Making the disabled wait for support is cruel
guardian.co.uk, 20 July 2011
The government's proposals to 'reform' welfare will punish the disabled. We must not abandon the concept of a fair society
The Hardest Hit march by disabled people received a fraction of the coverage of similar protests against government cuts. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
I watched footage of the Hardest Hit march with a mixture of admiration and sadness. Despite being considerably larger, it got a fraction of the coverage of the shambolic "Rally Against Debt". Perhaps it was because it's simply too painful to watch? One protester suggested it could be called "Britain's March of Shame". I certainly felt ashamed.
Like many of you reading this, I would have had a great deal of sympathy with the protesters but very little understanding of what they were actually going through. That changed when I was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year and told I had months to live. In a previous article, I wrote about my experiences and my attempts to shame policymakers into making welfare more fair and more just.
The current government's proposals to "reform" welfare are yet to be passed into law and while aspects of them have proved controversial, little has been written about the personal independence payment (PIP) which is proposed to replace disability living allowance. My earlier article was critical of the delay claimants faced between suffering a disability or illness and actually receiving financial support. Under the old system, claimants would have to meet the criteria for three months before receiving payment (which was not backdated). I felt this was scandalous. PIP addresses this issue – by extending this period to six months, which is downright cruel.
After repeated attempts to reach Iain Duncan Smith I finally received a response from Maria Miller, the minister for disabled people, through my MP, regarding why payments are not backdated. Miller argued that there is an "inherent difficulty in gathering and assessing evidence in respect of a period earlier than the date of claim". Really? Surely a simple note from the applicant's specialist would suffice – they have to sign the application anyway.
To date I still haven't received an explanation as to why the government is extending the criteria period from three to six months, but according to the DWP it will "establish long-term disability within the context of a cash benefit paid to contribute towards the extra costs of disability". The proposed extension is for all long-term disabilities with the very specific exception of the terminally ill with a life expectancy less than six months. How an arbitrary increase to the qualifying period will ensure this – instead of expert medical opinion – is anybody's guess.
Yet some have questioned whether this is a matter for the state at all. After my last article someone said that while they sympathised with my predicament I should have had insurance in order to protect myself rather than depend upon the taxpayer for support. Another poster pointed out that I had paid into such a scheme – it was called national insurance. Interestingly, national insurance is to be quietly done away with, and perhaps the hope is that the perceived right to state support will go with it.
My condition meant I was able to represent a rarely heard perspective and despite requests from BBC radio in Manchester and Sheffield, the government was not prepared to have a representative debate with me on this issue. Why? Because its policy is simply indefensible.
The powers that be know this small level of critical exposure is meaningless if public support is not mobilised in the same way it was in objection to the selling off of our national forests or the outsourcing of the NHS. Together we can make a difference, for the better. But can we afford to have a fairer society in today's economic climate? Of course we can. The more pressing question would be: can we afford not to?
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Benefits assessment firm causing 'fear and loathing' among claimants, says MP
guardian.co.uk, 24 July 2011
Commons committee to publish critical report on Atos, which determines whether people are eligible for sickness benefits
People who are fit and healthy are unlikely to have heard of the company Atos. But anyone who has had to apply for sickness benefits may find that the name triggers – according to one MP – a sense of "fear and loathing".
Atos is responsible for carrying out the government's drive to assess everyone claiming incapacity benefit, to decide whether they may actually be well enough to work. Atos staff is testing around 11,000 benefit claimants a week, to determine how ill they really are and whether they are eligible for benefit payments.
Since the last government launched a campaign to cut the number of sickness benefits claimants, the process has been controversial, with charities and politicians warning that vulnerable people have wrongly had vital payments removed.
On Tuesday a select committee will publish a detailed and critical report on the way the Department for Work and Pensions policy has been implemented, looking in part at the way Atos has carried out its contract to assess claimants. The work and pensions committee launched its investigation this year after many complaints about the testing process.
More than 400,000 appeals have been lodged against decisions not to grant the benefit since it was launched in October 2008, and 39% have been successful. The tribunal’s service has been forced to double the number of staff handling appeals, to accommodate the huge volume of complaints. The cost of tribunals is estimated at well over £30m a year.
Atos, a Paris-based IT company, is being paid £100m a year to carry out the work capability assessments (WCAs), allowing the government to phase out incapacity benefit and replace it with the employment and support allowance (ESA). The record of Atos Healthcare – a division of Atos – over the initial period of the policy's roll-out has been heavily criticised by disability charities.
There are two main areas of concern: unease about the government policy of retesting people's fitness for work, and alarm about practical hitches in the testing process delivered by Atos. Kate Green, a Labour MP who sits on the committee, said that while she was broadly supportive of the policy to help more people back into work, "the delivery has been absolutely disastrous".
Concern has been voiced beyond the select committee over the accuracy of the tests, the high numbers of successful appeals against the medical assessments, the facilities provided by Atos and the treatment of claimants by Atos staff.
For the past six months, Atos has been the focus of noisy protests by disability campaigners who have staged meetings outside its London headquarters, organised sit-ins at the medical assessment centres and sent protesters to picket Atos recruitment fairs. Protest banners declare "Atos doesn't give a toss" and "Atos Kills" – a reference to reports, highlighted by leading mental health charities, of people taking their own lives as a result of changes to their benefits. Those words have been painted on a wall near the company's London headquarters.
During the test, benefit claimants are interviewed by Atos staff – a mix of doctors and nurses – for between 20 minutes and two hours. Staff engages claimants in an often very relaxed conversation, gathering information about the medical problems, and calculating how capable the claimant is of performing simple tasks; a computer programme offers prompts to ensure that all the relevant material is inputted.
Staff can capture information in a sideways manner. The question: "Do you shop and cook for yourself?'' may be used as an indication of a claimant's mobility and competence. Atos staff award claimants between zero and 15 points (with 15 points indicating that they are too unwell to work), and send their reports to the job centre, where benefits officials make a final decision.
