Long painful story, but in a culmination of events - on Sunday, my 16 year old grandson thumped his mother in the face and was arrested ....his bail conditions mean he can't see her for 3 months or go near the family home ....social services are expecting my son to leave the family home and his wife and daughter, and live in a hotel with his son. This whilst being a senior partner in a company, in the middle of a big workload, and caring for his wife and daughter who are on their knees with all the problems. Is this solut realistic ....could somebody please advise me ....would he be breaking the law to refuse he has been told he will be arrested if he doesn't comply with social services...we all really think that my grandson needs to be in care with specialist help, and that the family are being ignored.... Is it really correct practise to split a family up in these kind of situations??
Autistic ADHD teen breaking up family : Long painful... - Mencap
Autistic ADHD teen breaking up family
I would challenge this decision get a consultant social worker to help you speak to the Autistic society and Mencap and the care quality commission anyone you can think of and your M.P. Good luck what a nightmare situation but he sounds like he needs help and so do you as a family. Also co tact the carers association to get help from them for you as a family.
Thank you very much for taking the time to reply....we all feel so out of our depth, alone and isolated
it must be awful I’ve never been in this sort of situation but talk to whoever you can think of to help and support you. I know a consultant social worker but you may be able to find your own. Please do let us know how you get on so hard for all of you. If your son lacks mental capacity you can get him an independent mental capacity advocate but I’m not sure what his mental capacity is like.
It MAY not have been statutorily possible for Social Services to have moved so quickly to make such a claim to being arrested unless they are simply advising on the bail conditions for the son, and inferring a parental duty of care on the father.
Social Services have a habit of stating the obvious (arrest) given the bail conditions and then doing absolutely nothing to address the more extended matter of parents.
One thing to avoid MAY be to NOT emphasise the Director role of the father because another habit of Social Services is to direct their advice to the predicative dial of the presenter. In this instant that would be the father. And it doesn't matter who makes the claim (your claim senior partner in a company) because that will have the same effect.
The more salient legal issue in that regard is the father's carer standing as defined by the Care Act 2014.
That standing places the father on the precise beneficial level as the son who has a learning disability. So he MAY need to raise the flag and cite the ACT and ONLY then once they have formally responded - begin expressing the consequential outcomes that of themselves do not carry in the ACT.
In short Social Services are statutorily obligated to have regard for the father as an informal carer of the son. If they resists that (which they will) then the dial is to point out that the only party who is directed to leave the domicile now instructing the son's entry (bail conditions) is under a parental duty of care meaning and thus by impetus the father is also required to leave.
Resist speak of money - NOR imply personal wealth NOR raise a family strengths based meaning as if the FATHER were an implied purse commensurate with having regard for the public purse.
The obvious thing to say is that if the father can pay for accommodation in a hotel for himself and his son - then that fact alone will give Social Services the direction to having no interest in the family entity.
In Britain families don't mean diddle.
Just to give this context.
My son is severely learning disabled and when my mother in law moved in with us I suddenly realised that she presented with a moderate learning disability and so had to exercise a considerable effort to ensure that her newly widowed status was properly considered for her sake. That meant that my son reacted to the attention she achieved and could not understand her at all due to her own limitations. Social Services were brutal. They didn't give a fig for anyone other than the public purse. Their involvement by myself was resisted every inch of the way. In the end my wife and myself had to consider asking my mother in law to purchase a small condone in a retired apartment block three miles away.
Social Services, after a significant legal presentation by myself allocated one hours support (unfunded) to her daily needs.
In your grandson's case his age is a definite risk for Social Services. Use it and show no mercy.
Your grandson is sixteen. Not a fully formed adult in law and certainly not in his mind.
Thank you...you've taken a lot of time to give me all this information...I appreciate it. I'm struggling to understand some of the things you've said... I wonder if you could clarify ....am I right in thinking that you're saying that no one will be concerned about keeping that family together ....they will only be concerned about finding someone for free to take care of this 16-year old rather than it be on their hands?? (ie...in this case, the father)
'.....am I right in thinking that you're saying that no one will be concerned about keeping that family together ....they will only be concerned about finding someone for free to take care of this 16-year old rather than it be on their hands?? (ie...in this case, the father).
Precisely on point.
That premise in abstraction (theoretical abstraction) is called Strengths Based Approach.
When that theoretical abstraction is then expressed, so that it includes an ethical - and by direction - a familial frame of reference, it takes on an applied meaning in the same sense that sociology can be both theoretical or else applied. About people or the person precept as in psychological theories or clinical psychology, but in the case of sociology then it speaks about the social cohort (groups of shared influence) as sociologically predicating to the individual - expressed in psychosocial theories.
