The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has finally agreed that all disabled people being assessed for personal independence payment (PIP) will be able to have their face-to-face assessments recorded.
The promise has come in a letter to the Right to Record action group, a disabled-led group of campaigners in Barking and Dagenham, who have been meeting online every week for the last six months.
They worked with audio artist Hannah Kemp-Welch to collect testimonies of people who have applied for PIP, lobby MPs, and produce a radio programme to “creatively campaign for change”.
They have been pushing ministers to fulfil the government’s promise to ensure there is audio equipment in every PIP assessment centre, or if they could not do that, allow claimants to record their assessments using their mobile phones or other devices.
In one of the letters, they told Justin Tomlinson, the minister for disabled people: “Members of our action group have given testimony of their overwhelmingly negative experiences of PIP assessments – specifying demeaning treatment and inaccurate written reports by assessors amongst other issues.”
They argued that the current rules that allow audio recording of PIP assessments force claimants to bring their own equipment, which must be able to produce two identical copies of the recording on audio cassette or CD.
They told Tomlinson that this presents “an insurmountable barrier” to claimants wishing to take advantage of their right to an audio record of their assessment.
Research in 2019 (PDF) by the International Disability Law Clinic (IDLC), based at
the University of Leeds, concluded that not having audio recording available at PIP assessments was unlawful.
IDLC found that DWP’s “delay in honouring its commitment to put in place recording equipment” at every PIP assessment breached the Equality Act 2010, the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Now the action group has received a response from ministers which says audio recording should be available by the time DWP resumes face-to-face PIP assessments, which are currently “paused” because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
DWP has told its two private sector contractors, Atos and Capita, that all face-to-face PIP assessments will have to be recorded, although it seems that claimants will still have to request that their assessment is recorded, rather than it happening automatically.
In a letter written on behalf of ministers last week, a DWP civil servant says: “We have recently started working with both assessment providers… to find a suitable method of audio recording which we hope to have in place with the reintroduction of face-to-face assessments.
“This will remove the need for claimants to source a device which meets the required specifications to bring to their assessment as the assessment provider will record the assessment on the claimant’s behalf.”
