Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to increase the effectiveness of the assessment process for Personal Independence Payments.

The Health Transformation Programme is transforming the entire Personal Independence Payment service, from finding out about benefits through to decisions, eligibility, and payments. It will modernise the service to improve efficiency and customer experience. This includes introducing new options to apply online, improving how we gather health information, and tailoring the process to the customer’s needs and circumstances.

We announced in the Pathways to Work Green Paper that we will, in future, record assessments by default, unless the claimant asks that the assessment should not be recorded. This will give us the means to check what happened when an assessment is found later to have been incorrect, and, we expect, an effective lever for improvement

We have also launched a review of the PIP assessment, which I am leading. Through the review, we want to make sure the PIP assessment is fit for the future. We have now begun the first phase of this work which includes speaking to stakeholders to gather views on how best to approach the review.