Hearing loss PIP appeal adjourned
Please can I ask someone to help me understand the notice of adjournment I’ve received.
I have moderate-severe sensorio- neural hearing loss in both ears.
I applied for PIP for the first time and was awarded 10 points for mobility as I need my hearing aids to travel as I cannot hear announcements etc.
I appealed as the DWP didn’t reconsider the award. I requested a paper appeal.
I received a letter stating that the appeal was adjourned as the Tribunal felt my argument Would benefit from the an assessment in person. (I was never assessed by the DWP as they made their decision based on the audiologist report).
However, this paragraph threw me:
“ The Appellant is advised that the Tribunal hearing the appeal has the power to increase an award, To leave an award as it is, or to reduce or remove an award altogether. The Tribunal has not yet made a decision on the appeal And will not do so until it has considered all the evidence, but the existing award may be at risk if the appeal goes ahead.”
My argument included the fact that I cannot hear on the phone, that I miss large parts of conversation.
Thank you so much in advance.
God Bless x
Comments
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suzie11 said:“ The Appellant is advised that the Tribunal hearing the appeal has the power to increase an award, To leave an award as it is, or to reduce or remove an award altogether. The Tribunal has not yet made a decision on the appeal And will not do so until it has considered all the evidence, but the existing award may be at risk if the appeal goes ahead.”This means that they are warning you that if you continue with the Tribunal you risk losing your existing award.I must admit that paper based hearings for Tribunal have an extremely low success rate of around about 6%.Before continuing you need to get some expert advice quickly so start here. https://advicelocal.uk/We dont' know anything about your case so we can't give any advice whether you should continue or not.
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Thank you Poppy123456!
my main emphasis when applying for pip as someone with hearing loss was under the communication sub heading of the daily living component. I scored 6 points under daily living and needed 2 more points to qualify.
under mobility, I was awarded 10 points as a hearing aid is classed as an aid and I wear them all the time and certainly need it for going outside.
I don’t have any other condition apart from a lifelong permanent moderate-severe hearing loss.
I just wanted to ask whether that paragraph in the adjournment letter “the existing award may be at risk if the appeal goes ahead” is standard/normal or have the Tribunal assessed my case to be weak?
As the mobility award is not in dispute- can they still stop any award all together?
Thanks in advance again
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Thank you mikehughescq for your very detailed and helpful response!
I think I may just withdraw my appeal as the whole process has just been very stressful. I had never applied for PIP before or DLA as a child having been discouraged from doing so.
Can I just ask quickly how I could have argued I need help prepping food on the application form as I left that section blank as I assume that referred to a physical disability?
Thanks so much again in advance 💓0 -
Preparing food doesn't just apply to those that have a physical condition, it applies to those that have mental health too and those that are deaf/hard of hearing.For example yourself, what would happen if a fire started in the kitchen, would you be able to hear a smoke alarm?Some useful information here. https://pipinfo.net/
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I think you mean "...enhanced rate mobility".Username_removed said:The reality is that if you were to get standard rate daily living you’d be less than £3 a week worse off than with standard rate mobility.0 -
@suzie11
Similar to you, I have severe / profound sensorineural hearing loss in both ears, wear hearing aids and don’t have any other relevant medical conditions. I was awarded enhanced mobility by the DWP before my tribunal took place.
I think you may have been awarded standard mobility for needing another person with you rather than for needing hearing aids, which as Mike says are not orientation aids.
If this is the case, it is a misunderstanding on the part of the DWP / tribunal that you don’t need this support on familiar journeys because the risk of not hearing traffic is the same whether a journey is familiar or unfamiliar.
I don’t hear approaching vehicles and so if I can’t see them I don’t know they are coming e.g. from round a bend, out of a side road, over a hill / bridge or because they are hidden by parked or moving vehicles. I don’t hear vehicles approach from behind me, or hear bikes or mobility scooters from behind me or round corners in pedestrianised areas so I need someone with me to keep me safe whether I am on a familiar or unfamiliar journey.