That transitional threshold between sociology and psychology is now fully organised in Britain and is being applied across every theatre of influence. And whilst that may seem somewhat abstract you will never arrive at an understanding of how statutory social work functions are applied at a frontline environment until you can extrapolate the social policy along with clinical psychological advice arising from research informing the outcome (enacted law and statutory instruments).
That play has been in pursuance, consequentially, and first became visible in the Mental Health Act 1959.
Due to a schism and misapplication of the moral dialectic (family morality in common law precepts) - strengths based approach has moved increasingly towards a reapplication of historical familial based provision of a strengths based precept of family life (paternal and maternal) yet chiefly applied to the family purse burden (self provision) and away from the public purse burden (statutory responsibility of the local authority).
That's not to say that the law is of itself ambitious of the breakdown of family life. Quite the reverse in fact, but the law is also a human rights force pertaining to the individual where individual means every person in expressed force (volitional force of the individual) from any age.
This (below) timeline gives a sensible account of the entire range of age related meanings.
lawstuff.org.uk/at-what-age...
It's rather startling if you read it carefully. And that sense comes into stark light when a sixteen year old LD child can be removed from his own home as a condition of bale with his parent (father) being compelled by impetus of a familial duty of care - who must inevitably go with him in an alternative parentis care arrangement. Yet if the son were to be assigned a benefit to a tenancy contract and he were visited and given reasonable provision for himself then technically that would be lawful - UNTIL it were challenged by Social Services were that parental provision deemed inadequate in consequence of the son's mental and social capacity.
You cannot make it up really - but that is the state of play in England and Wales, and Social Services do everything to avert any burden on the public purse utilising a single consideration from numerous considerations that must inform any needs assessment under the Care Act 2014. It is that needs assessment that informs a qualified basis for public purse provision to fund care arrangements in ALL circumstances where there is a care need and a care giver.
It is that strengths based approach that is now upheld to the nullification of the entire care assessment criteria of the Care Act - where the assessment establishes reasonable means for provision outside of the Mental Health Act 1983. I could show you how in MENCAP an explanation of the Care Act 2014 makes that precise same emphasis and utilises the community and family precept of a strengths based precept to inform an entire explanation for the Care Act.
BUT the father MAY have the means to fund accommodation and provide appropriate care provision for his son - and so that fact will win the day unless both parents force the issue by revoking the bail conditions formally at the relevant police station. Then the son will falter into Local Authority statutory control. That is NOT the way of family life in any caring sense.
There is a good reason why it is NEVER advisable to advocate for ones own son in a police station whilst the son is under caution and bail conditions are set to carry out a social enquiry precept into capacity and intent, ONLY then to seek guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service to establish public interest to a summary plea in court.
I should also make the point I made at the end of my first post.
Your grandson is a child - not yet 18 years old and so whilst the precepts I have expressed in my comments pertain to the father - they are best directed to children's law and not expressly adult social care in the care need sense when addressing or seeking advice in other places for your grandson.
The impetus of statutory force is more robust where minors are concerned. BUT that will not remove the local authority from pressing a strengths based approach as long as the father is the visible party and hence the provisioner.
Hello @2556, this sounds like an incredibly stressful situation. It might be worth reaching out to Access Social Care for some advice - you can find out more about them at accesscharity.org.uk/
Thank you very much for taking the time to reply....that's really helpful ☺️
So sorry to hear of your situation. Given the threat of arrest from social services I would also seek urgent legal advice from a firm that is expert in dealing with care issues. Since your son is a minor he may be entitled to legal aid. Leigh Day and Irwin Mitchell are two that have expertise. CASCAIDr.org.uk is a charity that provides legal advice on care matters.
In a separate comment I wanted to suggest a very simple and straightforward attitude to your problem that does not deflect onto the state as a moral compass to express our distress as our children are suddenly facing a stark reality because WE could not face up to how our own children are best served when we take full responsibility for their lives to ensure that the state does not harm them in its utterly incapable hands if we are genuinely intent on making them capable as self controlled adults.
The father in this instant is a senior partner in a business that is fulfilling large orders. Raise the liquidity (a likely 25k), rent a flat near to or else in the vicinity of the ordinary residence of the son - contract directly two part time members of staff (16 hours each) from the bank of agency staff available in the special needs and acute LD care industry - and then start the process of paying attention to the Nation you were likely born in when you missed the appalling reality of the many thousands of children who's lives have been destroyed because the most senior members of our statutory agencies and charities are playing fiddle with theories and in truth have neither the intellect nor the backbone to sort the mess out themselves.
