PIP Mandatory Reconsideration

James

I read your post multiple times and really struggled to understand that you met the requirement for the majority of days, even after I had worked through your maths it still took me several goes to understand the point that you were making.

If I had these problems then I think it likely that the DM did as well! My first thought was to take the statement "4 relapses per year" as meaning that you were not affected at all for 8 months of the year. I don't know whether it was recorded or not in the report but your statement on the day of the F2F the you were "7 out of 8" probably did not help either.

Whilst you certainly need to clarify what you meant in the form I think you should consider explaining it differently and more simply.

The first stage to challenging a Decision is for you to request a Mandatory Reconsideration, this needs to be done in writing to the DWP, within one month of the Decision, to the office that dealt with your claim, have a look at our PIP MR & Appeal guide for details of the process, the PIP area also has template letters that you can use to make the request with.

www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/help-for-claimants/pip

You should contact the DWP for a copy of the assessment report if you have not already done so, I would phone them but again follow up the request in writing. Once you have the assessment report you will have a better understanding of how the DWP Decision Maker has come to their conclusions and will then be able to argue against them.

Your primary task is to show that you meet the criteria, there are many reasons you may have failed, you need to address each of these but don't get bogged down in criticising the assessment report unless you can clearly show that it is incorrect, it is a lot easier to argue the facts of the situation;

"the assessor recorded that I walked 50m, I did but they have failed to document that I had to stop every 10m for a rest due to breathlessness"

than their opinions

"based on my observations of the claimant walking I believe that they can reliably walk more than 200m.

When you have a better idea of the issues with your claim, come back to the forum and we will do our best to help.

Gordon

James
The phrase "majority of days" is defined in the legislation and should be taken literally, so 4 days a week, 16 days a month, 27 weeks a year, 7 months a year, etc.

However, you also need to consider variability and how this might be seen as affecting the period affected, so as a general rule; 5 days a week will be seen as a stronger statement than 4 days and so on.

Stay away from percentages, for example you would need to be affected for 58% of the time to meet the 4 days a week requirement.

f your condition varies explain how; using your example from a previous post, how are you affected on the 150+ days that are not covered by your 4 x month and 2-3 days? Are you fully functional and perfectly healthy, I would guess not, so how are you affected. Remember you must also be able to complete the PIP activities reliably. So as an example; a claimant might be unable to stand and move more than 1m on four days a week, able to move 10m 2 days a week and up to but not more than 20m on the remaining day.

Gordon