Asked by: Dehenna Davison (Conservative - Bishop Auckland)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps the Government is taking to reduce the number of tribunals and mandatory reconsiderations involving personal independence payment claims.
Answered by Chloe Smith
The Department’s aim is to make the right decision as early as possible in the claim journey. We have made improvements to our decision-making processes to ensure that people get the support they are entitled to as quickly as possible, because Decision Makers can better gather relevant additional evidence earlier in the process.
Asked by: Dehenna Davison (Conservative - Bishop Auckland)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps is the government taking to ensure that reassessments for sufferers of chronic conditions are as unobtrusive and infrequent as possible.
Answered by Chloe Smith
As announced in the recent Shaping Future Support: Health and Disability Green Paper we want to make changes to the assessment process so people with the most severe health conditions and disabilities can claim the benefits they are entitled to through a simpler process. We are exploring how to test a new Severe Disability Group (SDG) so those with severe and lifelong conditions can benefit from a simplified process to access ESA/UC and PIP without ever needing to complete a detailed application form or go through a face to face assessment/reassessment.
We have already stopped reassessments for people with the most severe conditions that are unlikely to change. In Shaping Future Support: The Health and Disability Green Paper, we proposed ways to further reduce the number of unnecessary assessments, while continuing to ensure support is properly targeted. Alongside this, we proposed ways of offering greater flexibility and simplicity in the way that assessments are delivered, including improving the evidence we use to make decisions from health assessments, and learn the lessons of coronavirus where we introduced telephone and video assessments.
Asked by: Dehenna Davison (Conservative - Bishop Auckland)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to support self-employment.
Answered by Mims Davies - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
The Department supports people to be self-employed when it is the right thing for them to do to be financially self-sufficient. Key to this is continuing to help claimants in, or considering, self-employment to progress to a level of sustained financial self-sufficiency that does not exclude the possibility of better paid work elsewhere. This ensures fairness to claimants, but also taxpayers who fund the welfare system.
Work coaches offer tailored support to our claimants who are in self-employment through to help them to increase their productivity and earnings. Work coaches can refer low-earning claimants to mentoring support from New Enterprise Allowance providers and sign-post claimants to the other extensive business support which is already funded by the Government.
We recognise that it takes time for new businesses to grow and that even established businesses can experience difficulties. From September 2020, all self-employed Universal Credit claimants will be given the same 12 months’ exemption period to provide them with time and support needed to grow their businesses.