What happens when PIP recipients are hospitalised?
Have you had experience of calling the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) Helpline while in hospital, including mental health inpatient settings? If you’ve been in hospital for more than 28 days and you are in receipt of PIP, you are supposed to report this as a ‘change of circumstance’ and advise the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) of your admission date. This is because PIP payments are normally suspended when someone is in hospital beyond this period on the basis that your care is deemed to be provided by the NHS.
If you know the number, good luck waiting for the DWP to answer your call – the wait can be up to an hour, and if you’re able to stay on the phone long enough to get through, you’ll need to remember the answers to some questions to pass security. Unless you have an appointee (that you would have had to have organised before your hospital admission), no one else can report your admission to hospital on your behalf. If you’re unaware that you need to report – or fail to complete one of these steps – and are in hospital for a number of months, then it’s likely that you have unwittingly incurred a large overpayment of PIP.
When DWP eventually realise that you have failed to inform them of your hospitalisation, they will seek to recover the PIP money that has been paid to you while you’ve been in hospital. This can be a lot of money, depending on the length of admission and the amount of PIP normally paid each month.
Unfair policy, inefficient practice
This strikes me as being very unfair when many people could have been too unwell to be able to report or simply unaware of the need to contact the DWP in the first place. Some people don’t choose to be in hospital nor believe that they are in receipt of care as an inpatient. Once you find out that you owe money to the DWP, this can cause a great amount of stress and distress. The hospital admission therefore has been more of a disservice than aiding anyone’s mental health recovery.
The circumstances regarding this issue amount to a form of disability discrimination, due to the failure of the DWP’s system to consider the wellbeing of PIP recipients. Of course I understand that there needs to be rules and that such rules apply to everyone but, equally, there are times where certain rules do not work. In this case, the current system does not help people in receipt of PIP or even the DWP itself. The outcome is that the DWP ends up doing lots of work in recouping overpayments that need not have occurred in the first place. Frankly, it smacks of inefficiency.
That said, the more important issue with the current system is the human cost, which sees people dragged into debt through no fault of their own. This is bound to put more stress on anyone who has been in hospital beyond 28 days. The longer the admission, the greater the debt – no matter whether they agreed that they needed to be in hospital in the first place.
Call to form a campaign
While I know this to be happening, I don’t know the scale of the issue. When I contacted the DWP to raise my concerns, they simply told me that “rules are rules”. Although I pointed out that the current system is not workable for people in receipt of PIP or for the Department, they were not interested when I raised this issue as one single voice. That is why I want to hear from more people with experience of this issue and campaign to change these rules. Together we can make things fairer for people who’ve been in hospital.
If you have experience relating to this issue and/or are interested in forming a campaign around it, please contact me at compassionatecuppa@gmail.com.