PERSONAL Independence Payments (PIP) are a lifeline for many Brits with physical or mental health conditions that make it hard to carry out everyday tasks or get around.

Worth just under £10,000 a year for someone on the higher rate for both the daily living and mobility elements, a sudden stop to payments can cause a serious black hole in people’s finances.

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Worse, if the change is unexpected, it could mean bills going unpaid as there’s not enough in the bank to cover outgoings.

The government has said that around 3.1 million PIP claims have been reviewed since 2016. 

According to Citizens Advice, tens of thousands of people have their payments stopped or reduced as a result of these reviews.

The charity says that there are eight key reasons that payments could be decreased or stopped altogether, and has explained what you need to do about each of them. Here’s everything you need to know.

You didn’t return a review form in time

If you failed to send back your review form by the deadline given, you need to call the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as soon as possible.

If you have a good reason, the benefits office might give you an extension. Make sure you then fill in the form as soon as possible and send it off.

If your claim is successful, you’ll be paid the money you should have got if your claim hadn’t stopped.

If you aren’t given more time, and don’t have a good reason that you can use to challenge this (such as ill health or an emergency) then you need to start a new PIP claim.

You should do this as quickly as possible because the process can be time consuming.

If you want to challenge the DWP about a stopped PIP claim, you need to do so within a month. Read our guide on how to make a challenge.

You’ve reached the end of your fixed-term PIP award

If your fixed-term award came to an end, the next step depends on whether you’ve been sent a review form or not.

If you didn’t get a form, but think you should still qualify, you should start a new claim as soon as possible.

If you did receive a form, but didn’t return it on time, you should follow the process above.

If you sent your form back within the deadline and haven’t heard anything, ring the DWP. You can check whether your form has been received – and ask when you can expect to get a decision on your award.

You had a medical assessment and the DWP decided your condition has improved

The DWP can decrease or stop your benefit payment entirely if they believe that your mental or physical health condition has improved.

However, you can challenge the decision if you think you should still be getting the benefit.

Make sure you gather evidence before making any challenges, for instance, a note from your doctor or a specialist saying that your condition hasn’t improved or that you still struggle with everyday tasks.

Read our guide on how to make a challenge explains the specific steps you need to take and the deadlines you should consider.

You missed a medical assessment

If you missed your medical assessment, the DWP will stop your claim. In the first instance, ring up and ask whether you can get a new appointment. This is more likely to be successful if there’s a good reason you missed the first one.

If you are given a new assessment date, make sure you turn up. If you’re successful in your PIP application, you’ll be paid the money you would have got in the interim if your claim hadn’t stopped.

If the DWP won’t let you arrange a new appointment to be assessed, you’ll need to start a new PIP application and should do this as soon as possible.

You told the DWP about a change of circumstances and they decided you can’t get PIP any more

You must alert the DWP if you go abroad, go into hospital or a care home, go into prison or custody, or if your immigration status changes.

Depending on what has changed, your benefit payment could be stopped. For instance, if you go abroad for more than 13 weeks or you’re in hospital for more than four weeks.

You don’t need to tell the benefits office about changes such as getting a job, changing earnings, or moving in with a new partner.

If your circumstances change again, for instance if you come out of hospital or return to the UK, call DWP. Citizens Advice says that you might be able to restart your claim, or you might need to make a brand new claim instead.

If you think the DWP has made an error, you can challenge the decision, using our guide.

The DWP is taking back a benefit overpayment

If you’ve been paid too much benefit, the government will usually reduce your future benefits payments until you’ve repaid what you owe.

You should get a letter explaining why they think you’ve been overpaid, including a list of reasons. If you haven’t been told why you can ask to be sent the reasons in writing.

You can challenge the decision if you think it’s wrong. We have a guide to how overpayment happens and what you need to do to make a challenge here.

Even if you have been overpaid, if the reductions are causing you financial hardship, for instance, if you can’t afford your rent or to eat, ring the DWP’s debt management centre.

You might be able to work out a more affordable plan, or even have the overpayment ignored.

The two main numbers are:

• Telephone: 0800 916 0647 
• Textphone: 0800 916 0651

You have been accused of benefit fraud

If you’ve been accused of fraud, your payments will stop while the DWP investigates. Citizens Advice says that you should try to find a solicitor that can help you while you’re being investigated.

The charity has a helpful step-by-step guide explaining how to get help and what else you need to do here.

If your health condition worsens, or if you have a new disability or condition, you might be able to make a new claim, but otherwise you’ll have to wait.

If the DWP decides your claim wasn’t fraudulent, you’ll get all of the money you should have received while the investigation was going on.

You are subject to immigration control

If the DWP say your PIP has stopped because you’re subject to immigration control, you should get help from a Citizens Advice adviser.