Do that and begin the process of holding those same bureaucratic and vile agents to account by administrative and litigant means to provide the son with a health and care structure that is going to have a meaningful outcome for his life.
Be real because you are going to have to suck on lemon all the way, finding no other recourse than to smile and show charm and especially agency that predicates to a business model that now has our children as mere commodities in a country that is incapable of true morality - that has raised an entire generation that believes itself heroic and fully formed in decency. And God help you if you try to stand them down in their sociological and psychological public square minds that sets them as the voice of experience when they have almost no true experience at all.
At the same time those skilled agents of the state and private care industries are ham strung trying to adapt continuously to the crisis of tens of thousands of young men and women (our youth) who have no quantum agency of their own because their parents have no financial agency - no business acumen - and no intellect to know how to care outside of an often broken voice which keeps getting weaker as they face up to their own realities of life - when they often missed the mistakes they made in the early interventional years of their children's lives.
And because my own manner of expressions are often discomforting to both sides of this social coin I can say with complete openness - I had no choice but to stand in for my son in his 16th year because I missed reality by focusing on trade - I have been paying for it ever since because even 17 years ago the public square was already a septic place.
Twice I have intervened to rescue children [teens] by consent from difficult family circumstances and on both instances I had to raise the liquidity to do precisely in character what I am now telling you to consider doing. Then use the time wisely until the bail conditions are removed.
When a businessman can't answer the phone he pays someone else to do it and that by instruction. No different here unless you want an endless process of crisis management that cannot be managed other than your grandson coming into his own adult litigant agency where he MAY believe that he is the offended party when he strikes his own mother in the face. When that happens the state will bear down with the rod and make their mark.
I went through this process from being a small child - then onto special needs residential school as having learning difficulties - then onto the street and sleeping in derelict warehouses and park benches, taking drugs and facing down every challenge with impeccable skill only to find that I had faced down my own wellbeing in the process. I should have know better than that when I missed my own son for 16 years even though I knew his clinical and likely psychological outcomes, spent over a 320k establishing his condition and making litigant claims to protect his future because I was a businessman who thought that money was the answer and missed experience which I already had in spade loads.
The father has the means to resolve the most critical factor in this and to stay the prosecution by negotiation with the chief constable or it may simply resolve itself anyway on that front - but the son won't know how to self control until he is given the means to see what self control really is. No one needs to be nice - we just have to be decent in a semblance of britishness that covers a multitude of sins.
I don't take advice from anyone no matter how skilled they are and no matter what their often implausible paradigm of care may be - when set within the bounds and influence of sociopyschological bias that came out of American greed.
Today we have missions of public servants and practitioners who are simply turned away from reality and who believe that they are the most skilled agents of empathetic intellect whilst simultaneously being incapable of bearing with a small offence when they are told that they are mad. I make a point of pressing that reality home across every sphere of statutory agency I encounter - almost on a day to day basis. No exceptions and no mercy.
Of those many agents the most honest are those who know that unless the system is corrected from a near thirty year insanity of facilitation of improper use of the public purse by millions of citizens, then those who have no agency and no quantum facility of wealth will not be properly served and improved because others are misusing the system because they genuinely believe that they are victims themselves when they often have the means to rise to their own lives or the lives of their children and make a far better job than the state could ever manage even when regulating the private sector to facilitate health and care.
The only obvious thing to say to be clear - is that insofar as learning disability is concerned (that means the autistic spectrum with Asperger's tagging along and neurological trauma or brain insult from birth that gives rise to classical learning disability) parents need to pay attention to clinical and health advice where it is clinical health and take most social workers with a pinch of salt when they exercise their new Continuing Health Care checklist standing and somehow imagine that they know what learning disability is other than in those psychosocial theories they swim in.
Sorry about that view and the length of it - but I always have to show both sides of the coin before tossing it up into the air.
Legally, I know nothing and I am well aware that common sense doesn't count for much.
Son has committed no offence. Let us underlined that .. Son has committed no offence because of that, and his age, no one can force him to leave the family home.
The only one who can be forced to leave is your grandson. Now, obviously, as a caring dad he wouldn't want 'his' son out on his own. That is why I suspect he chose to go, he wasn't directly pushed but rather given an option such as, go live with this child else we offer him local authority housing or, at worst, let him wander the streets.
