The Department for Work and Pensions has said it is hiring extra case managers for Personal Independence Payment reviews to tackle a growing backlog and long delays.
In recent years, DWP has reported significant delays around PIP – a benefit for people with mental or physical disabilities that affect their day-to-day life, which is typically awarded for a fixed period of two or three years. At the end of the award period, recipients must undergo a PIP review to determine if their needs or circumstances have changed and whether this should be reflected in their award.
Work and pensions minister Sir Stephen Timms acknowledged that “many” recipients of the benefit are “waiting longer than expected for their review to be undertaken”.
“We have been actively recruiting additional case managers to meet increased demand for PIP, which means we are now in a position to begin to deploy additional resource onto award reviews. This will increase the number of review cases we can complete ‘in house’,” he said.
As of August, there were 1,948 full-time case managers working at DWP, up from 1,847 the previous year – a 5.5% increase – according to figures provided to CSW by the department. More recruitment is planned, the department said.
Rather than recruiting case managers specifically to undertake reward reviews, the department is training new case managers to work on less complex claims, giving more experienced case managers more time to review cases, a departmental spokesperson said. The number of case managers working on a specific area at any one time changes according to demand.
Timms was responding to a parliamentary question from Labour MP Katie White on what DWP is doing to reduce the length of time PIP reviews take.
DWP does not publish statistics on the time it takes to complete PIP reviews. As of July – the latest month for which figures are available – it took 15 weeks on average from registration for DWP to reach a decision on a new PIP claim.
As of 31 May, there were 392,000 PIP award reviews outstanding in England and Wales, according to figures released under Freedom of Information legislation to Benefits and Work, a company that supports disabled people claiming benefits.
The charity calculated that it could take the department ten years to clear the backlog – based on figures showing it had only managed to reduce the overall backlog of outstanding award reviews by 10,000 in the last quarter.
CSW understands some PIP recipients are being contacted close to a year in advance of their award ending, to allow for delays.
DWP has previously blamed the long delays to reviews on an increase in demand for PIP. In his response, Timms said DWP is continuing “to prioritise new claims to PIP to ensure claims are put into payment as quickly as possible”.
“Unfortunately, this means many customers are waiting longer than expected for their review to be undertaken,” he said.
PIP awards can be extended for up to 12 months, meaning that if someone’s review is delayed, they will continue to receive payments in the interim, Timms added.
He said the department has also introduced processes to “increase efficiency and move cases through the system more quickly”, including enabling case managers to make decisions on reviews without the need for a functional assessment “where sufficient evidence/information is available”. In most cases, the PIP application process includes a so-called functional assessment carried out by a contractor that evaluates a claimant's ability to perform daily activities and mobility tasks.
Other changes include a “light-touch” regime for PIP recipients with the most severe conditions, on the highest level of support, who now receive an ongoing PIP award with a light-touch review every 10 years.