Suspended PIP payments

simongregson

My son'son's pip payments have been suspended for over 3 months now. My wife is his appointee and she has chased this repeatedly. He is a child still

He lives in a residential placement for the week, this is funded by social services and from what we uunderstand a part papayment from NHS continuing care (not continuing health care), which on research we can see he qualifies for his higher rate mobility, we know he doesn't qualify for his higher rate living while on placement but we are able to let them know when he is staying with us and claim these dates.

The problem is that the DDWP have written to our local council asking for them to confirm the funding for his placement, but as our local council are bloody useless they haven't replied.

Does anyone know how we take this further, we have emailed our local MP in frustration, as the council i have yet to locate the person responsible and whenever my wife rings the pip helpline at 4pm she is put on hold waiting for an advisor then she is hung up on at 4.45 presumably because they don't want to answer the phone at the end of the day. She is already at the limit of her paid leave so can't take time off to ring them. The mp tells us they have to wait 4 weeks to get a reply out the council.

it just seems really out of order that his payments can just be suspended waiting for two totally incompetent organisations to communicate, in the meantime it is affecting our son. God knows what he would do if we weren't around to help.

KxMx

Can she call PIP during her lunch break?

tacpot12

Contact your local councellor to ask if they can ask the Social Services department respond to the DWP asap.

There's no point chasing the DWP if they have asked for information from the council and not received it yet. If the answer has to be sent by post, I wouldn't chase it for two weeks after you have been told it has been sent.

simongregson

The hold time is always an hour at least. They shut at 5. Also if you phone towards the end of the day they pick up then hang up, to avoid going past closure time I think. They don't accept emails etc! You can post letters to a random po box in Wolverhampton which they seem to receive and ignore, but they do have them when you next manage to get through on the phone. Hilariously we were once told that we shouldn't have used the pre paid envelope they sent to us as they take weeks to get to them. I am lost for words about how useless they are.

The council are the same, You get through to a voice recognition system and say 'I want to make a complaint', 'putting you through to planning…'

beanielou

So have I got this correct. There has been an OP on your son’s daily living component due to part funding by the council of his weekday residential placement. The payments have been suspended. You are looking for reinstatement of mobility component mean time until the council do due diligence at their end?

simongregson

Yes, we are not sure why they have stopped, as the care home has already confirmed the funding is from social services (they had a similar letter I believe and sent it bacback, PIP people have received this). We have researched and his partial NHS funding from children's continuing care doesn't affect the mobility component as far as we can see, confusingly if he was eligible for adult NHS funding it would affect it, but he has been assessed as he is 17 and is not eligible in any case. His placement is full time if needed but he stays with one of us at home (parents) once a week, unfortunately he cannot stay with his younger brother so we take it in turns to stay with him one day over the weekend. The placement is funded by social services, we aren't aware of the split in funding between them and NHS continuing care.

simongregson

Just to update our thread, we have successfully got his payments reinstated through a combination of persistence until we got through to a caseworker who took responsibility and gave an email to social services to send the information, and a complaint sent from our MP which prompted the council to action. The net result is that it was mosmostly the DWP at fault as they sent the paperwork to adult social services despite the fact they can see our son is 17, and the council presumably did nothing to pass on the information. At least it is sorted for now, until the next mess up!