Another issue is that there is nothing to indicate to a driver / cyclist that you can’t hear so they will expect you to hear them and stop, step back or speed up to get out of their way and you won’t because you haven’t realised they are there.
Likewise you can easily end up in the wrong place on a familiar journey by public transport if you haven’t heard that there is a diversion or early termination of the journey or a tannoy announcement about a change of platform etc and if you can’t communicate reliably how will you be able to sort things out and get to your intended destination?
For example you would need to find out the right platform or in the case of a diversion or early termination what alternatives there are to get to where you want to go - will the next bus / train be going there, is there an alternative route, where does this depart from and when, how will you get back using that alternative and if you can’t continue your journey can you phone someone to collect you or order a taxi?
Familiar journeys do not have to be short or local as explained here:
https://pipinfo.net/activities/planning-and-following-journeys
The DWP have already accepted that you need support on familiar journeys so for a mobility appeal you would need to show that you need someone with you on familiar as well as unfamiliar journeys.
I agree with what other people have said about getting clarity on whether the letter is just a general warning or a specific one but tribunals have to warn you if you are at risk of losing your award and I am not sure if a badly phased letter would qualify as such a warning. I would try to contact the tribunal service - there should be an email address on their correspondence and try to get clarification as to what the letter means as you may well be worrying over nothing.
Also you are entitled to ask for communication support at a tribunal hearing. For me they organised an induction / T loop system so I could hear what the panel were saying easier and ( in pre covid times) a speech to text reporter who typed out what people were saying so I could read that if I couldn't understand what was said. You need to contact the tribunal service to arrange these.
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Yanni, thank you very much for your helpful guidance. May I ask since your diagnosis is similar to mine (although mine is classed as moderate-severe) do you only receive the enhanced rate mobility and not daily living allowance?
At the moment, I’m ONLY receiving standard mobility. I was awarded 6 points under the daily living component as I fell 2 points short of the standard award.
That is the reason I appealed because I believe DWP should have awarded me the daily living component.
My points were as follows:
DAILY LIVING (only the relevant sub-headings as below)
- Washing and bathing: 2
- Communicating: 2
- Mixing with other people: 2
MOBILITY
- Planning & following a journey: 10
“You need another person, an assistance dog or an orientation aid to follow the route of an unfamiliar journey”
- Moving around: 0
How can I qualify for enhanced mobility here?
I have realised 2 things:
1. Under daily living component I left the “preparing food” section blank. (Thanks mikehughesscq for pointing this out)
But I can’t hear bubbling/sizzling of food which poses a health /safety risk. When the fridge door was left ajar I didn’t hear the warning beep beep until someone else did.
Can I still explain this at Tribunal even though I omitted this information to the DWP as I assumed it referred to a physical disability?
This is a technical point- does the Tribunal have jurisdiction to consider a point that was never raised on the application form?
2. My appeal focused solely on the communication element- the DWP maintained that with my hearing aids I may experience “minor “ difficulty but that is overcome with my hearing aids and lip-reading.
I have insisted that I need communication support in order to communicate effectively. I need someone to help me fill in the missing blanks of conversation and to speak on my behalf on the phone (lip reading is impossible on the phone!)
I must confess I’m feeling rather overwhelmed- and would like to thank everyone for their time and input- it’s much much appreciated
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Did you contact an advice agency for some expert advice? If you haven't then you really should do this urgently.
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@suzie11
You said and I quote;; " Can I still explain this a Tribunal even though I omitted this information to the DWP as I assumed it referred to a physical disability? "
Of course you can. The Tribunal hear everything afresh.. As long as you are not contradicting what you said to DWP,, you can add further evidence and information
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@poppy12345
Yes, thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I contacted my local council welfare office via the online contact form. I explained I prefer to chat via email or in person due to my hearing issues. I received an automated reply stating that they will contact me in 10 days
Thank you. I would be interested in reading the Tribunal guidelines also as to this point too.
What I might do is send a supplementary bundle to the Tribunal and attach the “preparing food” section of the PIP form that I left blank and explain my difficulty.