Charities have warned that glitches in the system have meant that many seriously ill people have been judged fit for work. A third has appealed, with 39% of decisions overturned by tribunals.
The tribunal’s service spent an estimated £22.15m on processing appeals between May and September last year. The service has had to double its capacity in the social security section to deal with the large number of appeals, recruiting an extra 170 paid medical panel members. The government accepts that the system has not run smoothly, and set up a review last year, headed by Prof Malcolm Harrington. His initial recommendations have been implemented by Atos. However, Harrington's review has not yet addressed all outstanding issues and will make further recommendations later this year.
During the work and pensions select committee hearings earlier this summer, MPs asked if Atos was penalised financially for inaccuracy. The company said it was paid per assessment, with no sanction if the decision was overturned on appeal. Anne Begg, Labour chair of the committee, responded: "That adds to the suspicion that you are a private company, you are driven by a profit motive, and the incentive is to get the assessments done, but not necessarily to get the assessments right."
Neil Coyle, director of Disability Alliance, said the government was paying the company to do the test, and was then footing the bill for reviewing flawed assessments. "It's like paying for a childminder to babysit, and then going home three times in an evening to make sure they are doing their job," he said.
A DWP spokesman said that if a decision were overturned, it did "not necessarily mean the original decision was incorrect", because new evidence was often produced, or "the tribunal weighs the original evidence differently".
MPs of all parties and from all parts of the country have found that the work capability assessment is a constant feature in their constituency mailbag. Labour MP Tom Greatrex was alerted to the issue last year when a constituent reported difficulties getting through to an Atos helpline.
Greatrex's office called the number 135 times before getting through. Although the phone service has subsequently improved, he said the "experience of both my constituents and my own office of the customer service provided by Atos has been entirely negative". He is concerned about the high levels of appeals, particularly now the system is no longer just testing new claimants, but has started retesting all 1.5 million incapacity benefit claimants to see whether they are eligible for the new benefit, ESA.
"The acceleration of the assessment process will mean that we end up with more and more mistakes being made. If that many people are winning their appeals, then it is grossly inefficient, apart from anything else," he said. A lot of his constituents felt that they were "being branded as skivers" and "demonised by the system", he said. The computer-led method by which Atos assessors work out how many points to award each claimant has also caused frustration, Begg said. "One of the big fears, and it was a common theme through all the evidence we got, was the mechanistic nature, the computer-based nature. I think a lot of your clients feel they are in the Little Britain sketch, where it says, 'The computer says no'," she told Atos staff at the hearing.
The Conservative MP Simon Hart was warned by Citizens Advice staff in Carmarthen that the test was causing many complaints. In a series of parliamentary questions, he established that 29,000 claimants who originally scored zero in the test were later granted the benefit on appeal.
"It seems that some people are not failing by a couple of points. They are failing completely and then going to tribunal and then passing completely. If it were missing by a narrow margin, you could understand that... there could always be a margin of error, but for some poor people the system is not working," he said. "The policy is a sound one, but it has to be fair and there does seem to be a group for whom it is obviously not fair." MPs also raised concerns about the numbers of assessment centres that were not well equipped to receive people with disabilities.Given the high level of concern expressed about Atos's current record, MPs wondered how the company was going to manage to deliver the "substantial savings" it promised when its contract was recently extended to 2015. Atos officials told MPs they would do that by "making the process more efficient".
Glenda Jackson, Labour, said she struggled to see how the company could improve its performance, as promised, and simultaneously cut costs. "How will it be possible with a reduced budget to improve and expand training?" she asked.
The Lib Dem MP Stephen Lloyd, asked Atos staff how they planned to improve their reputation. "It is not [an] exaggeration that, for x number of people in the UK who are currently going through this process; Atos is feared or loathed in equal terms."
Tom Pollard, policy officer with the mental health charity Mind, said it was often hard for charities to pass on their concerns to Atos. "It often feels like we are kept at arms length from Atos so they are not answerable as much as the DWP is," he said. Officials tended to respond that the problems highlighted by charities were "one-offs or isolated incidents" and this evidence tended to get "passed off as if they are the exception to the rule", he said.
"Often our experience suggests that the assessment is almost designed to ensure that it is catching out those people that might overplay things... to catch out scroungers. We often hear about people being asked slightly opaque questions... 'Do you watch Eastenders? ' And staff will extrapolate from that, that person will be able to sit repeatedly and reliably for 30 minutes. That's not quite straight from our point of view. It would be better to have an open conversation, where you don't need to cloak the questions," he said. "We don't believe that people overplay their symptoms or conditions; that doesn't line up with our experiences of the situation; they're more likely to underplay it if anything."
Some charities are also uneasy at the prospect of Atos being given further contracts for a new set of medical assessments that the government is to introduce in 2013 to test eligibility for the new personal independence payments (PIP), to replace disability living allowance.Richard Hawkes, chief executive of Scope, said: "They are responsible for the WCA and that doesn't work and so we would have great concerns if they became responsible for the PIP assessment as well."
The public's anxieties about Atos have been largely aired in blogs. Some disability campaigners have warned that by focusing anger on Atos, which is merely the company contracted to carry out a government policy, protesters are missing the point. When Atos (which is also responsible for IT at the Olympics) appointed athlete Steve Cram to be its UK ambassador for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, protesters turned their frustration on him, with a burst of angry online campaigning. The Disabled People Against Cuts group, wrote to him asking him "politely to reconsider his position", but say they have yet to receive a reply. Cram's agent said the athlete had not received a copy of the letter, although she had seen it online, and referred calls to the Atos press office. The company has recently taken legal action requesting closure of at least one website, which had invited people to post descriptions of their experiences of the medical assessment. Phil Lockwood who created a website, afteratos.org, earlier this year, was contacted by the company's lawyers advising him to take the site down.
