DISABLED people are waiting at least six months for vital benefits because of a Government blunder, a minister has admitted.

Mike Penning owned up to the mistake of ordering face-to-face assessments for almost all claimants of the new personal independence payment (PIP).

As a result, a huge backlog of claims has built up – amid allegations that a private contractor, Atos, made untrue claims of a network of available centres.

In a Commons debate, Mr Penning said: “What was wrong is that we went to 97 per cent face-to-face assessments and I think that was unacceptable.”

The admission is likely to pose difficult questions for Esther McVey, the minister who took that decision prior to her promotion to minister for work.

And it came as Darlington MP Jenny Chapman revealed further examples of the misery caused by harsh benefit tests and rules in the town.

Some follow the trials of PIP – replacing disability living allowance (DLA) – while others are from ‘back-to-work’ tests for employment and support allowance (ESA).

They included:

* A woman forced to go to a food bank to feed herself and her five-year-old son – after waiting ten months for a PIP payment to be processed.

* A young man with autism who volunteered for training because he “desperately wanted to work” – only for his benefits to be stopped.

* A man with mental health problems who was found fit for work by Atos and stopped taking his medication – only to be sectioned after being found in a “distressed state”.

* A father-of-two children offered a job if he completed a training course, who then had his benefits stopped - because he was on the course.

Ms Chapman described PIP as “shambolic”, telling ministers: “It can take 12 to 16 weeks to get an appointment for a face-to-face assessment and 21 to 26 weeks from date of claim to a decision being made.

“That is six months, and that is not acceptable.”

Mr Penning did not duck the controversy, vowing to be “brutally honest about the problems we have with PIP”.

However, he insisted the time to take a decision on PIP applications by the terminally ill had been cut from 28 days to under ten days.

And he added: “We expect that, by the autumn, no one will be waiting for an assessment for more than 26 weeks and, by the end of the year, we expect that to be no longer than 16 weeks.”

The aim was to cut the proportion of face-to-face assessments to as low as 40 per cent, to end the “unacceptable” delays.

PIP came in for new claimants across the North-East last year and, from February, for claimants “reporting a change in condition” in Darlington, York and Harrogate.

By 2018, around 210,000 disabled people in the North-East and North Yorkshire will all be re-tested and either moved onto PIP, or denied payments.