Hearing On May 14th/15th At Royal Courts Of Justice, London

A final hearing in a judicial review of the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP’s) system for providing Personal Independence Payments (PIP) to disabled families is set to be handed down this month, after lawyers launched action on behalf of vulnerable people forced to wait for up to 13 months to access the vital support.

Specialist public lawyers at Irwin Mitchell, who have already helped seven people secure decisions on applications for PIP, launched the judicial review on the grounds that delays which are being experienced by those applying for PIP are so unreasonable that they are unlawful.

The DWP estimated the process for applying for payments would take just two and a half months, but of the 529,400 claimants who had registered for PIP assessments between April 2013 and July 2014 only 206,000 had received a final determination.

The DWP has recently admitted that tens of thousands of people are still waiting for a decision 5 months or more after they applied – and that thousands have been waiting for more than a year. Despite this, the DWP maintains that it will press ahead with the roll out of PIP to all 1.75 million recipients of Disability Living Allowance this October.

The problems were described by Public Accounts Committee chair Margaret Hodge in June last year as “nothing short of a fiasco”.

Expert Opinion

"Too many people have been left in the lurch as a result of flaws in the system.

"We hope our legal challenge will force the DWP to reconsider its decision to continue with the roll out of PIP until flaws in the system are resolved, so that future applicants do not have to face such gross delays for this essential support." Anne-Marie Irwin - Senior Associate