An Atos spokesman said: "Atos Healthcare is focused on quality to ensure high standards are maintained. Customer satisfaction ratings for Atos Healthcare Professionals regularly exceed 90%." The company says it has introduced improvements in partnership with the DWP, including "improved consistency and quality of medical assessment and reports".
A DWP spokesman said the government was continuously improving the test, adding: "Prof Harrington is now undertaking a second independent review of the WCA, which will be published before the end of the year. As part of this he has launched a call for evidence and we would encourage people to respond."
Questions and answers: taking the test
A Guardian reader agreed to be accompanied to his recent work capability assessment. He has epilepsy and Asperger's syndrome and has been suffering from anxiety. He lost his job last year because of his ill health.
He was assessed by a nurse, who greeted him kindly and tried to reassure him about the process. The assessment started with an informal chat, and she asked how he had made his way to the assessment centre, clarifying whether it had taken more than half an hour. This was not just small talk, because the answers help build up a picture of potential fitness for work. The nurse asked questions about his diagnosis, but was also interested in his daily life.
"Do you go shopping?" "What happens if you have a fit when you're shopping?" "How long do you need to recover from it?"
"Do you do the cleaning at home?" she asked. "Do you do the cooking?" "Do you worry that you might leave the cooker on?" "Do you have pets?" "Do you have friends?" "Do you meet friends in cafes?" "Do you get the newspapers every day?"
Ability to cook and care for pets shows evidence of general competence, but claimants often find this roundabout form of evidence-building confusing.
She typed answers into the computer as she spoke, inputting his replies into the LiMA (logic integrated medical assessment) computer programme that processes the responses and helps translate the replies into a score between 0 and 15, with 15 being the point at which sickness benefit is recommended. She apologised for the noise of the keyboard being tapped, and for the fact that she had to take contemporaneous notes. After criticism about assessors looking at the computer rather than at the claimant, staff has been told to improve their eye contact.
After a while, the tone of the interview became much more business-like, the sympathetic murmurings stopped and the questions became more rapid. "Do you cry?" she asked, trying to gauge the seriousness of his anxiety. "Do you feel that life is not worth living?" "Do you feel that you can't on?" The replies (no) were typed in swiftly.
Two weeks later, the claimant was informed two weeks later that he was temporarily eligible for employment and support allowance, but would need to take part in "work-related activity" sessions
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Disability benefit reform: is the government hiding behind Atos errors?
Guardian, 25 July 2011
Righteous anger by disabled people over Atos incompetence in assessing benefit claims should also be directed at the government
Atos is a French IT company engaged by the government to run the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) contract to assess claimants for sickness and disability benefits. It is also the target of blame and fury by many sick and/or disabled people suffering at the hands of an inhumane system.
Exactly what a French IT company would know about sickness, disability, welfare benefits and the tough job of administering such claims might be the first question to spring to mind, but the important questions here are not related to competence. The key issue is whether Atos is responsible for a situation causing so much distress and pain to genuinely sick and disabled people. And who benefits by Atos being seen as responsible for this situation?
There are consistent themes among the complaints that sick and disabled people make against Atos. It may seem shocking, but one of the most significant complaints is that many centres Atos use to perform "medical" assessments are inaccessible and lack available disabled parking. Some lack any parking. This has led to fears that using inaccessible centres is a direct tactic to refuse people the benefits they are entitled to.
Another key complaint is incorrect assessment decisions. With a success rate of 40% – according to the DWP's own figures – and up to 70% in Scotland for those who appeal against Atos's original decision, costing something in the region of £50m pounds, this is a significant issue for all taxpayers, not just claimants. At a time when the cuts are biting, the cost of living spiralling and government insisting "we're all in this together", it should be of particular concern that vast sums of money are being spent on incorrect decisions. Particularly as the government pays Atos per medical and although financial penalties are written into the contract, no money has so far been claimed back. Somewhat confusing considering the government's aggression in pursuing benefit fraudsters for relatively small amounts of money.
Despite significant evidence of incorrect decisions and the high appeal success rate being commented on since before the 2010 election, the employment minister, Chris Grayling, admits not a "single penny" has been claimed back from Atos and insists it has "met all [its] targets for medical advice".
Atos is a private company and provides services with the intention of making a profit. It's unreasonable to blame Atos for doing what it does as a company, but it is perfectly reasonable for people to challenge where Atos or any other private company is not fulfilling its contractual obligations.
Which leads us to the heart of this issue; who lays out those contractual obligations for Atos to follow? Who's responsible for enforcing them? Who decides upon the descriptors to qualify for each benefit, so unrelated to the world of work that genuinely sick and disabled people are left bewildered by their assessments? Who sets the standards for companies like Atos to adhere to? Who should be enforcing issues such as of lack of access?
The answer to every one of those questions is the government and/or the DWP. These concerns about the performance of Atos were recently raised by the work and pensions select committee, which asked senior Atos executives why the company is "feared and loathed" by disabled people, their families and friends.
Now, if I were a member of the coalition government determined to push these disastrous welfare "reforms" through I would have been turning cartwheels after the answer Atos gave, which was that "claimants do not really understand the role that Atos plays".
Because if I were in government, if I wanted welfare reforms to be harder to challenge than they already are ... well, I couldn't have set it up better than to place a private company at the heart of the issue. A private company feared and loathed enough to inspire sick and disabled people, with wheelchairs, guide dogs and walkers to picket the offices of this company. Because the more Atos take the flak, the less I as a government minister would have to worry. A totally disposable private company, which can easily be outbid when it comes to renew the contract by another private company no more or less competent than the first one, and likely to be reliant on the same healthcare professionals.
If I were the minister, I couldn't dream up a more ideal scenario to ensure my wasteful, damaging and expensive welfare reforms went through with as little protest as possible. It's a tactic as cowardly as hiding behind a human shield … but no one said morality was involved in these reforms, just a drive to save money, slam scroungers and hide behind a "feared and loathed" private firm.
