Reblogged from Work Test Whistleblower:
The Personal Independence Payment programme is still in Intensive Care.
Although the DWP boasted yesterday that Edinburgh and sparsely-populated parts of southern Scotland will now start to use PIP assessments in place of DLA, that still leaves the rest of Scotland, the north of England, southern England and London in limbo - it seems that in those places, the DWP will use a makeshift hybrid of DLA and paper-only PIP decisions, for cases such as terminal illness.
And even in Edinburgh, Wales and the Midlands, where face-to-face PIP assessments have got underway, these are only actually happening when certain trigger-points are reached, such as the end of a fixed-term award or when a child turns 16.
The DWP has confirmed that "the majority of existing DLA claimants won't be re-assessed until 2015 or later". This means that the plan to actively substitute PIP for DLA - or to stop payments completely on the basis of the face-to-face PIP assessment - for the millions of people currently receiving DLA will not now take place during the Coalition's five year term of office. As the political commentator Matthew D'Ancona has written in his book In It Together on the Coalition, this reform was "driven, at least in part, by the need to save money".
So the announcement yesterday shows that, even on the Coalition's own terms, PIP's implementation has failed.
