Personal Independence Payments (known also as PIP) are geared to doing exactly what it says on the tin – helping people to achieve an improved level of personal independence despite experiencing a disability.
Several of our customers who work in the welfare support sector in some shape or form, particularly those who have attended our Getting to Grips with Universal Credit course, have told us that they also struggle to understand the complexities of PIP, worrying that their clients might not get the best possible support when completing their PIP application. Evidence shows that a high proportion of people who apply for PIP actually fail in their application – indicating that this is a real concern. Many of those with failed applications ultimately do go on to successfully acquire the benefit when it is recognised that the first decision wasn’t fair, however this is often after pursuing a long appeals process which causes delay, money worries and of course a lot of stress.
In 2019 the Disability News Service reported that DWP’s own statistics show that as many as one in seven of all government decisions to reject claims for personal independence payment (PIP) is eventually overturned, a rise of 6 percentage points since 2014/15. They also suggest that this is probably the tip of the iceberg as many such decisions aren’t actually challenged.
So what can we do to help people who are entitled to PIP make a successful claim?
Society Matters cic aims to make its mark by mobilising the knowledge of the people who do know amongst those who don’t – our learning programmes draw expert knowledge from the people working at the front end of social welfare, based on the principle that the more people and organisations within the system who understand the detail the better the system can support the people who need the help.
As well as a half day workshop to really dig into the detail, we have developed some short introductory videos as an introduction to PIP and the PIP application process. This is the beginning of our Video Help Series – let us know if you need help in other areas as it’s your feedback and ideas that will help us to make sure our resources really make a difference.
