PIP fiasco should have been avoided | Letters

Baroness Thomas says the Lords should have stopped personal independence payment regulations last March, and Dr Stephen Pacey, a former judge, who for decades heard appeals from DWP decisions, says the government should take full responsibility for the cost of the review

The personal independence payment (PIP) regulations which the high court has quashed, thus allowing claimants with overwhelming psychological distress to potentially receive enhanced mobility payments (Report, 30 January), could have been stopped at a much earlier point in the House of Lords. The government lost an upper tribunal case, which it decided to appeal. But it didn’t wait for the appeal, instead deciding to change the law, immediately with a new regulation barring those with a severe mental health condition from entitlement to enhanced rate mobility.

In exceptional circumstances the Lords should not flinch from voting against regulations. This was surely such a case, where physical and mental health conditions were being treated very differently. Voting against regulations very occasionally is something the joint commission on the conventions of parliament, chaired by Lord Cunningham of Felling 12 years ago, endorsed, saying: “It is not incompatible with a revising chamber to reject a statutory instrument.” Labour peers abstained when Liberal Democrats tried to vote down the regulations, preferring to vote for their own toothless regret motion.

Continue reading... February 02, 2018 at 12:03AM