Delving a little deeper, I suspect the violence to his mum was not the first time?
I ask that as my eldest, when he lived at home, was very violent and we just accepted that this was the reality of him living with us. We gave up on that idea when he was 19 and too big to deal with. Not many parents would get the police involved because of one incident.
I read your post several times and my own condition is stopping me recalling every little detail. Has the grandson had a formal diagnosis and assessment of needs? If not, he should have. As much as social care prefer the cheapness of making it parental responsibility, it's actually not if additional needs are diagnosed.
You must also be aware that social care live and breath absolutely terribly written policy documents on the law. If ever they say it is the law, ask them which law? Then read the law because they won't have and challenge them when you discover they are not applying the law as it was written. I have won an argument so many times.
On one occasion they placed a 'legal' order on me for alleged child abuse that I was to record all activities and report back to them. I discovered that the law they tried to use had no application to me or the situation. It was just a social worker overstepping the mark to avoid their own responsibility. As has always happened, they back pedalled and what they should have done was what was done.
In essence, whenever they say it's the law, challenge it.
I am going to presume too that the bail conditions are because his mum pressed charges and demanded he not go near her, I cannot see any reason for this otherwise.
Anyway, I do not have legal experience, it seems some other replies do so, go with that. I am just joining in so that you know the system is broken and to encourage you not to trust anything you cannot see written down and then only after you checked the law it's based on.
dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/docume...
The (above) link will give you one thread of an understanding of just what you are up against in Unitary Authory terms by reading this Ofsted report (the first Ofsted report carried out since Dorset became a Unitary Authority in 2019).
Dorset is your LA.
If you read it you will see the meat of what I have said in the simple detail of the strengths based approach to the provision of services.
However, the element that should give you some impetus can be found on page two in the first statement 'what needs improvement'.
Your grandson will falter into that threshold of regulatory concern IF he were to become in need of an emergency accommodation. So it isn't difficult to see why the advice you have been given deflects from that direction on Dorset Council to your own son (the father) as the parent of your grandson.
If 'the father' of 'the son' makes provision then HE (the father) is the one who will be taking responsibiltiy and not [just] the statutory authority
The previous poster TPrider has made the point that local authorities have a track record of making supposed legal claims that in the end prove mistaken. In this instant that is highly unlikely to be true because the broader statutory duty on the UA (Unitary Authority) gives direction to a likely offence that must be reported to the Police Authority were HE (the father) to facilitate an encouragement to HIS son not to comply with the Social Services advice or else obstructs due process.
Further, by assessment (even in a crisis event) the advice is commensurate with a known financial disqualification due to the financial assessment thresholds placed on those who seek for care. No different to a bank loan secured on a business tort basis to property or land arising out of an ability to service the loan by assessment of prior financial standing. In this instant the matter is far simpler.
If a brief narrated and vocalised process, giving rise to a presumptive financial assessment is believed to be unlikely to achieve financial support for qualifying needs then the advice would be directed to provision by the parent based on THEIR financial and common law natural responsibilities. NOT removing a full and proper assessment of safeguarding issues, risk and provision set in an advisory meaning.
CQC inspection for the same statutory authority is presently unreported.
It would be possible to go on and on expressing views from a whole raft of threads across legal domains such as childrens' law, criminal law and statutory guidance to the application of statutory instruments that apply to some elements in this discussion, where the lawful and proper consideration gives rise to a complex application and would likely fail unless you had a formal advice (given by Dorset UA) that gives rise to a clear basis for litigant consideration focused on that advice from the UA - in writing or else recorded with a clear journalised evidential format.
No less than a senior partner does in business in truth, just a very different and far more complex meaning.
That Ofsted report should open your eyes because if you can place your grandson into the outstanding threshold in your communications and dealings with Dorset Council - then you would have to be derelict of your own reporting on this forum.
I have read your original comments dated to seven months ago.
The consultant social worker that Jofisher gave then is repeated in this thread also.
Independent social workers are a thing of the recent past unless they are exceptional in their skills and learning. Given that they would also have to be currently registered to even give formal advice then they must all know that by now a whole new plan is afoot and the thresholds have as much to do with protecting the wellbeing of social worker as they have to do with protecting the client.
The enactment of the Corona Virus Act 2020 on the 23rd March 2020 created significant impetus for social care because significant sections of the Care Act 2014 were suspended. By the time the suspension was removed the damage was done, in as much as it gave rise to an incalculable thrust for UAs and LAs to implement the strengths based approach (as outlined in that Ofsted report for Dorset Council).