• Kaliya Franklin is a founder of the Broken of Britain campaign on welfare reform and blogs at Benefit Scrounging Scum
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Mark Steel: Time to inflict pain on the terminally ill
The Independent, 27 July 2011
How do YOU suggest we cut the deficit then? You'll be asked this if you ever oppose a cost-cutting scheme, such as merging the sewer system with the library service or something. So here's one answer, we could pay a bit less to ATOS, a company that receives £100m a year from the Government for assessing who should be cut off from disability benefit.
The method they choose is to interview each claimant, asking them a series of questions such as, "Do you look after your own pets?" Because clearly if someone can feed a hamster they're capable of driving a fork-lift truck. Another is "Do you cry?" If you do, you're probably told it's all very well being depressed but there's no reason why you can't get a job imitating actresses who've won an Oscar, or hiring yourself out to appear at funerals to make it seem the deceased knew more people than they did.
During this questioning the interviewer taps the answers into their computer, which makes an automatic calculation as to whether the claimant loses their benefit. This is so much quicker as a method of assessing health than the old-fashioned way of examining someone.
Hospitals should follow this example. Instead of faffing about with X-rays and stethoscopes, the consultant could say, "Which do you prefer, pizza or a curry? Who would you rather have to dinner out of Fearne Cotton and Dermot O'Leary? OK, let's see what the computer says – aah, you've got gallstones."
Maybe the plan is to turn the whole process into a radio panel show called "Fit on the Fiddle", in which claimants answer the questions from a panel including regular captain Gyles Brandreth. One man who might as well have done this was Larry Newman, who attended an ATOS interview with a terminal lung disease, when he could hardly breathe. So he took his medical records and ATOS ignored them, preferring their method of asking questions.
They decided there was nothing wrong with him so his benefit was cut, and a few weeks later, as the hospital attached a ventilator he'd have to wear permanently, with splendid jollity he said to his wife: "Still, at least I'm fit for work." He died a few weeks later, and I expect if his wife took him in again now they'd still say there was nothing wrong with him and send him for an interview to be a town crier.
Still, the cuts have to be made somewhere so I suppose it's only fair that the brunt of them should fall on the terminally ill. But here's where it gets complicated. The ATOS system has worked so well that in the past three years 160,000 people have successfully appealed against their decision. So from now on perhaps they'll use a more reliable method, such as rolling two dice and anyone who gets eight or over loses their money. Or they could still call people in for interviews but do three at a time while the assessor lines them up and goes, "Ip dip dog s***, you are not it", and the loser has to crawl to the job centre.
The trouble is that these tribunals have cost £30m (and you'll laugh at this bit), and that money is paid by the Government, out of taxes. So they still get paid the £100m, out of taxes, and all the mistakes are paid for out of more taxes.
It's like a minicab firm that always takes you in the wrong direction, but you still have to pay them, then they charge you again to bring you back where you started. And to complete the analogy, on the way home they run someone over and shout: "If you can stroke a cat there's nothing wrong with you", as the victim is carried into the ambulance.
So here's my suggestion. On live television ATOS are called in for an interview by a panel of disabled people, who ask them to mime looking after their pet, then assess whether they're entitled to still get £100m or have to go and get a proper job
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A contract to terrify 1.5m people on incapacity benefit
guardian.co.uk, 25 July 2011
A French company is being paid millions to harass incapacity benefit claimants with the threat of being made destitute
Some sobering summer reading came my way on Monday: not The Social Animal or any of the voguish paperbacks being thumbed in Tuscany and elsewhere, but a report from the select committee on work and pensions (officially published on Tuesday). Bear with me: if you've got visions of a headache-inducing text full of tedium and official speak, nothing could be further from the truth. It is incisive, fact-packed, smattered with moving first-person testimony, and downloadable for free. Anyone with any interest in where Britain is heading ought to read it.
The report's focus is on welfare reform – more specifically, the reassessment of 1.5 million people who have been on incapacity benefit, via the so-called work capability assessments, or WCAs. It sets out a story that includes plenty of the most fundamental aspects of life in modern Britain: the tabloid shrieking about the supposedly work shy that exerts such a grip on our politicians; the stupidly cushy terms on which whole chunks of the welfare state are being handed over to private companies; and above all, an underlying sense that the pain and panic that result from all this have precious little chance of gaining any political traction.
As of October 2008, incapacity benefit began to be replaced by the employment and support allowance – and anyone putting in a new claim faced the WCA, which places people in one of three categories: judged "fit for work" and introduced to the stringent regime based around jobseekers' allowance; in effect deemed incapable of employment and put in a "support group"; or held to be somewhere between the two and thus destined for "work-related activity". The monopoly provider of WCAs is Atos Healthcare, a division of a French IT firm, which had signed up for £100m of DWP business three years before.
Last October the reassessment of those 1.5 million people began, and the kind of alarming stories that crop up in the select committee report started to pile up. Ministers apparently claim that two official reviews have blunted the process's worst shortcomings, but still: evidence from Citizens Advice Scotland says that the assessments, delivered by Atos's doctors and nurses, "can last just 20 minutes", and that "the yes/no format of the assessment is too narrow". One page later you find a mind-boggling handful of paragraphs about the company's "Logic Integrated Medical Assessment" (or Lima) computer system, which has often seemed to reduce complex cases to the stuff of binary idiocy.
The results of all this are obvious enough. Thousands of people have been fallaciously deemed fit for work. Even if your condition is sufficiently serious to avoid that fate – as the Mental Health charity Rethink puts it, "if a claimant can set an alarm clock, feed themselves and manage life without daily aggression or needing almost constant supervision" – you can still be pushed into "work-related activity" – which, under the terms of the government's welfare bill, could see your employment and support allowance stopped after a year.
On Monday I heard from a man in the West Midlands; a diagnosed depressive and agoraphobic who was deemed fit for work, only to successfully appeal. "I have no confidence in the Atos way of assessment," he told me, "as I feel it's geared more to them ticking boxes and gaining brownie points … than the actual physical and mental wellbeing of each person." He is now on to his third assessment, feeling "very apprehensive", and in fear of "ending up on a mental health wing".