You can speak to the charity online, or by ringing 0800 144 8848 in England or 0800 702 2020 in Wales.

Personal Independence Payment (PIP)

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Here’s everything you need to know about claiming PIP

Yun Fong Lim was “thrilled” when the Financial Times told him his academic paper on last-mile delivery had been cited in a patent application by ecommerce company eBay.

“We had several conversations with companies, including DHL, during our research to learn about the issues,” says Lim, professor of operations management at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business in Singapore. “We’re glad to see that our research has some impact.” Lim’s co-authors were his Lee Kong Chian colleague Xin Fang and Qiyuan Deng at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Economies of scale

Data supplied by patent search company The Lens shows the top papers cited in patent applications, which serves as one method of measuring the practical value of business school research. Lim and his co-authors’ paper, “Urban consolidation center or peer-to-peer platform? The solution to urban last-mile delivery”, was published in the journal Production and Operations Management.

It concluded that having a central location for deliveries in cities — known as an urban consolidation centre (UCC) — can be better than using a system where individual drivers respond to customer orders (placed on an app), collect the product from the shop/restaurant and deliver it to the customer’s address. This is known as a peer-to-peer system, where delivery costs for carriers are high. This central approach not only saves money but also helps reduce traffic and pollution in the city.

The authors found that the UCC model also allows for better economies of scale through consolidation, and becomes increasingly efficient at reducing social-environmental impacts when the number of carriers involved is large. However, when the variable delivery costs are low, a peer-to-peer platform is more advantageous, as its overheads are reduced and it can quickly adapt to varying demand.

“Last-mile delivery is the most challenging segment of the business process of online retailers, and many ecommerce start-ups cannot survive because their last-mile delivery cost is too high,” explains Lim. “Since the profit margin of last-mile delivery is low, the question is: which business model can make consolidated last-mile deliveries financially and environmentally sustainable?

“That sparked my interest in this area, and knowing that our paper has been cited in a patent application is strong encouragement to work on meaningful research with practical impact. It’s always more rewarding to work on research projects motivated by real settings in industry. It creates more opportunities for us to interact with industry, and means our students are more engaged when we share our research findings in the classroom.”

Social media impact

Among the papers The Lens identified as being cited in two patents is “Does social media accelerate product recalls? Evidence from the pharmaceutical industry”, by Huaxia Rui, professor of computer and information systems at Simon Business School at the University of Rochester, with Yang Gao of Singapore Management University and Wenjing Duan of George Washington University. Published in the journal Information Systems Research, it concludes that, when people discuss problems with medicines on social media, it helps pharma companies recall those medicines faster.

Using a discrete-time survival analysis of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug recall reports, alongside social media data, the study identified two primary mechanisms through which social media influences the recall process: the information effect — how social media enables consumers to report problems quicker than the FDA’s own reporting system — and the publicity effect, where adverse reactions create pressure on pharmaceutical companies and regulatory agencies to act more promptly.

The authors did not know that their paper had been cited in patents granted, including one from credit card company Capital One. “I’m glad that practitioners find this work inspiring and valuable for their patents, and it proves the impact of our work beyond traditional metrics such as publication and citation by other papers,” says Rui. “I feel there needs to be more dialogue — just imagine all the possibilities if ideas and innovations flowed more smoothly and frequently between academics and practitioners.”

Rui argues that the impact of research is ultimately determined by the intellectual or practical significance of the research questions asked, not where it is published. “It’s natural for us academics to think about publication when we launch a new research project, but this has to be an afterthought,” he says. “I encourage young people to work on big questions and hard problems, which should eventually generate greater impact.”

Coupon targeting

Coupons for online shopping were the subject of another paper cited twice in patents. Published in Marketing Science, “Dynamic coupon targeting using batch deep reinforcement learning: an application to livestream shopping” is by Xiao Liu, associate professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business. Her study found that using advanced computer methods, such as batch deep reinforcement learning (BDRL), to set coupons for online shopping helps businesses earn more money than traditional coupon methods. This new approach allows businesses to adjust discounts based on what each shopper likes and how they have shopped before, making it much more effective.

Specifically, the BDRL approach outperformed static targeting by nearly twofold and improved gross merchandise value by 63 per cent. Liu’s research addresses the challenges of developing personalised pricing strategies in settings such as livestream shopping — which is used by brands to promote and sell products through livestreams on digital platforms, often in collaboration with influencers. Traditional coupon strategies often fail to capture consumer dynamics and heterogeneity in livestreams. She formulated the coupon-targeting problem as a Markov decision process and used Q-learning, a model-free reinforcement learning method, to optimise coupon allocations based on consumer interactions.

