DWP assessor reveals 'sneaky' tricks used in PIP exam such as chair choice test

[Sly Saint]

The chair choice and small talk of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) applicants is closely monitored "as soon as they walk in the door" for an exam, a former assessor has claimed.

The "sneaky" tricks are used by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to find the true mobility capabilities of applicants, former PIP assessor and Psychotherapist Jacqueline Gozzard told the Dr A Says Podcast. It comes as the rules of the daily living element of the scheme are set to be tightened as part of the Government's sweeping benefit reforms.

Almost 400,000 applicants are expected to be cut from the scheme by 2030 under the plan to save the country billions of pounds in welfare expenditure. Psychotherapist Gozzard, who was a PIP assessor for two years, said an applicant who walks past a chair with arms for one without will probably be marked down for mobility as they are deemed to no need assistance getting out of a chair.
She explained how she carried out assessments at a centre in Nottinghamshire: "There is a big waiting room. There are chairs in that waiting room, some have arms on and some don't.

"When we go to collect them, we say, 'you are here for a PIP assessment, is it okay if we do the assessment here?' If they say yes, the assessment has started.
"What we are looking at is what chair have they sat in. It starts right from when they walk in the door."

She added: "If they walk past chairs with arms on and have gone to a chair which hasn't got arms on, then you would deem they haven't got that much of a problem getting out of a chair because they have chosen a chair that hasn't got arms on.

"When they come into the office (where the exam is held), there are two chairs. One is a high-back chair with arms on and one hasn't (arms). So again, it is which chair do they chose to sit in."
She explained a second trick of the assessment after they sit down in the assessment room: "When they sit down and you ask them for ID, you don't get up, you put your hand out. It is whether they get up – or can't get up – and lean over and give it to you.

Dr A said, "I guess some people would call it sneaky but I guess it is important because there will be a lot of people trying to play the system. But people who actually need that will not be able to do that potentially."

MSN

 

[BrightCandle]

Ignoring the fact that for some people its painful to lean over but they have been forced to lean forward or have to get up. Arms can also be an issue if you have back pain and have to sit awkward and its a trade off between being able to use arms to assist to get out of the chair verses whether they get in the way. A classic example for men is some chairs have the supports of the arms quite far forward and this gets in the way of splitting your legs apart, which if you have Covid infecting your nether regions you need to minimise the pressure and may choose that trade off.

Its potentially valid but its also missing the other possibilities that go along with these chronic diseases that may be less disabling but more painful.

 

[Hoopoe]

Are they regularly catching people trying to game the system, or have they devised a complex system of sometimes dubious beliefs about what disability and mobility issues look like?

In one's own imagination, it's easy to arrange things so that you're successful.

 

[PrairieLights]

I have only had my original assessment via the phone (as the assessor couldn't figure out their end of the video call).

They absolutely ask trick questions that sound like friendly chat but isn't. Like, do have have a pet, what kind, do you do xyz for it.

They also try hard to push you to say yes or no even if neither is accurate.

 

[MrMagoo]

Are they regularly catching people trying to game the system, or have they devised a complex system of sometimes dubious beliefs about what disability and mobility issues look like?

In one's own imagination, it's easy to arrange things so that you're successful.

Well the women in the church is Salem all said they felt cold, didn’t they.

 

[rvallee]

I wouldn't call it sneaky. I would call it dumb, though. Very, in fact.

Might as well take out their calipers while they're at it.

 

[MrMagoo]

People who claim they have difficulty getting out of a chair are also claiming they can’t walk a meter even aided. So, by walking in more than an metre unaided, they have already blown it.
Except they are supposed to be able to do it repeatedly, as required, without pain and in a reasonable timescale not more than twice as long as the average person.
So I hope the assessor is looking at all of these aspects and asking about them before “marking someone down”.

 

[Sean]

Chairs with arms can be a problem for me as I discovered years ago that I can relieve back pain to some degree when sitting by keeping my arms folded across my chest (it helps lock the back into a relatively comfortable position, reducing the amount of active effort required to keep it there). Doing this is harder in chairs with arms, sometime impossible, for bigger people.

Plus not all chairs with arms will have them at a comfortable height for everybody. I like low arms. If they are too high for me I quickly get sore shoulders and neck.

I also much prefer to use a computer keyboard on my lap, not a desk. That is very difficult and often impossible in a chair with arms or sides. You need space for your arms to stick out further to the sides.

This gotcha stuff is just nasty deceitful tricks, with no legitimate basis. The 'professionals' who devise and administer this drivel this should be ashamed of themselves for abusing their training and authority like this.

 

[Hutan]

Yes, there are a whole lot of reasons why you might choose a particular chair in a waiting room, or in a clinic room. Ease of getting out of it is just one.

