Am I eligible for PIP back payments worth more than £5,000?

Yahoo

6 days ago

More than £260m in arrears has been paid to PIP claimants who wrongfully missed out on their disability benefits, the government says.
A charity has said it is "truly shocking" that the government has had to give payouts to thousands of disabled people after it made errors calculating their personal independence payments (PIP).
Thousands more disabled people could be in line for payments after it emerged that their benefits were underpaid by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Just weeks after the government was forced into an embarrassing U-turn over its watered-down welfare reform bill, it said that more than £260m was paid back to PIP claimants after their benefits were underpaid.
PIP is a benefit given to people who have extra care or mobility costs because of a disability.
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But the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it has paid out arrears to thousands of claimants, potentially totalling more than £5,000 each.
Yahoo News UK examines how many disabled people were underpaid benefits and who might still be owed money.
Who is eligible for PIP repayments?
In its annual report published on 10 July, the DWP revealed that thousands of PIP claimants were wrongly denied or underpaid what they were entitled to, but there could be thousands more.
Most of those affected lost out because of a mistake over the definition of "social support" when assessing claimants' capacity to engage with other people face to face, one of the ten categories that make up PIP's controversial points system for the daily living component of the benefit.
A decision by a tribunal in 2016 ruled that the DWP had defined this too narrowly, meaning claimants wrongly missed out on payments because they did not have enough points to qualify.
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After the Supreme Court upheld that decision, the DWP has been reviewing and paying out arrears to those denied payments between 2016 and 2020.
These cases have seen £250m paid to the end of March after the government reviewed the records of 308,665 cases, its report says.
However, there remain 324,673 records to be examined, which indicates the DWP may have to pay out at least another £250m.
The annual report does not detail how many of the 308,665 cases reviewed resulted in payouts, but it has previously revealed that up to the end of August 2023 that about 14,000 payments had been made to qualifying claimants in this category, totally about £74m, meaning an average payout of £5,285 per claimant.
What were the other DWP errors?
There were three kinds of errors affecting PIP claimants that were detailed in the DWP document, as first reported by The i Paper.
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As well as the "social support" definition aspect, a number of claimants who did not have a national insurance number did not have their application processed properly, even though a PIP claim can still be made without one.
For those who lost out because they did not have a national insurance number, the DWP have reviewed 455 cases and paid out a total of £500,000 up to the end of March this year.
The Department for Work And Pensions has paid out millions in arrears to affected PIP claimants. (Getty Images)
The third error affected disabled people in Scotland, who missed out on their entitlements when they moved over to the adult disability payment (ADP), the Scottish replacement for PIP, which was rolled out in 2022.
The errors processing Scottish claimants led to a total of £13m in arrears paid out to the end of March after reviewing the records of 4,691 people affected.
In total, across all three errors, the DWP has paid out £263.5m in arrears.
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While the DWP is said to be handling the backlog of cases and issuing corrections, anyone who falls into the error categories mentioned here and below and has not had any communications from the DWP can contact their case manager for more information.
What have campaigners said?
At the beginning of July, under pressure from disability campaigners and its own Labour MPs, the government dropped planned changes to PIP assessments until disabilities minister Sir Stephen Timms conducts a review into the impact of cuts, to be concluded by autumn 2026.
Evan John, policy adviser at the national disability charity Sense, told Yahoo News UK: 'It is truly shocking that the flawed PIP assessment process has left hundreds of thousands of disabled people without the support they are entitled to and that, years later, huge numbers are still waiting for compensation.
'These errors will have left many disabled people struggling to make ends meet and it is vital that the DWP now corrects this long-drawn-out situation as swiftly as possible.
'This disgraceful episode also highlights why the PIP assessment process must be made fairer. The ongoing Timms Review needs to listen to the voices of disabled people and deliver a system that makes it easier to claim support – not harder.'
Mikey Erhardt, policy lead at Disability Rights UK, told Yahoo News UK: "The DWP has not only a legal obligation to pay the hundreds of millions of pounds of benefit arrears to disabled claimants but to do so expeditiously and learn and rectify the mistakes that caused them.
"It continues to fail to do so, with its PIP review, which highlighted these issues relating to social support, having begun in 2020 and still ongoing to this day.
"The amount we receive from disability benefits is already too low, and it must be paid at the correct rate."
What has the government said?
The government defended its actions in its report.
It said: "Underpayments are treated seriously, and we will always look to ensure that individuals receive the correct level of payment."
Yahoo News UK has approached the DWP for comment.