Of course that is simply my view of it, but I have seen that social workers are dancing a ditty in their new improved confidence seeing as they are almost inaccessible to reason and a genuine facilitation of a person centred approach to care - other than deflecting that sense to a single precept - Strengths Based Approach.
It is a safe guarding issue where their vulnerability now lies. And that is only to speak about your grandson's ordinary residence - displaced to a bail condition.
In the past there were numerous vulnerabilities in place such as the 'wellbeing principle' taken from the statutory guidance to the Care Act 2014 that gave real impetus to parental force. And whist that meaning technically applies here, it is somewhat subsumed to a circumstance arising out of a consideration provoked by a minor where sexual assault (as you previously commented on) and now assault occasioning bodily harm arises.
What is wellbeing now?
The parental direction is self evident to describe what constitutes a wellbeing of their children. BUT so does a safeguarding meaning giving rise to parents who refuse advice when it will be a risk assessed advisory meaning taking the legal minor into account.
Social Services are applying your grandsons' parents standing to safeguard their son - before they will act differently other than by giving advice and offering community based and CQC assessed and regulated services for health placement on day, advisory, counselling and other community enterprises including the voluntary sector.
Yet your grandson is in the SEND threshold and so those precepts narrow down to childrens' services and that is where the Ofsted report it taken from.
The distress and anxiety we feel as parents or grandparents gives rise to anxiety and so we often find ourselves incapable of acting with force when faced with such a burden you have for your grandson. I am so sorry for your situation and especially sorry for your grandson.
It is all these considerations based on 35 years of providing for else caring for my son in a shared family burden that informs my sober and rather stark assessment of social care in the UK. Social Workers are NOT carers. They are STATUTORY enforcers of both the MUST and the ADVISORY components of statutory instruments and enacted law.
Social Care Workers are carers to be instructed by the employer or the contractee of the agency. Let them answer the phone because Social Services are on a roller costa ride at a fun fair where they are having a special time recovering from the corona virus epidemic when they abandoned almost the entire population of LD adults.
All this information is brilliant ....thank you very much!!! I'm trying to work my way through it but at the same time I'm facing a PIP claim tribunal on Tuesday on behalf of my husband who has OCD and and social anxiety disorder. I've had to work through 200 pages about this claim at the same time as all this is happening with my son and grandson, and I'm actually overwhelmed and exhausted mentally.... but please don't think I'm ignorant.... I'm just a bit spent at the moment!! To update you ...grandson has been placed in a temporary hostel type place with his own bedroom and shared facilities until Monday, and then we don't know what's happening next....
I hope the PIP claim tribunal goes well for you and your husband.
Speaking of husbands
It's your OWN son who should be reading these comments.
That you are reading them essentially requires you to filter their meanings and sense the battle that lies ahead. Tell him from me as a father and a carer of my LD son that he needs to wake up and get off the executive sofa. All motherly like of course.
The family home is not a board room. Yet the board room most definitely equips men for the absolute dishonesty that has always existed in the LD sector of health and care and how it has been that our children have historically and to the present day remain invisible commodities in our society.
I worked in Calderstones Hospital in the late seventies and was privy to a massive reporting exercise that was carried out then by Peggy Jay for the committee of enquiry. I was working in a Hospital that was ahead of the curve in LD care where for the first time in political history LD people were being given the right to vote in parliamentary elections.
That national reporting process called 'The Jay Report', published in 1979 was intended to further the progress of closing down or shrinking LD hospitals (subnormality hospitals) and making the Community Care precept a real meaning and so furthering the whole raft of changes that gave rise to care in the community - precepts in independent living.
This below link are just a few of the responses to the Jay Report 1979.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi...
This (below) report by MENCAP will give a somewhat recent account and a more up to date account. It is sanitised and inaccurate in one very real sense, however, because it fails to mention how many LD people ended up in hotels on sea fronts and other unsuitable places when they were discharged from LD Hospitals.
mencap.org.uk/sites/default...
Yet in the seventies the term 'learning disability' (not then in use) was discussed in those reporting discussions that attended the Jay Report. I witnessed by invitation numerous psychiatric doctors, psychologists and senior nursing staff all trying to make the case that if that label became THE label for people with (Mental Subnormality or Mental Handicap), as was then used, and Social Services were given the hand to organise community care needs for LD people the consequence would be innacluable for thousands of people.