From Rethink I received the story of a man suffering from bipolar disorder who had also been put through the assessment grinder. His account chimed with recent reports of WCA-related suicide attempts: "As a direct result of the way I have been treated by the DWP and Atos I considered taking my own life on and off for a period of months. My GP even wrote a letter to them to spell out the severity of my illness and how the situation was putting me in danger."
He won an appeal last February, and will now receive his backdated benefits. (At the last count the rate of successful appeals was running at about 40%. The projected annual cost of appeals has been put as high as £50m – although Atos incurs no penalty for getting things so wrong.)
All of this is scandalous, yet it goes on – seemingly of no concern to the supposed everyman, nor to the politicians who fixate on him. This raises two issues: first, the treatment being meted out to thousands of people should be a moral offence to all of us; and second, our flexible labour market and increasingly brutal welfare system are now so constructed that even if you are doing well, it is perfectly possible that you could fall ill, and then find yourself just as terrified as the thousands who are currently being herded through the WCA process.
In the modern benefits system, trapdoors abound: if you fail to get the employment and support allowance and find yourself on jobseeker's allowance, for example, you will not only suffer a 14% drop in income but may very well fall foul of the latter's demands and find yourself "sanctioned", with no benefits at all. The next stop is that miserable demi-monde that defines more lives than a lot of people would like to think: crisis loans, food banks, the very real prospect of ending up destitute.
In other words, the old aspirational tagline of the national lottery now applies to some of the most iniquitous aspects of the benefits system. Really: it could be you.
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Tests for Employment and Support Allowance 'humiliating and degrading'
News & Star, 3 August 2011
When the number claiming they were too ill to work topped two million, the last Labour government decided enough was enough. They introduced radical reforms designed to get people off benefit and into jobs.
Out went Incapacity Benefit, in came Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). Since October 2008, new ESA claimants have had to undergo ‘work capability assessments’.
These are tests carried out by a French company, Atos Healthcare. Those deemed fit move onto Jobseekers’ Allowance and are expected to find work.
On one level, the reforms have succeeded. Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show that, of the 1.33 million people who have applied for ESA, 39 per cent were found to be fit for work.
A third dropped their claim before it was decided. Seventeen per cent were judged capable of doing some work. Just seven per cent were so unwell they could not work at all.
But critics claim the system is humiliating and degrading.
That view has been reinforced by the House of Commons Work and Pensions committee.
Its report, published last week, says that work-capability assessments are causing "fear and anxiety” among vulnerable and disabled people and that Atos Healthcare’s service is "below standard”. The MPs suspect that the Government is using the scheme to save money.
Gill Thorburn, a 57-year-old mother of two from Oaklands Drive in Upperby, Carlisle, was turned down for ESA and is waiting to appeal. This time last year she was working as a cleaner having just completed a social sciences degree at the University of Cumbria.
She says: "In September and October I was hospitalised. I couldn’t breathe. I was in five days the first time and then eight days. I was on oxygen both times.
"They diagnosed me with emphysema. The consultant said it will not get better, with care they can stabilise it but it is a degenerative condition. There was no way I could go back to work.”
She applied for ESA and was called to Atos’s offices in Carlisle in January, to be seen by a nurse. The interview lasted 20 minutes. She says: "The only medical test she did was to ask me to breathe into a peak-flow meter. I didn’t see her notes until later. She put that I had a very low peak-flow rate but that my [breathing] technique was poor and the result was likely to be unreliable.
"If she thought my technique was poor, why didn’t she ask me to try again? Her report is all the Department for Work and Pensions has to make their decision on.”
Ms Thorburn has been told that her appeal will not be heard before November, more than a year after she applied for ESA. In the meantime she receives the benefit at the assessment-phase rate of £67.25 a week. This will rise to between £94.25 and £99.85 a week, with arrears backdated, if her appeal succeeds.
She says: "My confidence has taken a knock. When someone says you’re lying – that’s what it amounts to – you feel like a criminal, like a malingerer or scrounger, somebody who wants to get something for nothing. You get paranoid because you think people are thinking that about you.”
Dr Helen Davison, 44, of Rosebery Road, Stanwix, Carlisle, has been through the whole process. She held down a high-flying job as a registrar in public health until she became ill in November 2009.
She says: "I stopped working through pressure and anxiety. I’d gone through a relationship break-up and I’d had to move house. I was struggling with the level of work, it was a combination of things.”
She applied for ESA when her sick pay ran out last summer.
"The questions on the application form were not that relevant to me. They were asking if I could perform basic tasks such as getting up, cooking and shopping. I had real problems with concentration and memory but they didn’t ask about that. There was no way I could go back to my job.
"Although I was surviving, I wasn’t on top of things. I was exercising and socialising, however, because that’s about getting yourself better.
"The rules are that if you manage to get out and do those sorts of things, then you’re fit to work. They don’t take account of the nuances of mental health, that you have good days and bad days. On bad days you hide in bed.”
Her Atos interview was with another doctor.
She recalls: "It was clear he was trying to get me to fit categories in his tick-box system. He wasn’t probing as a doctor would probe to find out information. He didn’t really pick up on what was wrong with me.
"He actually said, ‘you’re a doctor, you could do my job’. I couldn’t, not morally I couldn’t. They’re not doctors. They are agents of the state enforcing a system.”
Dr Davison lost her appeal and is now claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance and looking for work.
She adds: "The whole thing has been detrimental to my mental health. It triggered my anxiety again.
"The system is penalising people who are genuinely low. I’m sure there are some who work the system, there always have been. They can probably get around it. This is impacting on the recovery of people who are genuinely ill. It’s inhumane.”
Both women were taking part in a protest in Carlisle today close to the offices of Atos in Carlyle’s Court and those of Carlisle MP John Stevenson.
