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Presenting Officers attend via Video at appeals
The majority of Tribunals recently have had PO on a video in attendance. I am sure there was a request from DWP rep at our latest TUG meeting (last year)to do this and seem to remember the District Judge raising objections about this but I have no minutes to confirm. I have raised objections to their continued attendance via Video or phone on grounds below;
1. Before tribunal begins we have been handed UC85 (20 pages or so) at PIP appeals.
2. I had a PO reading from a UC journal entries during hearings.
3. recent appeal where PO from Cardiff Video kept freezing so he emailed clerk telling them he couldn’t hear. They then spent half an hour trying to get his attendance through phone but he couldn’t hear evidence and complained again. Judge sent us out and when we got back in she Adjourned as PO still wanted to attend but couldn’t due to technical difficulties. Client was very upset due to his anxiety in build up to appeal. I asked Judge if she would ask PO to withdraw in order to progress hearing. She advised that she couldn’t do that and appeal adjourned.
My point being that a PO in his office should not introduce any new evidence during the appeal.
P.S. In 2 above the PO seemed to read Journal entry that was not related to my client about visiting his sister in Aberdeen. He has no sister and not been in Aberdeen for 15 years.
I’ve noticed this too. Where they used to be a rarity, they’ve made an appearance at the majority of my appeals in the past 6 months.
They’ve been more or less useful. One immediately conceded an appeal in the client’s favour. Another one submitted meaningless evidence the day before the hearing, had not notified HMCTS he would be attending until the last minute, and provided the usual nonsensical arguments we’ve come to expect.
We’ve noticed an uptick in attendance by POs (I’d say there coming to around 80% up from 10/20% pre-pandemic) but so far they’ve been coming face to face rather than via video link. We did have one telephone into the hearing which worked from a technical point of view but the PO immediately blew up the proceeding by vacillating on whether or not the DWP were making a partial concession (said something like “I think there’s clearly a need for prompting so it would be good if the Tribunal were to look into that aspect”) which someone irritated the Tribunal as they then weren’t quite sure just what it was they needed to look at anymore and the PO was unwilling to be more specific. We ended up adjourned and eventually the DWP just revised the decision before the rehearing came around.
The temptation to request the recording of the hearing just to enjoy the PO getting torn apart by the judge was quite significant…
1. Before tribunal begins we have been handed UC85 (20 pages or so) at PIP appeals.
This is nothing new or specific to video attendance. POs have always presented new evidence either on the day or shortly before the hearing. It is a function of the fact that they are only briefed on the case and review the papers a few days before the hearing. The UC85 should have been included in the case papers from the outset per rule 24(4)(b) but very frequently isn’t.
If you object to the production of new evidence then ask the tribunal to exclude it under rule 15 or request a short break or longer adjournment to consider it.
I recently had a PO on a telephone hearing defending, what ultimately was a £105 underpayment due to tariff income rules for an ESA client (and this was highlighted in the submission), where he stated that handing bank statements into the local Jobcentre (which they had subsequently lost) was not complying with notifying the correct ESA office of a change in circumstances, but they were happy when she had attended the same Jobcentre initially to report her small inheritance! He also tried to explain away the failure to use case controls, as they are to help staff manage workloads (which they had ignored though due to workload!) rather than the clients, the Judge chased him on this after I had responded in a less than professional manner.
Both parties have a right to attend the hearing and address the tribunal.
Of the things complained about, where there is a valid basis for a complaint on procedural grounds, there’s a valid basis for complaint - and whether the PO attends in person or by video link makes no difference to that. As it goes, in Pension Credit cases, POs have attended face-to-face hearings by video link in the London region since God was a boy - they’re hardly going to send someone down from Newcastle.
As for the PO having difficulty hearing/connecting, that is unfortunate - but the suggestion that they should have been excluded/the hearing should have continued without them was (rightly) never going to go anywhere. Really, it’s no different to where a PO had attended in person and then been taken ill part way through the hearing. Imagine the situation reversed - the appellant’s internet connection failed and the PO had asked for the hearing to continue in their absence? We’d have been happy with that?