A CHARITY has raised concerns over the high number of claimants who have had their Disability Living Allowance (DLA) stopped in Northern Ireland after after being reassessed for the new Personal Independence Payment (PIP).
More than a third of the 21,000 DLA recipients who have made an application for the new benefit were told they were 'disallowed' by the end of July.
The charity Advice NI said this was considerably higher than the 27 per cent 'disallowance' rate in Britain.
The figures were obtained by the BBC Spotlight programme.
The PIPs payments are made to help people aged 16 to 64 to help them cope with the extra costs they face due to ill health or disability.
The Department for Communities in the north told BBC NI the process was still in "very early days" with the majority of around 125,000 claimants still to be reassessed.
But Advice NI chief Bob Stronge described the number of people stripped of their benefits as 'significant' and called for an urgent review of the assessments.
"Advisers are already seeing increased demands on advice services following the introduction of PIP, so much so that PIP enquiries now represent over half of all social security enquiries dealt with by the independent advice sector," he said.
Northern Ireland has one of the highest rates of DLA claims and the criteria for PIP payments are much more stringent.
Previously, if someone was considered to be "virtually unable to walk", and therefore eligible, they have to prove they were unable to walk more than 50 metres. Under PIP, that was dropped to 20 metres, excluding more than 420,000 people across the UK.
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