The demo has been organised by Brent Kennedy, secretary of the Carlisle branch of the Socialist Party.
He argues that the high rate of successful appeals – almost four in 10 – proves the system is flawed. And he claims the success rate rises to 70 per cent when the individual appealing gets professional help, for example from a solicitor at a community law centre.
Mr Kennedy says: "The Government’s cynical argument about helping people off benefits and into work is a sham. The idea that big business will take on the sick and disabled when they can choose from one million able-bodied young unemployed defies reality.
"The financial savings will be minimal when compared to the traumas and poverty inflicted on 1.5m families. This demonisation, together with the fear of humiliating assessments and loss of income is driving more victims to suicide.”
He cites the example of Paul Reekie, the Scottish author and poet who committed suicide last year after his benefits were stopped.
The Department for Work and Pensions defends the system. It argues that, just because an appeal is upheld, it does not necessarily mean the original decision was wrong. New evidence may have come to light.
A spokeswoman said: "The work-capability assessment looks at what kind of work a person may be able to do, if they can no longer do the job they used to.
"People who are disabled and cannot work get extra money and those found able to work will get the help and support they need to find a job. Anyone who disagrees with their assessment can appeal and they will continue to receive support until the appeal is done.”
The last government commissioned five annual independent reviews of how work-capability assessments were working in practice. Professor Malcolm Harrington led the first of these and reported last November.
The majority of his recommendations have been implemented. He is undertaking a second review and is appealing for evidence at this link
Please click on the link to see the article
Atos case study: Larry Newman
guardian.co.uk, 24 July 2011
Larry Newman was assessed by an Atos staff member and awarded zero points. To qualify for sickness benefit he needed 15. He died from lung problems soon after
Larry Newman attended a work capability assessment in March 2010, when a degenerative lung condition made it impossible for him to go on working in the wood veneer showroom where he had spent much of his career. His weight had dropped from 10 to seven stone, and he had trouble breathing and walking.
The Atos staff member who carried out the medical test awarded him zero points. To qualify for employment and support allowance, the new sickness benefit, he needed to score 15 points, and in July he received a letter from jobcentre officials stating that he was not eligible for the benefit (worth around £95 a week) and would be fit to return to work within three months.
He was devastated by the decision, and dismayed to note a number of inaccuracies in the report that accompanied the letter. He decided to appeal against the decision, but before three months was up he died from his lung problems.
His widow, Sylvia Newman, recalls that one of the last things he said to her, as doctors put him on a ventilator, was: "It's a good job I'm fit for work." He was trying to make her laugh, she says, but it was also a reflection of how upset he had been by the conclusion of the medical test.
"He was so hurt by it. It made him so upset that they thought he was lying, and he wasn't," she says. "I think it added to him just giving up."
Mrs Newman has lodged an official complaint, with the help of Citizens Advice staff, highlighting 12 inconsistencies in the report by the Atos assessor. It said her husband had been unaccompanied. "I was with him, although in his medical report they claimed that I was in the waiting room," she says. The report says that Mr Newman's pulse was fine, that he had no scars on his chest and that he managed to climb on to the examination bed without any problem. Mrs Newman says that her husband did not get on to the examination bed, that his pulse was not taken, and that the assessor did not look at his chest; otherwise he would have seen scars.
"He never touched Larry, he never took his pulse. There were endless inaccuracies," she added, describing the report as "make-believe".
They were both dismayed by the assessor’s casual attitude. "At one stage, he took a phone call. We were trying not to listen, but it seemed to be a personal call," she says. "It went on for a few minutes. It wasn't very professional."
Although they had given written permission for Atos to seek written medical reports from Mr Newman's hospital consultant, who had diagnosed extrinsic allergic alveolitis, the assessor said that he didn't have a copy of his records or the questionnaire that he had filled in when he applied for the benefit.
"They could have just got a report from the hospital to see how sick he was. It seemed a pointless exercise," Mrs Newman says, profoundly distressed as she recounts what happened.
She is angry at the treatment she and her husband received from Atos staff.
"They are charging the government a lot of money for these assessments, and I know that other very sick people have been treated as Larry was. I promised him I would pursue it. It wasn't a fortune, and we were struggling to survive. It wasn't anything he wasn't entitled to."
An Atos official said: "We are sorry to hear that Mr Newman has died. We cannot comment on individual cases. We do expect the highest standards from our staff. All complaints are taken very seriously and thoroughly investigated."
Please click on the link to see the article
On Incapacity Benefit, this government is failing our society
contribution by NTDSMK
The coalition often quote Tony Blair ruefully saying that he didn’t "push forward fast enough over the NHS”. The same cannot be said for the coalition, and not just on health.
On many things, the coalition heedlessly charges onwards – their ideological compass acting as their only guide in the dark.
One such prime example is over the changes to Incapacity Benefit.
As part of an overall scheme to be seen to be pushing people back into work, the government has been pushing through radical reforms. They tell us that this is a prime way to claw back money from this supposedly endemic problem of "benefit scroungers”, and to reduce the deficit.
But with their eyes focused on the money, the government have failed to take into account the terrible human cost – and at the same time been blinded to the lack of cost effectiveness.
In March 2010, The Guardian reported that Larry Newman was deemed fit to work. He failed to qualify for the sickness benefit and was sent a letter by stating that he was not eligible for Incapacity Benefit. He died not long after. According to his widow, there were several inconsistencies in the assessment.
A study for Mind, a mental health charity, established that 51% of those covered by the survey had been left thinking in a suicidal fashion due to the anticipation of being assessed. Three quarters said that they had suffered a worsening of their mental health for the same reason. An incredible 95% didn’t think that they would be believed when assessed.
Even more horrifying is the case of Elaine Christian, who committed suicide in Hull. This is Hull and East Riding reported that she had been worrying about a medical assessment before hand.
On top of the dreadful human cost, the policies have not been cost effective. Of 400,000 appeals against the decisions in the assessment since 2008, 39% have been successful. Mental health experts have also been warning about the pace of the government’s cuts in this important area.
