Sons pip stopped. Any tips for tribunal?

samcats

hi everyone i am new here,my eldest son who has Schizoaffective disorder  had his pip stopped last week and my other son who has end stage kidney failure has been put from high rate care to middle rate,this is so stressful but I do plan to go to tribunal,does anyone have any tips to share 😊

wilko

@samcats, hello and welcome to the cumunity, your first port of call is to call DWP and ask why your sons care has been lowered and secondly as why your sons PIP has been stopped. After you have this information you may wish to repost with more information, like reasons given for lowering care and stopping PIP, where you moving from DLA to,PIP the more of a picture you can give the more advice, help opinion can and will be given no need to give intrermate personnel details . 

Yadnad

wilko said:

@samcats, hello and welcome to the cumunity, your first port of call is to call DWP and ask why your sons care has been lowered and secondly as why your sons PIP has been stopped. After you have this information you may wish to repost with more information, like reasons given for lowering care and stopping PIP, where you moving from DLA to,PIP the more of a picture you can give the more advice, help opinion can and will be given no need to give intrermate personnel details . 

The above information is sent out with the decision notice, explaining why they have come up with that decision.

Matilda

Disability Rights UK site has a good guide to tribunals.  They also publish their own Disability Rights Handbook that has a good section on tribunal hearings.  £18.50 from their website or might be available in your local reference library.

mikehughescq

Tips about appealing or on the day? 

DRH a waste of time for appeals. Way too little detail beyond the basics of the process. If you have specific questions then ask away.

BenefitsTrainingCo

samcats,

You probably know this already, but for both decisions you'll have to ask for a mandatory reconsideration before you can appeal. And if your sons had a face to face assessment, you can ask for the assessors' reports from those.

As regards both MR & appeal, again, you may already know but the first thing is to establish how many points you think each of your sons should have got, and try to supply evidence for this. You can take the PIP self-test here.

Beyond that, then once you have your MR (& assuming that is a no), you lodge the appeal on form SSCS1. At some point you'll get the DWP bundle, & if possible you can respond to that with your own 'submission' (a response to the DWP's response), although you don't have to. If you can get any help with that from your local CAB or a disability information service, great - but they tend to be very over-subscribed.

There's no problem with doing it yourself, and many people are successful. The Disability Rights Handbook (DRH) isn't bad on the basics and if you haven't been to a tribunal before, I think you'd find it useful, but whether it is worth shelling out for is up to you. The appeals factsheet on their website (which is free) is here. What ultimately makes a difference is understanding the activities and the points-scoring system (the descriptors) and you can do that either from the DRH, or for free from the link above, the Disability Rights UK website and elsewhere. 

You might also find this guide from Advice Now useful.

As Mike says, it depends what you are after at this stage. If you want tips about the process of appealing, then let us know where you are up to & I'm sure people will be able to help. If you've got hearing dates & want to know what it might be like, then again, lots of people here have been through that & Mike & others have lots of knowledge.

Going back to Yadnad's point, whilst you may have been given some sort of written decision, I'd bear in mind that case law says making a change to someone's PIP may not always be lawful, especially where there is no change in condition, so this is definitely worth looking into in both cases.

Will