On 17th December, Mark Harper Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions) (Disabled People) made the following ministerial statement in the Commons:
“The Government are pleased to announce that the first independent review of the personal independence payment (PIP) assessment, carried out by Paul Gray, will be published later today. This is the first of two independent reviews as required by the Welfare Reform Act 2012.
Paul Gray has explored how the PIP assessment is operating from the perspectives of claimants, health professionals and other staff involved in delivery and has made a number of recommendations designed to improve the claimant experience. He has concluded that it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the overall effectiveness of the PIP assessment based on available published data and has made recommendations to help the Department ensure the fairness and consistency of award outcomes in the future.”
The report is now available via the GOV.UK website. It is worth reading at least the Foreword and Executive Summary – to form your own overview of Paul Gray’s recommendations.
From the Foreword:
In framing my recommendations, I have been conscious of some other contextual factors. Without question the introduction of PIP is a major delivery challenge. It is one of several large scale business operations for which the Department is accountable, where several million claimant s rightly set high expectations for their customer experience. And major challenges flow from assessing eligibility on the basis of functional impact.
The key premise here is that different people with the same underlying conditions may well experience significantly different functional impacts on their activities in daily living and on their mobility. This will reflect the complex interaction of many factors – including physiological, psychological, motivational and social. So functional assessment is not a precise science. Accurately and consistently assessing several million awards in this way is a formidable undertaking.
It is also one which few if any other countries attempt in such a specific and bespoke way, or on such a scale. While international comparisons are fraught with difficulty, to the extent that other countries provide broadly similar eligibility they mostly link them to other qualifying conditions and processes.
The design of PIP was also undertaken in a context of fiscal austerity, against a background in which spending on the predecessor benefit Disability Living Allowance (DLA) had grown considerably over earlier decades. So the design parameters for the new system have needed to balance the interests of taxpayers with the goal of targeting the new form of support on disabled people with the greatest challenges to remaining independent and participating in society.
From the Executive Summary:
Overview of findings
1. The current Personal Independence Payment (PIP) process gives a disjointed experience for claimants. Some short term improvements are needed, for example to communications including decision letters. In the longer term, there should be a more integrated, digitally enabled claims process under common branding that would improve claim ant experience and effectiveness.2. The way in which further evidence is collected can be clarified and improved. PIP is an assessment of functional impact yet it is widely perceived as a ‘medical’. Health professionals other than General Practitioners (GPs) are often well placed to provide relevant further evidence. The potential for sharing information already held by the Department and across the wider public sector should be explored.
3. It is too early to draw definitive conclusions about the overall effectiveness of the PIP assessment based on available published data. A rigorous evaluation strategy that will enable regular assessments of the fairness and consistency of award outcomes should be put in place, with priority given to the effectiveness of the assessment for people with a mental health condition or learning disability.