The Department for Work and Pensions office in London.

James Moore makes excellent points about the predicament in which the Department for Work and Pensions finds itself.

Having been exposed by the courts as “blatantly discriminatory”, the DWP is having to re-examine its assessments of 1.6 million claims for the main disability benefit, Personal Independence Payment.

The number of reassessments is only this low – yes, low! – because the DWP is treating the court ruling as a “test case”, meaning in legal terms that it would only have to pay arrears from the date the judgement was filed, November 2016.

But the decision to review all 1.6 million claims, rather than just those relating to claimants with mental health issues, is to ensure that they are all “goodthinkful”, to quote the Orwellian term.

It seems clear that such a concern would apply to all three million claims since PIP was introduced in 2013, though. Why aren’t they all being checked?

We’re told the current paper-based review will take five years. Adding the remaining claimants could take a decade, going by that yardstick.

It would be a nice little earner for those government-employed private assessors the Tories love so much!

Finally – and This Writer considers this to be the Tories’ main consideration in restricting the number of claims under reassessment – what if a significant number of claimants are found to have died after being unfairly ruled ineligible for PIP?

As an admin exercise it looks like the nightmare Winston Smith faced in George Orwell’s classic 1984 when Oceania suddenly decided it was at War with Eastasia not Eurasia during Hate Week, necessitating the updating of every news report and official document in the fictional totalitarian state.

Some 1.6m Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claims are set to be reviewed by Smith’s real life equivalents in the civil service to decide if they are still “goodthinkful” under new criteria.

For once, it’s the Government, rather than Britain’s disabled community, that could find itself in an Orwellian nightmare and there is a certain schadenfreude in seeing the shoe on the other foot for a change.

Source: The DWP are reviewing all PIP payments – we all knew this day would come, so why did it take them so long?

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