Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people with epilepsy have (a) had their personal independence payment award decreased or disallowed following disability living allowance reassessments in (i) each year before and (ii) the period since November 2016 and (b) successfully appealed a disability living allowance reassessment where their award was decreased or disallowed.

Table 1 below gives statistics on the number of people with a primary disabling condition of epilepsy who have had their benefit payments reduced following reassessment for Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

Table 1 – Decreased awards following reassessment for PIP for claimants with a primary disabling condition of Epilepsy.

Notes: Data has been rounded to nearest 10.

The Department published statistics on Disability Living Allowance (DLA) reassessment claims to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) on 14 December 2016:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/personal-independence-payment-statistics

These statistics are intended to be published annually and therefore data on reassessments occurring from November 2016 onwards isn’t readily available and in order to provide a reply it would require us to link together several complex datasets and assure the quality of the results, this would incur disproportionate costs.

The Department does collect some information on appeal outcomes broken down by initial award outcome from the PIP administrative data but to provide a reply would require us to link together several complex datasets and assure the quality of the results, this would incur disproportionate cost.

Information on the number of PIP appeals is published by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). A link to the latest national level statistics published on 9 March 2017 is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/tribunals-and-gender-recognition-certificate-statistics-quarterly-october-to-december-2016