DLA503a, "Written Statement of Reasons"

It arrived in the post this morning, four sides of A4 that it took them 14 days to print out and put in an envelope for me. This supports my theory that the Department of Work and Pensions only ever send letters like this out to people to arrive on a Saturday, when the helpline is closed. They would have sent it sooner, but then it would have arrived at a time when the helpline was available and that would just be too sporting.

One side is just the usual "If English is not your first language..." and "we would welcome any comments, good or bad..." and about two sides were this information which is pretty general knowledge, it's the simple list of what they ask you to think about when you are considering whether you should apply for DLA or not.

And four paragraphs pretended to explain why I was not awarded DLA. It's not really very helpful stuff though. It says things like "you can cope with all tasks for preparing a cooked main meal for one person if you have the ingredients", but it doesn't say why they think this, you know, like "your response to section X indicates that..." or "your GP tells us...". This statement, and others like it, lead me to suspect that they didn't even read my answers on the form. In fact at the moment I'm feeling rather hard pushed to create a response beyond simply repeating the stuff that's already on my forms that they just obviously haven't paid attention to.

There's also a sentence that doesn't really make sense - I can only imagine that while copy/pasting standard responses, someone made a mistake, because it reads:
"You may require help at time with bathing but your conditions are considered to be reasonable well controlled with your levels of medication taken." (all spellings and punctuation reproduced exactly). I'm not sure why having a bath has any connection to the effect my medication has on my condition. I have No Idea how to respond to this statement. Ideas welcome.

The reason I'm blogging when I should be working on my response, is because after a couple of sensible, thought-out responses, referencing evidence on my forms and the report from the specialist clinic and so on, I got to a point where all I could think of to type was "read my goddam forms, you morons". I doubt this would go down well with the reconsideration lot.