DWP can’t meet it’s own PIP targets, so its moving the goalposts

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has promised to not only meet but increase how many PIP applications they process — but they’ll only be able to do this by making it easier for themselves.

At the beginning of the year, the department was once again shamed by a parliamentary committee for its utter incompetence.  The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was so unimpressed that it expressed serious doubts about wheteher the DWP could actually support disabled people into work.

A big part of this was how badly they have handled the PIP backlog. The committee highlighted that the backlogs are so bad that they are having a seriously detrimental effect on claimants’ well-being.

The department was slammed by PAC as they couldn’t meet their own target of processing just 75% of new claims in 75 days. They were instead only managing to process 51%. The committee requested that the DWP update them on when this will be improved and how they expect to do this.

DWP moving the goalpost instead of admitting failures

In response to this, the DWP has announced it will be upping its target to 90%. However, they will be giving themselves 120 days to do this. That means they only have to process a fifth more claimants, but they’re giving themselves three-fifths more time.

The DWP, of course, gives absolutely no details as to how they will do this. However, they did say that so far they’ve made it easier to submit claims by introducing online applications, working to reduce postage time and apparently investing in ‘additional resource to support increased speed of clearance across the PIP
system.’ But naturally, they don’t say what this resource is.

The department also gave a more detailed breakdown of how many claims were processed within the 75-day target and beyond.

• 390,500 claims were processed within 75 working days, just 50.9% of all claims
• 287,500 claims were processed after 75 working days, but within six months, 37.5% of all claims
• 84,300 claims were processed after six months, but within twelve months, 11.0% of all claims
• 4,600 claims were processed after twelve months, 0.6% of all claims

Misleading

They try to make this sound like a good thing naturally, but 287,500 waiting for nearly six months is bad enough. Never mind the more than one in ten people who had to wait up to 12 months to get the vital support they need —  and the 4,600 people who wait far longer than that.

But of course, they couldn’t resist telling big fat fucking lies as well. As Hannah Sharland reported on Disability News Service, the DWP claimed the clearance time had not “exceeded” 16 weeks in more than three years. However, that same month, new departmental data showed the wait had hit 20 weeks.

The fact that the DWP has absolutely no shame in any of this shows just how much of a farce of an organisation they are. They know full well that they can’t hit these targets, but instead of admitting that they’d rather move the goalposts again.

Featured image via the Canary

By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

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