The mystery of how PIP and ESA assessment companies achieve over 90% customer satisfaction ratings has deepened after Benefits and Work tried to find readers who had been asked to provide feedback.
Last month we asked readers ‘Were you intimidated into giving good feedback to a PIP or ESA assessor?
We asked the question because we had heard from one member who had been asked to give signed feedback to a PIP assessor who stood over her as she wrote it. Not surprisingly she gave the health professional top marks.
We wanted to find out whether gathering feedback in this very unsatisfactory way was the norm, and the explanation for the 90% plus satisfaction rating achieved by private sector assessment companies, or whether it was a one-off error by an inexperienced assessor.
However, far from providing an answer, all we have done is deepen the mystery.
Because out of the many tens of thousands of claimants, advice workers and support workers who read our newsletters, only two people contacted us to say that they had been asked to give feedback.
One gave feedback in person and one in writing.
Such a low level of response is very unusual for Benefits and Work and does raise at least a suspicion that the number of people that the feedback responses are based on is quite small.
We have now made a freedom of information request to the DWP asking how and when feedback is collected, who it is collected by and how many responses the latest statistics are based upon.
We won’t be holding our breath for a response.
But we won’t give up either.