At the time I asked a clinical psychologist for his view of the label 'Learning Disability' and he said that his concern was the overlap between a known term 'Learning Difficulty' that arose in an educational psychological application in the mid 1950's in America to describe students with a 'difficulty' in learning due to their environments which caused them to fail educationally when they in fact had the intellect to succeed.
Essentially a generalised (though specified) meaning in psychology.
And see why MENCAP (below link) make a proper distinction today and needs must do it - even though the distinction is almost refused due to that sociological and psychosocial dial I spoke of earlier. EVERY social worker I speak with CANNOT make a proper account in even a simple explanation to what the difference is between Learning Difficulty and Learning Disability. I knew the difference from 1968 onwards because that 'learning difficulty' designation was to become my experience when I was placed into a special needs residential school just 18 months later aged 10. So when I joined the staff of Calderstones Hospital just a few years after leaving special needs care - I could SEE the difference right in front of my face.
mencap.org.uk/learning-disa...
Autism is in the LD designation and should NEVER be conflated with a learning difficulty. So pin them on that one and don't remove from it otherwise you are likely to find that your grandson will be assessed in his adult life very differently from his present scope of assessment criteria taking account of s1 Mental Health Act 1983.
The intended scope of that section of the Act is likely to be changed to remove LD and Autistic diagnosis from the Act in the very near future.
This (below) link expresses some of the concerns with that intention.
thesmallplaces.wordpress.co...
In my book (a figure of speech not an actual book) there are more nuanced terms that can be applied to the same sense of concern - yet scarcely accessible to parents of LD children (or LD adult children) because it requires a much rounder explanation where the risk lies between social services (social workers) and LD care significantly informed by social policy mechanisms that dial to the sociological and psychosocial domains of learning.
In my opinion the new NHS National Framework will not really address that risk either because if suitably qualified social workers carrying out health and care assessments trigger through the CHC checklist the prolonged means to speculate on whether LD care of an individual can be put back into the National Health public purse for entire costs pertaining to health and social care - then that is likely to falter after a protracted process unless the primary health needs of the LD person are visibly and clinically provable to exceed LD specific matters.
Thus removing the UA and LA ASC from the financial burden on their own budgets for months on end and a very likely litigant process that will have to be paid for out of your own pocket to resist the process or else implement its success.
Thank you again....I will get back to this in the next couple of days... just an update: in the meantime it looks as if the social services placement of my grandson in the emergency social care House is going to be slightly more long term, which is a relief to us all at the moment...he loves it there!! and also to let all you lovely people know that I was successful in my husband's pip appeal today, which is a great weight off my shoulders ....and they've actually raised his award higher than it was before we appealed!! Now time to concentrate on my son and family 😄
So happy that you won your appeal with the appeal tribunal for the PIP payment.
What a shame that we have to go through so much to get a fair outcome.
Stay strong and best wishes.
I just wanted to add to this ( I hope everybody that's trying to help me will be able to read this comment )....It's been invaluable to have joined this forum... I have felt really isolated as the grandparent, and unsupported, but to know that people will take the time to reply and to listen carefully to what you're saying and even express deep sorrow about the situation have been really comforting and strengthening to me...thank you 😢
I think, sometimes, it just helps to have others offering help. I know I don't mind one bit if no one replied to one of my comments, that's not my reason to post.
I am sad you seem to be doing this PiP tribunal on your own. There are charities out there which would have helped loads, they totally took away my stress. Yes, I paid them some money but it was a fraction of what the DWP owed me in back pay.
Dealt with all that paperwork so many times for me, my friend, my two kids, I am sick of even thinking about it. Invisible illnesses suck with it as it's just so easy to have the DWP pretending it's all just some dammed fiddle! (It's not).
Absolutely the best of luck with all of this. Tomorrow is another day ... as was said in Gone with the Wind which I never stayed awake to remember anything but the last line for!
Hi TPrider, glad you got support and success with a claim. Just wondered if you could let us know which charities gave you such good support, it would be helpful to know if needed in the future, thank you.
fightback4justice.co.uk/ Fight Back for Justice. Initially I was put off by the fee to cover their costs but, it really is just to do that. For example, I paid maybe £75, I was awarded just shy of £5000 and donated another £400 to their charity to ensure they could help others.
I found the site "advice now" really helpful....their guides were so useful....the one about compiling a mandatory reconsideration letter and the one about the pip appeal process.... I dictated all my notes onto my phone and then copied and pasted them into the forms .... it just save me a lot of angst and organised my thoughts and my notes...so useful 😁
How I spent my time in Lockdown? I am autistic!
Any advice 
Direct payments for Family 
