Hola Mike
After waiting nine months, my client Chrissie has a PIP appeal coming up soon.
The other day the DWP phoned her and said that they are willing to change their decision to give her some PIP, but not the full amount that we think she qualifies for.
They said that if she accepts this partial offer her appeal will come to an end.
Is this right?
Maria
Hola Maria
The answer to your question is yes and no. Here is he full deal:
Revisions, Appeal and Offers
If you are not happy with a benefit decision you can ask DWP to look at it again. The law calls this a revision, but DWP love to give things two different names, so they call it a mandatory reconsideration.
If you are still not happy after the revision, you can appeal to an independent panel called a tribunal. Usually this involves a meeting, called a hearing, where you can explain to the tribunal why you think the the decision is wrong.
As part of the appeal process the DWP always check their decisions before these hearings take place – and sometimes when they check the decision they change it, either fully or partly in the claimant’s favour.*
And that’s when they will get in touch with the claimant to make them an offer.
If She Takes The Offer.
Here’s the yes and no bit.
If she takes the offer, it’s true that the appeal will lapse. But she then has the right to appeal against the new revised decision.
She can have her cake and eat it.
The advantage of doing this is that she gets the lower payments right now, along with any back-money. And depending on her other benefits this might lead to other entitlements like the SDP right now.
The disadvantage of doing this is that her new appeal goes to the back of the queue, so it will be a long time before the final decision is made.
If She Refuses The Offer
She can refuse the offer and this means that the original appeal will go ahead. And so she will get the final decision much sooner – but there is a small chance that the appeal tribunal might decide to award less than the DWP have offered.
In making the offer the DWP have already accepted that their original decision was wrong.
When the tribunal comes to make their decision they should take the offered rate as the starting point for making their decision, but nonetheless a tribunal has to look at the whole thing from scratch so they could, in theory, make a lower award.
If the tribunal thought that the correct decision was less than the amount that the DWP had already offered they would almost always adjourn (delay) the hearing to give you chance to prepare an argument against this – maybe getting new evidence together.
What Should She Do?
In this case I would go over the PIP scoring with Chrissie and re-check the evidence that we have.
If she thinks that the offered award is still clearly, obviously wrong she might prefer to continue to the tribunal to get a final decision now.
If she thinks that there is any doubt about what the tribunal might decide to award she might prefer to take the offer and then do a new appeal.
*What’s With The Asterisk?
You might ask: if the DWP can see that it’s wrong now why didn’t they see that nine months ago, at the revision stage?
Frustrating innit?