The Guardian reports that the tribunals service have been forced to double their staff – at an estimated cost of £30m a year. The Department of Work and Pensions has the highest number of decisions overturned at appeal of any UK Department of State in 2011. This is deeply hypocritical from a program branded as being an attempt to save money.
Kate Green, a Labour MP summed it up perfectly: "the delivery has been absolutely disastrous.”
Tomorrow will see the publication of a report on the implementation of the policies. The government’s disability policies are viciously damaging and not at all cost effective. This farce must stop. A rethink is the least they can do.
Please click on the link to see the article
Sick? Who gives Atos?
Mirror, 16 February 2011
Tough tests for sickness benefit are "all about saving lives not saving money", claims Employment Minister Chris Grayling.
He might try telling that to the family of one father who died after being told to get a job as his heart condition wasn't "life-threatening".
We constantly hear about the sick note fakers who screw the system then get caught running a marathon or playing in their local Sunday football league.
But not about the tens of thousands of genuinely sick people who are turned down for the new Employment Support Allowance benefit but go on to appeal and win.
It's not a handout - if you work you pay national insurance to qualify for this benefit should you ever be unlucky enough to need it.
George, from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, worked all his life, first as a miner and foundry worker, then as a communications engineer, until a heart attack in 2006 when he was 53.
After a brief stint working self-employed his doctor told him to stop and George applied for ESA.
It's worth £91 to £97 a week but like everyone else George got £65 a week - the equivalent to Jobseeker's Allowance - for three months while he waited for his "work capability assessment".
These tests, carried out under a £100million a year contract by private firm Atos Origin, were introduced by the last government.
They've been finding up to two in three applicants are "fit to work" - but many appeal and 40% are successful.
In George's 39-minute exam, the "disability analyst" noted that George had angina, heart disease and chest pain, even when resting.
But this wasn't "uncontrollable or life-threatening" and George "should be able to walk at least 200 metres".
Atos's report went to the Department for Work and Pensions, where George's heart problems were ignored and he got six sick "points", as he could only stand up for less than half an hour due to pain.
Short of the 15 points needed to get ESA, George was put on Jobseeker's Allowance and told to find work.
He appealed, waiting eight months for his case to go to an independent tribunal. There George got nine more points, as he could only walk 100 metres before stopping.
He was put on the "work related activity" group where he got the lower rate of benefit and special help finding a suitable job.
But months later George collapsed and died of a heart attack, the day before another Atos medical. His widow is convinced the stress of claiming killed him.
We've got no time for spongers who milk the system and no problem with medical tests - as long as they're fair.
Professor Malcolm Harrington, of the University of Leeds, was asked to review the Atos tests by the Government last year.
He found they needed to be made "fairer and more effective". Currently the system is "impersonal, mechanistic and lacking in clarity".
Poor decisions were blamed on lack of time and common sense.
When the Royal Mail paid Atos to assess postman Garry Hollingworth they said he should be medically retired. But just weeks later, when they assessed again him for ESA, Atos gave him zero points and passed him fit for work.
Colin Hampton of the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers' Centre (above) says he's had four identical cases.
He's dealing with hundreds of appeals with a 70% success rate, including people with lung cancer, brain tumours, asbestosis, cerebral palsy and spina bifida.
But last month the local Tory council scrapped the centre's £35,000 annual grant.
So back to Chris Grayling's claim that it's about saving lives, not money; Professor Paul Gregg, of the University of Bristol, worries it will do neither.
He designed the "work-related activity" programme for people sick enough to get the lower £91-a-week rate of ESA but who have a "potential capability to work".
Prof Gregg insists they are "not job ready" but believes most could be employed within two years with the right support.
He's worried that so many work capability assessments are getting it wrong - taking those people and pushing them onto the lower £65-a-week Jobseeker's Allowance and onto the slow appeals process.
"It is taking up a huge amount of time and cost," he told us. "The appeal process is up to a year. People stay in limbo, not receiving the help they need.
"Professor Harrington is very clear that the current system is essentially not fit for purpose. If there was any justice everyone would be reassessed.
"My concern is that the very people who would benefit from an active programme of engagement are being pushed onto JSA or they are ending up on appeal for a year.
"It's a huge loss of time and the total net effect could be negative not positive. We are slowing down the process of getting people on the right support.
"This has gone on for three years now. One million people have been assessed and has the total number of claims gone down? No. It's a big missed opportunity."
Please click on the link to see the article
Open Letter to Iain Duncan Smith
Monday, 25 July 2011
The day you get that diagnosis is the day the blood runs cold in your veins. Everything stops. Sound is muffled in your ears, shock runs through you and you know in that moment that nothing will ever be the same again.
Life that always seemed so ordered and full of potential becomes precious. A gift greater than any you ever appreciated. A privilege, not a right. Your own mortality comes crashing in around you, redefining love and hope and dreams for the future. Everything will change forever in that one horrifying moment.
If the unthinkable happens to one you love, the sense of impotence and fear is worse. You want it to be you. You'd give anything to change things around, to take away all the pain and suffering. You want to take on every invasive test, every painful procedure. You want it to be you laying there, pail and weak, vomiting endless traces of chemo or morphine into a grey cardboard tray.
You want to be there. All the time. Every minute of every day. You want to protect the person you love most in the world, to fight for them, to arrange the very best care available. Suddenly work and meetings and focus groups are forgotten - irrelevant even - when contrasted with the battle for life.
Money won't save them. It might make things easier, speed up care or assure access to the most innovative treatments, but the battle is yours and yours alone. Together.
You grieve. Grieve for the carefree days, the easy confidence that good health brings. You grieve for the future, so cruelly and randomly threatened. You grieve for the love and support that always came first. You grieve for your children and the spectre that now hangs above their heads every minute of every day. Youngsters become carers and you grieve for the easy innocence they will never know again.
