Email address for complaint re ESA assessment

Department for Work and Pensions did not have the information requested.

Dear Department for Work and Pensions,

My sons 13 week assessment officially ended at the beginning of May. Its now 3 months later & I still do not know if he is to be assigned to the support group or not.

I am his carer & appointee, my son has autism. I have made several calls to the ESA but am always told nothing yet been updated on their screen. My son had his health assessment weeks ago.

Yours faithfully,

Amanda2713

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Martyn Dewar left an annotation ()

Hi Amanda,

DWP will usually only communicate by email if you are requesting a reasonable adjustment (under the Equality Act), otherwise, its a bit pot luck really - their policies generally prohibit staff from using it as a correspondence method.

ESA is provided under the auspices of jobcentreplus, so, you can find an email address for them by using the Local office search [1], however, emails sent there go to a central office and might not actually be sent to the Benefit Delivery Centre that is actually responsible for your son's claim.

That said, you could, in the first instance contact CHDA [2] to confirm when they transmitted the report to DWP (it should be automatic using their IT system, but, it might have been done clerically), and then, if you know the benefit centre in question (their name will be on any letters sent to you or your son, along with an address in Wolverhampton), you could use the dataset disclosed to another requestor [3] to find the relevant ESA contact address for that centre. The ZIP file there contains PDFs, which are broadly sorted in alphabetic order. Most of the email addresses are along the format of "CENTRENAME ESA Customer Services" or such like.

In any event, I'm afraid they would likely reject your FOI request as you haven't given your full name (or some variant - see some helpful guidance on this site's FAQs [4]) - and that rejection could take up to twenty working days (the maximum time allowed for a reply under FOI), so, you may wish to use the suggestion above as an alternate route.

Alternatively, you may wish to try contacting your local MP - you can find them using a the helpful website WriteToThem, which is built by the same people who run WhatDoTheyKnow [5], or by using parliament.uk. Your MP will be able to contact the DWP using official channels on your behalf if necessary.

Hope this helps, and, good luck.

[1] http://los.direct.gov.uk/
[2] https://www.chdauk.co.uk/contact-us
[3] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/d...
[4] https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/priv...
[5] https://www.writetothem.com

Amanda2713 left an annotation ()

Thanks for you reply & info

Still waiting no response

Also none to my posted letter

And continue to be placed on indefinite hold when I call

My sons ESA 13 week assessment period finished going on four months now

Buxton Craig DWP OED CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS AND INTELLIGENCE, Department for Work and Pensions

1 Attachment

 
 
Dear Amanda 2713
 
Please find attached our response to your recent Freedom of Information
request.
 
 
Yours sincerely
 
DWP Central Freedom of Information Team