Can I just say thanks to everyone who is commenting…I was on the brink of withdrawing my appeal and thinking I should have never applied in the first instance
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Glad that you are getting some helpful advice on here - please don't give up on the tribunal.
Re Familiar / Unfamiliar journeys
I don’t know what reasons the assessor or the DWP gave for deciding you need another person with you on unfamiliar journeys - does the assessor’s report or decision letter say why?
I can only think of two reasons why someone with hearing loss would need another person with them - either to stop them stepping in front of a vehicle because they haven’t heard or seen its approach or to help with communication if something goes wrong on a journey and it is necessary to find out what the problem is and how to sort It out or both of these reasons.
Mine said that as I have difficulty communicating I would not be to sort myself out if there were unexpected changes on an unfamiliar journey but on a familiar journey I would be able to re-orientate myself. I appealed saying that these communication difficulties occurred whether a journey was familiar or unfamiliar, as do the risks of not hearing approaching traffic.
If you don’t hear traffic approaching and can’t see it because it is outside of your line of sight - behind you, hidden by parked cars, round a bend / corner, down a side road etc- you can’t cross a road safely.
Likewise if you don’t hear information about a diversion, early termination, change of platform etc you can end up in the wrong place to where you intended to be and would have difficulty communicating well enough to be able to sort yourself out.
As with me, the DWP have already accepted you need help to follow an unfamiliar route reliably presumably on the basis of either safety or communication difficulties or both..
It is just a case of pointing out to the tribunal that these safety issues / communication difficulties exist whether the route is familiar or unfamiliar.
It is nonsense to suggest that because a route is familiar to you that you can suddenly hear traffic approaching or see round corners .
Or that if there is an unexpected change on a train or a bus that just because the journey is familiar to you that you can suddenly hear well enough to either hear the information about the change of platform etc and / or communicate well enough to sort yourself out when you find you have missed the train because you have been standing at the wrong platform / find yourself stranded at a bus stop 2 miles from home because the bus is on diversion but you didn't hear the driver say this when you got on / didn't hear the announcement that ' this is a fast train' and found yourself whizzing past the station you planned to get off at.
I don't drive but there may be issues with asking for / understanding directions from the driver's side of a car, following police instructions to divert / turn round. If you break down can you call for assistance at the side of a busy road or motorway? Can you communicate with the breakdown engineer when they arrive to explain the problem? Can you get somewhere safe while you wait if you can't hear approaching vehicles?
You still need someone with you to keep you safe and help you with communication difficulties even if the expected route is familiar to you.
Familiar doesn’t mean only short or local journeys. It is a journey you are familiar with.
Re communicating
As regards daily living, I was awarded enhanced daily living this time but at my first assessment I was also deemed to be able to hear ‘without difficulty’ wearing my hearing aids.
You said:
“2. My appeal focused solely on he communication element- the DWP maintained that with my hearing aids I may experience “minor “ difficulty but that is overcome with my hearing aids and lip-reading.”
However a couple of Upper Tribunals have decided that lipreading is meant to be ignored when assessing if someone can reliably communicate.
If they have assessed you as needing to lipread as well as wear your hearing aids you can not reliably hear with just your hearing aids and therefore should have been awarded a higher descriptor.
It’s really important that you highlight this ruling to your tribunal.
Something to the effect of “I understand that lipreading is deemed not to meet the reliability criteria as per this Upper Tribunal decision CPIP/315/2018 and as I can’t communicate reliably just using my hearing aids without lipreading I believe I should have been awarded a higher descriptor”
The latest ruling is here: https://pipinfo.net/activities/communicating-verbally
Or here:
The way is then open to show you need communication support to understand either complex (descriptor C) or basic verbal information (descriptor D).
It’s really important to provide real life examples of your communication difficulties if you haven’t already done so.
I made a list of real life examples where
-I had either not heard the person speaking or not realised they were talking to me (someone else had to point this out to me),
-I thought I understood what was said and only later realised or someone told me that I had heard something different from what was actually said. I included what I thought I heard and what they actually said.
