NAO report criticises DWP PIP planning

Personal Independence Payment: early progress.

This National Audit Office (NAO) report examines the operational performance of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as it introduced Personal Independence Payment (PIP). The report seeks to highlight early issues which could affect the full roll out of PIP.

Key findings of the report, in terms of PIP progress against plans, include:

1. The DWP successfully introduced PIP as planned through a controlled start in April 2013.
2. By mid-2013 backlogs developed and the Department has made far fewer claim decisions than it expected due to PIP processing failures by both the DWP and Atos and Capita. By 25 October 2013 the DWP had made only 16 per cent of the number of decisions it expected.
3. Claimants face delays, and the Department is not able to tell them how long they are likely to wait, potentially creating distress and financial difficulties. Terminally ill claimants took an average of 28 days to process against the Department’s working assumption of 10 days. Other claimants had to wait 107 days against an expected 74 days.
4. The DWP was forced to postpone the reassessment of most existing Disability Living Allowance claims. It postponed roll-out in most of the areas where Atos is the assessment provider because it needed to consider further Atos’s ability to reduce backlogs and manage higher volumes. At this stage the Department has not confirmed any further roll-out plans.
5. The Department will not achieve the savings it expected in the current Spending Review period, but still expects to achieve long-term savings. The revised timetable for reassessments means savings during the Spending Review period to April 2015 will fall from £780 million to £640 million. The Department still expects to achieve long-term savings of £3 billion annually from 2018-19.
6. The DWP adopted a high risk ‘challenging timetable’ for introducing a large programme and has had to simplify the programme and adopt a phased roll-out to reduce these risks.
7. The Department sought the views of others in developing Personal Independence Payment and adopted some recommendations, but disability organisations felt their comments had not been addressed.
8. The Department used the controlled start and phased roll-out to reduce risks in the programme, but left little time to test whether it could handle a large volume of claims.
9. Actual performance has varied from operating assumptions. Atos and Capita had completed 55 per cent and 67 per cent of assessments within the required timeframe. It was also assumed that only 20 per cent of new claims information would conflict with data on existing benefit systems, whereas 83 per cent of claims had conflicting information.
10. The DWP has learned some lessons from previous experiences with assessment providers but the NAO is concerned about its ability to recover quickly from backlogs. Past experience with the work capability assessment suggests this will be a significant challenge.

The report concludes that the DWP did not leave enough time to assess potentially foreseeable problems with its own and providers’ performance before rolling out successive phases of assessments. Because it may take some time to resolve delays the Department has increased the risk that the programme will not deliver value for money in the longer term.

The NAO makes a number of recommendations, including setting out a clear plan for informing claimants about the likely delays they will experience while plans to improve performance take effect or in the event of problems in the future. The DWP should also test assessment provider and departmental plans for dealing with backlogs and increased numbers of assessments, including testing operating assumptions across the whole claim process, to identify and prevent future bottlenecks.

With regard to Atos and Capita the DWP should identify any outstanding commercial risks in its relationship with them and should also review and be prepared to revise expected benefit savings after considering longer-term risks to the programme.

You can download the report at http://www.nao.org.uk/report/personal-independence-payments-pip/