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Is this normal for ESA Claim.
magunra2k
Member Posts: 43 Connected
My Brother has made his first ESA claim.
the application was made over the phone, the jobcenterplus has sent a statement , the statement is not correct as its missing a vital part of his condition (hes Downs Syndrome) and 24 hours later he has two more letters ,one from the local job center asking him to go meet his work coach and the other letter is a letter saying he has capability for work and he has been placed in a work related activity group (and details of how much ESA he will be paid).
it was my understanding that you make an application, then they send you an ESA50 and you have a face to face assessment and from that point they would decide what group he would be in.
so are we just jumping the gun and he will get a ESA50 and an face to face in due course, or have they skipped that part and placed him in the wrong group and effectively reduced the amount of money he should get?
the application was made over the phone, the jobcenterplus has sent a statement , the statement is not correct as its missing a vital part of his condition (hes Downs Syndrome) and 24 hours later he has two more letters ,one from the local job center asking him to go meet his work coach and the other letter is a letter saying he has capability for work and he has been placed in a work related activity group (and details of how much ESA he will be paid).
it was my understanding that you make an application, then they send you an ESA50 and you have a face to face assessment and from that point they would decide what group he would be in.
so are we just jumping the gun and he will get a ESA50 and an face to face in due course, or have they skipped that part and placed him in the wrong group and effectively reduced the amount of money he should get?
Replies
- the one in regards to my personal details for me to check and sign
- ESA50
Not everyone will have a face to face if enough information has been provided.
Has he received any letters in regards to his ESA award?
he hasnt had the ESA50 or any kind of assessment and as i say he really isnt capable of work, as he cant communicate,hes deaf,has a stack of health issues, he has very poor mobility and requires a carer to be with him constantly unless hes asleep.
My mum who is my brothers main carer and his appointee made a phone application for his ESA benefit, She was told this would make the application process faster and would get his benefit claim processed and receiving money quicker.
She told the person who was at the end of the phone that she had to do the phone application as my brother has Downs couldn't be understood and he wouldn't understand the questions she would ask anyway, she proceeded with the phone application which took quite a while. During the course of the phone call my mum told the operator that my brother attends college part time, the operator didnt ask for any course details or in what capacity he was at college(its a college in name but its a special needs life skills course for disabled people over school age) .
The ESA claim was processed and fast tracked and my brother was considered fit for work and was called to the job center for a work related interview with a view to supporting him into work. He was awarded the work related activity group level of ESA rather than the Support group level that we were expecting.
My wife and Mum took my brother to the job center for his work related interview, needless to say the people in the job center were gobsmacked that someone so clearly Downs and very incapable was sat infront of them and surprise surprise totally unable to do anything to reverse the decision about his ESA claim.
They did however offer us a leaflet about local food bank charities ...
Anyway, we called the DWP and were told that we had to write a letter requesting a mandatory review , and that my brother was most likely fast tracked into the work related group because he attends college but they couldn't understand why the fact his Downs was missed or why he had not had a medical assessment or forms for that matter ,so we wrote a letter and we took the liberty of including the 24 page ESA50 medical questionnaire that they had failed to send out, this was an eye opener , he wracked up so many points it looked like a basket ball game score.
So now we await the review.
The really concerning thing that has become obvious out of all this is that had i not been involved i suspect my Mum would have simply accepted the level of ESA or had she not accepted it she would have struggled to try and correct the error on her own and without help would have given up. My Mum is 60 and she is a full time carer , she isnt a support worker or a personal assistant , she is in effect parenting a 20 year old man as though he is a 5 year old child , he can amuse himself but he has to be supervised as you would a young child or even more so as he has no real sense of danger in any environment with maybe the exception of most of the home.
This is my first time dealing with the benefits system and from my point of view it seems extremely difficult to have them correct a mistake, not to mention the forms required to be completed are very long and dare i say difficult to follow, particularly when you consider the challenges some of the applicants face.
