Consultation outcome

Norfolk citizens advice response

Updated 23 March 2020

1. Executive Summary

1.1 Norfolk Citizens Advice conducted semi-structured interviews with clients claiming disability benefits to find out their experiences of being contacted for feedback by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). We found that:

• Not 1 respondent had ever been asked to give feedback to the DWP.

• Respondents believed they had valuable feedback they could give about the poor practice of health assessors and the lack of accessibility to DWP services.

• There is a culture of fear that surrounds the DWP, with most respondents fearing that their claim could be adversely affected if they gave honest feedback to the DWP.

1.2. In order to see improvements in any of these, clients stated that they wanted:

• Properly trained and accountable health assessors, as these assessments are often the starting point for peoples’ fear of the DWP.

• Avenues to give feedback that were less anxiety inducing, such as via email or in conversation with their work coach.

• Greater reassurances that any feedback given will not adversely affect their claim.

2. Introduction

2.1 Norfolk Citizens Advice is a charity that provides advice on several topics, including but not limited to money, disability and health. The service is delivered from ten offices and several outreaches throughout the county.

2.2 As a service, a great deal of the advice we provide concerns disability benefits, Personal Independence Payments (PIP), Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Universal Credit (UC), limited capability for work etc.). In Q3 of 2019/2020, we recorded over 900 casenotes across Norfolk which pertained to disability benefits in some way. Across all of the benefits advice we provided in 2018/19, 39% concerned disability benefits (DLA, Carers Allowance, ESA, PIP and Universal Credit disability components).

2.3 On account of the volume of cases we see that involve disabled people dealing with the DWP, Norfolk Citizens Advice is well positioned to speak to these previous and ongoing clients about their experiences. Thus, this document seeks to place our clients’ voices at the core of this response.

3. Methodology

3.1 This response is centred around qualitative semi-structured interviews with clients who engaged with us in January 2020.

3.2 These clients were located by searching casenotes recorded in Jan 2020 that revolved around disability benefits (DLA, Carers Allowance, ESA, PIP and Universal Credit disability components), producing over 300 results.

3.3 Following this, consents were checked for each client to see if they were willing to be contacted for feedback, which produced a shortlist of 31 clients.

3.4 In the time available, 17 were called from this shortlist, of which 6 clients were available and consented to giving anonymous feedback.

3.5 These 6 phone interviews were semi-structured, revolving around 5 questions derived from the guidance from the SSAC’s original call for evidence. More questions would have been asked had any of the clients been contacted by the DWP for feedback, but this had not happened in a single case.

The questions asked were as follows:

1. Have you ever been contacted by the DWP for feedback following any interaction with them?

2. What improvements would you like to see in the DWP?

3. After engaging with them for however long, would you have been willing to give feedback to the DWP?

4. What is the most effective way for the DWP to engage with you?

5. What do you think is the most important thing that the DWP asks for feedback on?

4. Findings

4.1 Hearing from the DWP

4.1.1 Put shortly, not a single interviewee had ever been contacted by the DWP asking for feedback. This was despite the fact that some had been claimants for nearly a decade.

4.2 Constructive feedback

4.2.1 One of the common themes that emerged from these interviews was a desire to see a significant overhaul in the way health assessments for benefits such as PIP are conducted. Half of respondents felt that they had not been properly listened to by the assessor, nor given a reasonable opportunity to adequately explain their circumstances. More than one client talked of how during their assessment, the healthcare professional seemed like they did not make eye contact with them at any point - instead simply staring at their notes or computer screen. There was also a general feeling that these assessors simply lacked the expertise to make decisions around a person’s mental health.

4.2.2 Respondents also talked of a lack of compassion in the way they or their partners were dealt with, with one case in particular seeing a client having to battle to ensure their benefits continued to be paid whilst simultaneously having to care for their terminally ill partner.

