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‘My Employment and Support Allowance has ended - help!’
> ‘The DWP didn't get my ESA50, or I missed my medical’
>> ‘I want know about preparing for and attending the appeal hearing’
>>> ‘Tell me how to prepare for a hearing’

If you have a professional representative, you don’t have to worry about this bit: this is their job. Lucky you!

If not, there’s still no need to worry, but you do need to understand why preparation is important.

You have the chance to provide the tribunal service with documents in support of your appeal before the day of the hearing, and I recommend that you take advantage of this opportunity.

Tribunals are made up of human beings. Surprising, but true. Being human, they want things to be clear, and they want things to be as easy as possible. In particular, they want to you be clear about what you want, and why you disagree with the decision maker. Being human, they also like to be prepared, so it’s a good idea to let you have anything before the day of the hearing (Letters from the tribunal service will ask you to provide extra information at least a week before the hearing: in reality they are more flexible than that, and will even accept new documents on the day, but it’s best to avoid this if you can: the longer and more complex the new documents are the more likely the tribunal is to be unhappy about them).

I recommend that in most cases you provide the following documents: 

I’ll deal with the evidence first, then look at the submission. But before we do either, I strongly recommend that you look through the appeal bundle and mark things you’re not happy with (you’re allowed to write on the bundle). In particular, read through the report of the ATOS examination and note things you disagree with.

Additional Evidence

Remember that you are trying to convince the tribunal that you meet the rules for Employment and Support Allowance. Any evidence that doesn’t help with this is useless, and, sometimes, annoys the tribunal.

Evidence that might help includes the following:

Evidence that is unlikely to help includes the following:

The Submission

Your submission has a number of jobs to do:

My general advice about how to write your submission is as follows:

In an appeal about whether or not you have limited capability for work, the following things should probably be included:
(Professional representatives (myself included) tend to include reference to other court cases but this is likely to be hard for you to do, so don’t worry about this. To be honest with you, I'm not sure if there’s that much point in professional representatives doing this either in regular Employment and Support Allowance appeals, as it isn’t really how the law works that’s in dispute, just how disabled or ill you are.)

When you’ve finished your submission

The Tribunal Service like to get extra documents at least a week before the hearing, because they have to send it out to the tribunal panel members and to the Jobcentre Plus. If you don’t manage to do this, they may accept it on the day of the hearing, although the longer the pile of papers you provide the more annoyed the tribunal is likely to be.

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