Plus in all honesty i cant help think that in my brothers case they have willfully fudged his claim in an attempt to save the DWP some money or to hit a target, it feels as though the welfare system is no longer about looking after the people who most need it and more about penny pinching and box ticking , Now i accept that the government has a problem with very able people making fraudulent claims or that some people who could arguably work if they had some support ,but in my brothers case he will never work(he would love to btw) and there must many thousands of other people like him who will always need care and support and should be placed into a benefit group who effectively just get a free pass until they pass away.
Does your mum claim carers allowance for your brother ?
CR
dont get me wrong i fully support the government trying to reduce benefit fraud and making it more difficult for people to claim benefits just because they are reluctant to enter the world of work ,but from what i have seen of the ESA process its not fit for purpose.
once the ESA claim has been corrected i think we will be lodging a formal complaint, i can only see two possible reasons why someone like my brother could be considered fit for work, incompetence or purposefully putting him in the wrong section to make the numbers look better/tick a box/meet a target, either of those require questions to be asked.
Now I’m asking myself: “Really is this country so poor to make these assessments who discriminate and destroy people with disabilities which are so obvious? Was that necessary to make an WCA for that lady who everybody could released that she never will be ok mentally? Why they do that?”
In my opinion they are not interested for us anymore. All they want is to remove people from the ESA to cut the money. They know very well that nobody could offers job to that Lady. They know that nobody can offer me a job, but they still make assessments to put more in stress, anxiety and panicked. Maybe the government is happy to see how we are suffering from these assessments.
We totally expected this to be the case, i mean lets face it why would they accept the word of many medical experts,recorded historical knowledge from there own records,education professionals,adult social services,carers ,respite workers,personal assistants and family members .
I think the worst part about all this is that his case is so cut and dry you could use it as a training example of someone who is without question unable to attend work in capacity, and yet the system is so flawed that even he can be placed into the looking for work group, and even though the error was spotted almost immediately after the claim was made, we are still waiting for a resolution and still maybe weeks away from an actual decision, and even now we are not confident that they will find in his favour and still may have to appeal.
like i said i just wanted to add this update and will continue to do so so that anyone else who finds themselves in the same situation can see what others have done.
I find that the public service works outside of the real world, many of the things they do and processes they have or use would not pass muster in the real world,they only work because they are in a vacuum,these services are supposed to work for us and to help us and our vulnerable members of society, they dont treat us like customers, they treat people with suspicion and contempt and are very hard to be held accountable when stuff goes wrong.
The one glimmer of hope for my brother is that it may be a case that due to my brothers condition being very well documented with the NHS and Education he may not need to attend a medical and they may just process the claim without needing him to go through the medical process, like i have mentioned previously there really isn't anyone on the planet who could consider him fit for work in any capacity.
But I am also slightly suspicious, this was really what caused the situation in the first instance, had they followed established procedure and requested he attend a medical this realistically couldn't/shouldn't have happened, i cant help think that if they once again failing to invite him for a medical assessment again it will at some point in the future cause a problem.
We will have to wait and see.
As for maxi farce they all too readliy will find a person FFW who isn't
Some cases are determined on paper paper assessments, or by a home visit if it isn't possible to get to the assessment centre , but you will usually need a GP's or other HCP's letter that supports this request and explains why you can't travel to them
Yes its only taken the best part of 5 months for DWP to decide that he should have a medical despite this being a routine part of the process, Im glad that they have decided on this route as this should establish beyond any doubt that he is not capable of working in any capacity.
their methods used are rudimentary at best but they are not treating or diagnosing conditions , just observing things like functional impairment,
Supporting & clinical evidence can play a big part in what they write in their reports to the dwp
After reading more detail i see that he was found to have LCW and not found to have LCWRA =Support group, they in deciding to assess on paper imo was the correct thing to do, because it imo isn't acceptable they attend a wca,
Quite how the HCP who did the paper based wca came to the conclusion that they did not meet any schedule 3 regulations i will never understand, DM's tend to blindly accept what the esa85 report says ,