The DWP has announced that some PIP decisions will be checked to see if claimants are entitled to additional payments, dating back to 2016.
The decisions to be checked relate to claimants who need help to follow a special diet and also to claimants who need help with both managing medication and with monitoring a health condition.
Special diet
If you need help or supervision to follow a special diet prescribed or recommended by a health professional you may score points under the PIP descriptors for managing therapy.
You might need help to ensure you don’t eat certain foods, for example, or to make sure that you eat the right sort of food regularly throughout the day.
The review of decisions only applies to those made on or after an upper tribunal decision dated 28 November 2016, which found that such help might count as supervision, prompting or assistance to be able to manage therapy.
Prior to that date the DWP did not consider that help with managing a special diet counted as therapy.
The DWP now admits that they continued to make the wrong decisions even after the upper tribunal decision.
They will now be looking again at any awards they think might be affected, including some made on or after 28 November where PIP was not awarded.
Because it would make no difference to the award, DWP will not be looking at claims where the enhanced rate of the daily living component has been awarded:
- continuously since 28 November 2016
- from the start of your claim if you claimed PIP after 28 November 2016.
Any awards the DWP make will be backdate to 28 November 2016, or to the start of your claim if your award began after this date.
The DWP are not planning to carry out any face-to-face assessments as part of this review.
You can read more about the reassessment relating to PIP and special diets here
Managing therapy or monitoring a health condition
The other change to the law relating to managing therapy or monitoring a health condition was only in existence for a short time.
The law changed as the result of the same upper tribunal decision above and applied for decisions made on or after 28 November 2016.
The judge held that where a claimant needed supervision, prompting or assistance to both manage medication and monitor a health condition they should score points for needing help to manage therapy. This leads to awards of 2 points or more.
Prior to that date the DWP had only awarded one point in total where claimants needed help with both these activities.
However, the DWP changed the law to reverse this part of the upper tribunal decision. So it stopped applying from 16 March 2017.
This means that the DWP’s review of decisions only relates those made between 28 November 2016 and 15 March 2017.
And any additional payment will only relate to that period, before the law changed back again
As above, because it would make no difference to the award, the DWP will not be looking at claims where the enhanced rate of the daily living component has been awarded:
- continuously since 28 November 2016
- from the start of your claim if you claimed PIP after 28 November 2016.
The DWP are not planning to carry out any face-to-face assessments as part of this review.
You can read more about the reassessment relating to managing therapy or monitoring a health condition here.
There is also detailed guidance for decision makers on both these issues here