- I had to ask someone else what the speaker had said,
-I gave up trying to understand what the speaker was saying and just nodded / smiled / said Yes / Right / OK and hoped that was the correct response,
-I have had to ask the speaker to repeat or clarify what they said.
I gave some brief information about if there was background noise, how far the speaker was from me and where (good / bad ear, facing me, to the side, behind me) and if I knew them well / slightly or not at all.
You don’t need to do loads of examples, just enough to demonstrate the real life difficulties you have.
I showed how I needed help with basic information with the following argument:
Hearing aids do not and can not restore my hearing to normal. With sensorineural hearing loss, the nerves in my cochlear are damaged or missing and hearing aids can not compensate for this damage. These nerves are responsible for sending sound signals to my brain. My hearing loss both makes sounds quieter and distorted.
If hearing aids restored hearing to normal there would be no need for cochlear implants or sign language as deaf people could just use hearing aids.
If you accept that hearing aids do not restore my hearing to normal, it follows that I have at least a mild hearing loss when wearing my hearing aids.
A speech banana shows where speech sounds fall in normal speech.
With a mild loss the softest / quietest sounds F S and TH are inaudible to me.
This means that with basic sentences such as
A mouse ran down the hole.
The light went out
They wanted some potatoes
The little girl is shouting
A white silk jacket goes with any shoe.
The child crawled into the dense grass.
Footprints showed the path he took up the beach.
A vent near the edge brought in fresh air.
Without being able to hear the F S and TH sounds I hear as:
A mou e ran down e hole.
e light went out
ey wanted ome potatoe
e little girl i houting
A white ilk jacket goe wi any hoe.
e child crawled into e den e gra .
ootprint howed e pa he took up e beach.
A vent near e edge brought in re h air.
F S and TH are common speech sounds in English:
Without hearing the F sound for:
For, far, few,fit, fix, feed, food, fill, full,fine, fun, form
I hear:
or, ar, ew, it, ix, eed, ood, ill, ull, ine, un, orm
Without hearing the S sound for:
Say, said, see, saw, soon, as, since,should, some, same, such,
I hear:
ay, aid, ee, aw, oon, a , ince, hould, ome, ame, uch,
Without hearing the TH sound for:
The, this,that, these, those, then, them, thought, think, thank,three, they
I hear:
e, is, at, ese, ose, en, em, ought, ink, ank, ree, ey
[This is a good example of a speech banana as it gives an explanation about how it works https://ohns.ucsf.edu/audiology/education/peds
I used some basic sentences on pages 36-42 from this document purely because they are used in audiological tests and so cover all the speech sounds: http://www.myavaa.org/documents/conferences/2009/joint-meeting-presentations/wednesday/McArdle_Speech_in_Noise.pdf]
I then went on to say about background noise making it even harder to hear speech and that I can only hear speech if the person is standing within 3-4 feet and looking at me as otherwise their voice goes in the direction they are looking rather than towards my hearing aids.
Obviously this is only the way I made my appeal but hopefully it is of help to you.
Re prepping food:
This is not an activity I had considered either.
I would say that the arguments are the same as for washing and bathing - you can’t hear a smoke alarm, sizzling / boiling pans, timers without your hearing aids in so you need them (aid or appliance) to be able to cook safely.
I second what Andrew says about a tribunal considering activities not in your original claim form. I submitted evidence for washing and bathing for the first time at tribunal as I also thought it was only for physical disabilities.
Length of award
A final point is to ask for an ongoing award on the basis that your hearing loss is lifelong and is not going to improve. Unfortunately tribunal tend to give 2-3 year awards unless you ask them to consider a longer award.
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Wow! I've learned so much today by reading this. Thank you everyone! I have been almost deaf all my life due to untreated boils and such in my ears when I was young. I am now about 2 points away from total deafness and the inability to socialize is totally debilitating. I don't bother to try now.
I'm glad I have found this forum and hope to get to know you all.
Joni xx1 -
somalian said:I think you need to get legal advice, if I were you I wouldn't want to lose the award, but on the other hand filing an appeal would be a fair decision.
You've commented on a thread that's 9 months old. I would like to think that the member has now got everything sorted.
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