trying to engage with it. There seems to have been a pervasive attitude that the Tribunal represents some sort of unknowable black hole which spews out decisions at random simply to try and interfere with the government doing its job. No guys, you are actually entitled to (and encouraged to) come along and make your case. Maybe then you will understand why you won or lost and can change things as appropriate.

I remember receiving directions from an exasperated judge a while back along the lines of “The Tribunal cannot compel the Respondent to send a presenting officer to the hearing, however sensible decision making and respect for the rule of law require one to attend”. Naturally no PO attended and the appeal was allowed.

Andrew Dutton
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I don’t do many appeals but the last PO I encountered had to be stopped in mid-(aggressive) flow and reminded (from the bench) of just exactly who was the judge in the room….

 

Mike Hughes
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Andrew Dutton - 18 May 2016 01:35 PM

I don’t do many appeals but the last PO I encountered had to be stopped in mid-(aggressive) flow and reminded (from the bench) of just exactly who was the judge in the room….

Yup, I think that’s ball park on what we’ll be facing.

Over the years I’ve had

- “There’s no such thing as 24 hour care”.
- “Mr. Hughes is being unprofessional.” (for pointing out that the PO had just stated as fact something he knew to not be true but seemed happy to mislead the tribunal on). Amusingly, the tribunal spent 10 minutes explaining to the PO just what “unprofessional” looked like - him!
- “There’s no such thing as a special diet!”.

My faves tend to be

- the POs who start a conversation with you in the waiting room pre-hearing. Always good to have a copy of the guidance relating to that in front of you and then watch their face.
- the POs who never quite get to grips with just how unwise it is to interrupt the judge. Brilliantly these are the ones who never interrupt the medical professional or the DQTM. Their lack of respect for judges shining through.

On second thoughts, I’m looking forward to more POs. Easy meat…

 

Dan_Manville
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Mike Hughes - 18 May 2016 01:46 PM

Easy meat…

My thoughts exactly.

I always love their writing off “junkies and druggies” whilst ignoring long, abused, histories that led up to the dependencies.

[ Edited: 18 May 2016 at 04:59 pm by Dan_Manville ]
1964
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I encountered a PIP one recently who, despite significant amounts of supporting evidence from psychiatrists, psycihothrapist, GP and various other sources seemed fixated on the fact that because the client had been allocated with a ‘support worker’ rather than a ‘social worker’ there couldn’t be much wrong with her.  It was very odd.

Dan_Manville
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1964 - 18 May 2016 04:54 PM

because the client had been allocated with a ‘support worker’ rather than a ‘social worker’ there couldn’t be much wrong with her.  It was very odd.

I do hope that the DQPM had some insight into how modern social work teams operate…

Mike Hughes
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Have had issues with tribunals taking care plans as gospel with little insight into the fact that a care plan might find no needs which trigger a service but that isn’t the same as no needs. Indeed one tribunal used one to award DLA on a time-limited basis because the clients CFS and Lupus must have magically disappeared on the date the care assessments found no needs requiring a service! Inevitably that’s the sort of nonsense new POs will run with.

Can still vividly recall the day a medical professional dismissed me and a CPN with “Mr. Hughes I know how to talk to poor people!” PO DIDN’T support my complaint. They thought there was nothing wrong with the comment. Nor did the judge. I was forever grateful to the lay member whose response to the complaint basically said that she was there and they were liars.

1980s here we come then.

Mairi
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I always (with rose-tinted specs) think it’s a good thing to have a presenting officer from DWP / HMRC at appeals.  I’m surprised though that there are places where the PO sits with the claimant prior to the hearing - here in Edinburgh they sit in a wee room half way up the corridor and are ‘collected’ on the way to the room the hearing will be held in - and then delivered back to the wee room on the way back to the waiting room to await the decision.

Here too, the judges are hot on criticising interruptions - the last hearing I attended which had a PO it was me that was interrupted and the judge was straight on it - the PO commented to me afterwards that they thought the judge was rude in doing this as the point might otherwise have been forgotten by the PO.  They’ve obviously never heard of writing a note to remind yourself - and it was obviously okay if I forgot what I was saying.