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SECTION 2— The Cooking Test (DLA ONLY)
As previously explained, the page that relates to difficulties with cooking a
main meal only appears on DLA forms and is treated separately to the rest of
your claim.
If you are over 16 and ‘pass’ the Cooking Test (or should that be fail?!) in the
DWP’s eyes, then it will lead to an automatic award of the Lower Rate of the
Care Component of DLA. Historically—before the DWP accepted that encouraging someone to get out of a
chair was just as much ‘help’ as physically assisting them to get it— it meant
that people who didn’t qualify on supervisory grounds often had to turn to the
cooking test as their only route to benefit.
It’s still important though to consider and describe all the difficulties you
have preparing a main meal here. The ‘main meal’ in question is defined by caselaw as a labour intensive, main
daily mean for one person - neither a celebration meal nor a snack. It should be
considered in the context of preparation on/in a conventional cooker, not
re-heating something in the microwave.
- I feel so low I just can’t make myself do it
- I just do ‘convenience’ things
- My concentration is so bad that I can’t get things ready at the same time
- I forget I’ve got things on
- I let things burn/ there have been fires/ I burn myself
- I can’t plan what to eat, let alone cook
- I try cooking in the middle of the night and end up leaving things on
At the time of writing, unlike other bits of DLA, caselaw now says that you
DON’T need to have difficulties preparing a main meal lost days to qualify under
the Cooking Test but as the Government are currently challenging this, things
may change!
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