4.2.3 The final point that arose more than once was the difficulty clients have had communicating with the DWP, with these issues spanning multiple different mediums. Two respondents cited excessive hold times to get through to their respective benefits lines, with one client finding that when they did get through, they would find themselves being transferred to another phone number or simply being cut off. Another client, who claims the disability element of UC, talked about the struggle for them to make an online claim and update their journal. They stated that they were unable to use computers, and required support from family or friends in order to ensure that they could maintain their claim. This specific client wanted greater tolerance for those who are limited in their ability to use or access the internet.

4.3 Willingness to talk to the DWP

4.3.1 Of all interviewees, only one respondent showed no worries around the idea of giving feedback to the DWP.

4.3.2 One respondent, on account of mental health conditions, said that they might struggle to give this feedback if they were put on the spot and unable to have someone there to support them in giving their answers. This will be addressed further in the next section.

4.3.3 However, the most recurrent theme throughout the majority of answers was that claimants would be nervous about giving feedback to the DWP out of fear of reprisals should they answer honestly. Half of interviewees raised this as their main concern about giving feedback to the DWP, from which most followed onto state that they felt they would either have to answer dishonestly or not engage at all. These claimants feared that the DWP was trying to catch them out in order to penalise them, sanction them, or stop their benefits entirely.

4.3.4 One specific interviewee was in fact so nervous about this that mid-interview they stopped to make sure that the caller was not in fact from the DWP and trying to catch them out. After the interview had finished, they subsequently called Citizens Advice Norwich’s admin number to double check that the interviewer did in fact actually work there, and had not lied about their non-affiliation to the DWP during the interview.

4.4 Best means of communication

4.4.1 This question produced a plurality of answers, though there were still some concurrent themes.

4.4.2 Two respondents stated that they would prefer to give feedback in a face-to-face setting to their work coach. As claimants, they both said that they trusted their work coaches far more than anyone else in the DWP, and consequently believed that they could be more honest and open with them. The face-to-face format was also the easiest way for a claimant to have someone there to support them if they did not feel confident giving feedback alone.

4.4.3 One client’s response worth noting was that they would only be happy to be contacted for feedback by email, as they would be extremely worried by a phone call from the DWP out of the blue. The client stated that this would cause them to feel extremely anxious that they had done something wrong, or were about to experience issues with the benefits they depend upon. Thus, email was their preferred medium, as it placed far less pressure on the claimant to respond. If they wished to, they could then do so in their own time.

4.5 Minimum expectations

The responses for this section largely mirror the complaints many interviewees made about their respective health assessments. More than one client stated that their poor experience with health assessors had negatively impacted both their health and their claim, and that they would have valued the opportunity to communicate this back to the DWP in an effort to stop this from happening again - both for themselves and other claimants.

4.5.2 Beyond this, other interviewees made wider calls for the DWP to start gathering more feedback on the accessibility of their services in general. These respondents believed that the DWP should both be collecting feedback on what the best medium is for claimants to engage with them, and how to make sure that the first point of contact is as useful as possible to the claimant.

5. Conclusion

5.1 Two of the most common themes found in these answers was that claimants felt that the health assessment process was often unfair, and that a general culture of fear exists surrounding the DWP. This meant that whilst nearly every respondent had constructive feedback they could give around the assessment process, their negative experiences of such often meant that they were very wary of engaging with the DWP any more than they needed to.

5.2 In general, all respondents felt that there was at least one thing that the DWP could improve upon - be it accessibility or the assessment process. However, not one of any of these clients had been contacted for their feedback.

5.3 In order for the DWP to be more responsive to the needs and wants of disabled people, it needs to:

• ensure its health assessors are properly trained to recognise both mental and physical disabilities

• ensure that opportunities are presented to people to anonymously give feedback on their health assessment

• have multiple avenues by which people can give feedback, so as to respect the diversity of needs of disabled people

• do more to reassure people that any feedback given will not have an adverse effect on their claim