Dushima Bandara v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

Facts

The appellant received Personal Independence Payment (PIP) under Part 4 of the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the Social Security (Personal Independence Payment) Regulations 2013. The Secretary of State had made decisions on her entitlement in 2015, 2016 and 2018. On 25 June 2021 and 21 September 2021, in LEAP (Legal Entitlement and Administrative Process) exercises, the Secretary of State made three decisions not to supersede those earlier decisions. The appellant appealed. On 14 December 2023, sitting at Sutton, the First-tier Tribunal (Judge J Lund, Mrs J Bird and Dr G White) found that all three earlier decisions contained official errors in the light of the Upper Tribunal's decisions in MM v SSWP (PIP), MH v SSWP, SSWP v LB and RJ v SSWP. For the 2015 and 2016 decisions, the extra points under Schedule 1 to the PIP Regulations entitled her to increased awards for certain periods, and those decisions were superseded. For the 2018 decision, the error on daily living activity 5 raised her score from 9 to 11 points, which was not enough for the enhanced rate of the daily living component, so that decision was confirmed. The Tribunal had directed itself that it could consider only the alleged errors and could not reconsider the earlier decisions on their full merits. It granted permission to appeal on the ground that this was arguably a misdirection. The appellant argued that on a full-merits review she might have scored under daily living descriptors 9b and 10b. The appeal was stayed behind TR and GD v SSWP.