Starting my PIP Appeal.

KrilloMcGillo

Hi everyone,

I just got my PIP MR rejection this week. I was pretty gutted because I mistakenly thought someone might look more closely at my evidence at the MR stage and it went right up to the 15 week mark. It's been 7 months since I first applied. I got zero points everywhere with my initial decision and big fat zeros for the MR too. The decision letter was extremely generic, no explanations of how they concluded I could do everything. The worst two issues I think are;

1) Back In April when I had my original phone assessment, I recorded the call and complained to Maximus with a transcript and recording. DWP gave me zero points then 2 weeks later Maximus did a clinical review and said the PA4 was not fit for purpose, unreliable in all areas inc. variability and functional, omissions, unreliable descriptors, DWP should think about new assessment, etc. I tried to ask the DWP if they'd seen the Maximus clinical review and no-one knew about it when I phoned on a couple of occasions. One case manager I read the letter out to literally said 'we shouldn't be using that' and sounded shocked. Fast forward to the MRN I got this week (August) and the original PA4 seems to be one of the 4 pieces of evidence they've listed but no mention of the April clinical review. I have no confidence they've ever looked at the clinical review.

2) I never had contact from PIP throughout the 15 weeks but I phoned a number of times because I was concerned nothing was being done, I was told 'just waiting for GP report' or 'Decision maker on holiday' or 'just waiting for advice from Maximus'. Then the first week of August I recieved a DWP phone call out of the blue at 4pm. No descriptor questions were asked, just security questions and the case manager said 'I'll be looking at everything and we wanted to get it right, I'll be making the decision in the next few days'. So I get the letter a few days ago and the decision was made that same day and the phone call listed as part of the evidence! I was shocked they can do that. It seemed very underhand to disguise that as reassurance about the long, 15 week wait. Using that phone call as evidence and the contradiction in timing between taking a 'few days' to do a decision when in reality it was done between 4pm and close of business that day…makes me think my evidence was not looked at properly or she wanted a way to close my file but to me it was a very unfair tactic.

So my question is, what should I put on the online appeal form? I think I should go through the descriptors again but what to include about the phone call and the PA4 report being relied on? I've done a SAR hopefully to get more info on how much they relied on the flawed PA4.

Any suggestions would be welcome.