Liu’s paper has been cited in two patents granted to Maplebear, which trades as online delivery company Instacart. “I wasn’t aware of the application, but I gave a research presentation at Instacart, so maybe that’s why they cited my paper,” she suggests.

Efficient travel

Another study, published in the journal Operations Research, is cited in a patent focused on ride-sharing services such as Uber, Bolt and Careem. It found that using smart pricing strategies, which change based on location and time, can make ride-sharing services work better and more fairly for drivers and passengers. This approach helps set fair prices for rides, encourages drivers to accept trips and improves overall service reliability. The study has been cited in two patents granted to US ride-share company Lyft.

Authored by Hongyao Ma, Fei Fang and David Parkes of the universities of Columbia, Carnegie Mellon and Harvard, respectively, “Spatio-temporal pricing for ridesharing platforms” concludes that implementing a spatio-temporal pricing (STP) mechanism can significantly enhance the operational efficiency of ride-sharing platforms by addressing the mispricing issues that lead to market failures. This STP mechanism aligns incentives for drivers and ensures that trip prices even out in terms of distance and time, promoting better decision-making.

The mechanism operates as a “subgame-perfect” equilibrium, ensuring drivers are incentivised to accept dispatched trips, rather than engage in strategic behaviour, such as cherry-picking rides.

“I started thinking about this issue when I read in the news that some drivers are gaming the system,” recalls Ma, who spent time as an intern at Uber. “For example, many drivers would go to a stadium just 10 minutes before the end of a game, and then go offline, so that the price shoots up’’.

“I appreciate having practical impact, changing how people think about a problem, and proposing ideas that can move things forward,” says Ma, whose research also has implications in other queueing systems, such as waiting lists for donor organs.

Borrowing needs

Published in the Journal of Accounting and Economics, “Financial shocks to lenders and the composition of financial covenants” looks at how lenders use accounting information in contracts with borrowers and how their needs influence the terms of these contracts — especially during tough financial times. The paper has been cited in a patent application by Tata Consultancy Services.

Typically, contracts are based on a borrower’s financial health, but this research explores how lenders’ own issues, unrelated to the borrower, affect the contract terms. The researchers examined how lenders react to financial shocks such as corporate defaults and non-corporate delinquencies, and how these events change the types of covenants in debt contracts. They found that, when lenders face financial difficulties, they tend to favour performance-based covenants — which depend on how the borrower performs — over capital-based covenants, which focus on the borrower’s assets.

Authors Hans Christensen and Valeri Nikolaev of Chicago Booth School of Business, Daniele Macciocchi of Miami Herbert Business School and Arthur Morris of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology discovered two key factors are at play: the capital channel and the learning channel. The former results in lenders tightening contract terms because they have less money to lend, and is seen when non-corporate delinquencies occur. The learning channel results in lenders adjusting terms based on lessons learnt from corporate defaults, using performance pricing to better manage risks.

In short, lenders react to financial shocks by adjusting their contracts to focus more on how the borrower performs, protecting themselves from potential losses. The study suggests that these shifts could influence the borrower’s financial decisions.

Nasdaq-listed software firm Freshworks announced its plans to restructure its operations across all locations, including India and the US, by laying off 13 per cent of its workforce. On Wednesday, the company posted lacklustre third quarterly results, with operating loss widening to USD 38.9 million from USD 38.7 million in the same period a year ago. 

Total revenue for the quarter improved 22 per cent to USD 186.6 million, but it did not arrest the loss. In an effort to improve operations, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) company founded by then-Chennai-based Girish Mathrubootham plans to cut around 660 jobs. 

According to Freshworks CEO Dennis Woodside, the job cuts are expected to incur costs of around USD 11 million to USD 13 million for the upcoming quarter, which will include severance payments and other expenses. 

Layoff season is back

The Salesforce competitor joins accounting big-four KPMG as a major brand to announce layoff this week. Reports on Monday said that KPMG was looking to cut at least 330 jobs, or 4 per cent, of its audit workforce in the US.

Last week, the maker of the open-source browser, Mozilla Foundation, announced the layoff of 30 per cent of its workforce. 

More job cuts circled the tech sector, with Elon Musk’s X laying off an undisclosed number of people, according to The Verge.

Reports in October also revealed that Samsung cut around 10 per cent of the workforce in Southeast Asia and Australia, and TikTok laid off at least 100 people, mostly in Malaysia. 

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Edutech firm Coursera also cut 10 per cent of its roles. However, last month’s major shocker was aircraft maker Boeing, slashing 10 per cent of its massive workforce, impacting at least 17,000 people.

The layoff trend, which was triggered during the Ukraine war scare, has been in full swing for the past two years. While it showed signs of slowing in the middle of 2024, the latest trends since October paint a gloomy picture for professionals working in the tech sector.