Complaints made to the Independent Case Examiner (ICE) about the DWP will not be looked into for almost 18 months, a Benefits and Work member has discovered.
Our member’s complaint against the DWP dates back to the summer of 2016.
Having exhausted the DWP’s complaints procedure our member then lodged a complaint with ICE in January 2018.
However, he was informed in a letter from ICE last month that they are currently only just beginning work on complaints lodged with them in November 2016.
This means that it is likely to be almost a year and a half before our member’s complaint begins to be investigated by ICE. And it could be well over four years since the original complaint to the DWP before a ruling by ICE is made.
The extraordinarily long wait sits uneasily with the latest statistics from ICE, released in January 2018. These claim that in the last quarter of 2018, 72% of complaints were resolved within 8 weeks of accepting them for examination.
However, figures given by Penny Mordaunt last October suggest a massive rise in complaints to the DWP about PIP assessments. They rose from 142 in the year from April 2015 up to 1,391 in the year from April 2016.
A proportion of these complaints may now be working their way through the ICE complaints system, causing an increasing backlog.
We’d be very interested to hear about other members experience of making complaints against the DWP. Please post your comments below.