Normally, strangers will space themselves out fairly evenly over the available chairs - it is odd if someone doesn't do that, and chooses to sit near someone else when they could sit further away. The appearance of the people sitting in the waiting room might be something you take into account when choosing your seat - if you are a man, you might not choose the armed chair next to a young woman if it meant seriously breaking the 'maintain maximum possible distance' rule. If you are hard of hearing, you might want to sit where you can see when the person comes out to call your name. People tend to like having their back to a wall, rather than a thoroughfare. You might want to watch the tv, or not have its flickering in your eyeline. People might have perfected a technique of pushing on their knees that helps them get up from an armless chair, even though their legs are a bit weak and they can't walk far. They might have come in with a support person and the need for two chairs has affected the choice.

In a small room like a doctor's office, it's normal to sit in the chair closest to the professional you are talking with. If there is a chair without arms by the desk, you might put a hand on the desk to help you sit down in it and later get up.

And then most crucially, as others have said, there's the whole issue of being able to get out of a chair easily this morning, but not being able to even be upright tomorrow. Being able to get out of a chair with no arms is not a binary thing when assessing disability, as much as these assessors might want to think it is.

This reminds me of the so-called tests for FND - there's probably that same desire for the 'gotcha' moment.

 

[bobbler]

Chairs with arms can be a problem for me as I discovered years ago that I can relieve back pain to some degree when sitting by keeping my arms folded across my chest (it helps lock the back into a relatively comfortable position, reducing the amount of active effort required to keep it there). Doing this is harder in chairs with arms, sometime impossible, for bigger people.

Plus not all chairs with arms will have them at a comfortable height for everybody. I like low arms. If they are too high for me I quickly get sore shoulders and neck.

I also much prefer to use a computer keyboard on my lap, not a desk. That is very difficult and often impossible in a chair with arms or sides. You need space for your arms to stick out further to the sides.

This gotcha stuff is just nasty deceitful tricks, with no legitimate basis. The 'professionals' who devise and administer this drivel this should be ashamed of themselves for abusing their training and authority like this.

It depends on the arms too if they interfere with how arms need to hang with eg shoulder/back issues. It’s always great if it’s made for you fit wise but I’d also think things like how low down the blinking thing is might be flashing more in th head of some

and if they’ve put one further away and don’t understand someone might not have actually had a choice to walk to the next without risk of payback …

 

[MrMagoo]

My constant complaint -since Invisble Women was written- is that I’m very short. I’m so short that I’m within an inch of being a little person’s height.

My experience of the world is actually really different to “average height” people. I can’t just reach/sit the same way, if I want to sit back in a chair with my feet dangling because they don’t reach the floor, I need arms but if there’s a lower chair with no arms where my feet reach the floor, that’s more comfortable.

There’s so many variables in this they shouldn’t be allowed to have these “secret rules” not open to challenge.

 

[rvallee]

This gotcha stuff is just nasty deceitful tricks, with no legitimate basis. The 'professionals' who devise and administer this drivel this should be ashamed of themselves for abusing their training and authority like this.

The part that bothers me the most, and I never see this addressed in the literature, is how misusing invalid 'gotchas' invalidates the otherwise valid ones. Saying scientifically valid things from the same position of authority where one says made up ones doesn't make the invalid things better, it only discredits the valid things, and the entire claim to legitimate expertise.

Which is something we do see out there. Once you are lied to your face by a health care professional, and it only takes one time, you never trust them implicitly again. This is one reason why conspiracy fantasies are so popular: the discrediting by official sources of their own credibility. They do have to be perfect, and it's hard, but this isn't even trying to be perfect, it's blatantly abusing the credibility of legitimate things to push through arbitrary politics.

Surely, there must be some of those that are legitimate. Maybe even universally so. That is, they will not be misapplied in situations where the conditions needed for this to be a gotcha aren't met. And yet, how do we know? Because they keep using completely fake gotchas, and misapplying real ones in cases where the conditions aren't even met, such as the EEfRT test at the NIH intramural study.

This reminds me of the so-called tests for FND - there's probably that same desire for the 'gotcha' moment.

We've seen this routinely misapplied by the very researchers who built this evidence base, who insist that those "rule in" signs are credible and necessary, yet aren't bothered when they aren't found. Again, same as the dude who invented the EEfRT thing, who made being able to perform either difficulty of the test a strict requirement, but is fine with this condition not being met, likely because he doesn't believe that ME/CFS is such a limitation, which is both arbitrary and wrong.

In the end much of this isn't any different than rejecting someone because you don't like their face, or their gender, or their religion, or their clothes, or literally any other arbitrary thing.

The real expertise, if it exists, which we can't know, because their tools also stamp as valid things that clearly aren't, becomes mixed with fake pseudoscience, where the latter is asserted to be just as valid by borrowing legitimacy from the valid things, if they even really are valid. Not only can't we know whether any of this is valid, neither can they.

Which is so much worse. It then becomes the same kind of problem where people start knowingly lying to get in power, all aware that what they say are lies, but with enough time, people who have been brought up in those lies end up believing the lies, unaware that they were lies in the first place, thus losing control over the entire thing.

This ends justify the means approach only ever has one outcome: the means become the ends. Lying to achieve an outcome almost never achieves that outcome, but it does make lying an accepted norm, which is exactly what we have seen out of psychobehavioral ideology and "Imagine a world"-based medicine.