The luckiest of all might be able to leave work that very moment, rush home and gather up family in strong, caring arms. The luckiest will only have to face a battle with the disease now tearing their family apart, with little thought for other practicalities.
Most are not that lucky.
Most will find that just as their world falls apart, they must still pay the mortgage, still feed the children, and still keep working hard. They will suffer endless, unimagined agonies as they try to keep all the balls in the air, desperate to fight side by side with their soul mate but unable to do so.
They might lose a wage. Suddenly and without warning their income may half just as they need it most. They may have no choice but to watch in terror as their modest savings drain away, placing fear of poverty side by side with the fear of death.
Is there anything worse? Could there be anything worse than finding your life turned upside down in every area? Job under threat, home at risk, ambitions and dreams destroyed? As your children's faces become etched with fear, do you tell them Mummy will be OK? Do you keep your financial fears to yourself? Do you take on every burden until the pressure gets too much? Do you try to do the work of 10 men? Superman at work, loving support at the hospital bed, devoted father and capable housekeeper? Can you bear the pressure or do you crack yourself?
There is something worse.
Finding that there is no cure.
Finding that there are no magic chemo bullets to stamp out the darkness, no dazzling operations to cut out the contagion. Treatments are patchy - the doctors tell you if you're lucky they can "manage" your condition, but from this day, life will be about survival. Forever.
The treatments won't stop in a month or a year, but they will still make you vomit or send shooting pains through your skull or make you so sensitive to sunlight that you can no longer go outside. No longer take your children to the park or dig sandcastles in the hazy summer sun. They might make you weak, or angry or depressed. They might cause more symptoms than the disease itself, but they keep you alive and "alive" is all those who love you need. Do anything Mummy, but don't die.
The boss who's been so supportive can't support you forever. 6 months, maybe even a year, but in the end, even the most caring boss will have to draw the line. What do you do? Who will care for your family while you work? Is your child old enough to call an ambulance if she has to? Would she know where the special pills are kept in case Mummy won't wake up? Can you teach her your work number or do you fret and worry through every day, never knowing what you will return home to?
Things won't improve. A grey faced doctor might tell you gently that they will only ever get worse. Functions will fail, dignity will crumble, and every previously automatic task will need thought and support. There will be wheelchairs or oxygen tanks or feeding tubes. You will have to learn to change incontinence-bags or give injections or rig up sterile feeds. You will have to find money for a hoist or a voice recognition system.
One day, Mummy might not be able to answer. She may not be able to walk or leave her bed. Birthday parties will have to move upstairs to a fetid room that smells of the end, but you will smile brittle smiles and put up bunting, pretending that nothing has changed. You will all laugh a little too shrilly, jump just a little too nervously, but you will pretend. When the kids are safely tucked up and your partner is finally sleeping a tortured morphine sleep, you will cry great heart wrenching sobs into a cushion so nobody hears.
There are legions of us Iain. Probably millions. We fight great battles every day. We find resilience and love we never knew existed. We find pride in the face of indignity, hope in the face of despair. Our relationships are tested every day and every day we have to whisper "but I love them". Every day, that love has to win. Every day, love is all we have left to get us through.
We pretend the poverty doesn't matter and when faced with life or death, it's funny, but it doesn't seem to matter so much. An afternoon in a park at the beginning of spring, watching the children climb steps to great slide-summits, their joyous eyes flashing in the watery sun is almost too much pleasure to bear. The poignancy of knowing it could always be the last time makes the simplest things precious.
We pretend our ambitions and dreams were not important. Strange, but when your ambition becomes surviving to see your children married, it's true, they don't matter so much.
We pretend we're strong, but we only have the strength we all have, buried deep inside us. We just have to dig deep down to find it. Every day. Forever.
This is why you cannot decide, randomly, that after a year, our families must struggle on alone. A year?? Why Time Limit ESA to a year? Why remove all support from these vulnerable families after one year? Why not 6 months or 3 years or a day? It bears no relationship to the real world, it is policy designed by Dali.
This is why you cannot make us wait 6 months for Disability Living Allowance. Why 6 months? By then we may be bankrupt, we may have lost our homes. We may be dead. The state may end up paying much more through picking up the pieces than in supporting us fairly from day one.
This is why more people must qualify for long term support and go into the Support Group of ESA. Because at the moment, you are failing people with lives like mine. People with Parkinson's and Arthritis and MS. Mothers and sons, daughters and fathers. People with lupus, schizophrenia, bowel disease, kidney failure, epilepsy, personality disorder, heart disease, COPD and thousands of less well known conditions that destroy lives. Countless things as devastating as cancer and some more so.
This is not "welfare." Welfare means to fare well. It is the mark of compassion and evolution in a democratic society. It means no-one should be left in absolute desperation. Your policies are causing this total desperation and I'm sure it is not what you want to do or set out to do.
By all means reform. Goodness knows the system does need to change, but the great myth is that it needs bigger sticks to beat us with and stricter reasons to ensure we do not qualify. Please Iain, listen to me today. You have all beat us hard enough for many years. There is nothing more to squeeze or remove or deny. We live in poverty and uncertainly already, and we have reached a tipping point. Labour's ESA was disastrous enough and already failing. Time limiting, tightening the descriptors yet again and leaving a lengthy qualifying period for DLA is going to cause real hardship and suffering.
Please listen. Please think again.
Please click on the link to see the article
Atos doctors could be struck off
guardian.co.uk, 13 August 2011
Twelve medics at the disability assessment centre are under investigation by the GMC over allegations of improper conduct
Twelve doctors employed by the firm that is paid £100m a year to assess people claiming disability benefit are under investigation by the General Medical Council over allegations of improper conduct. The doctors, who work for Atos Healthcare, a French-owned company recently criticised by MPs for its practices, face being struck off if they are found not to have put the care of patients first.
The Observer has found that seven of the doctors have been under investigation for more than seven months. The other five were placed under investigation this year following complaints about their conduct.
It is understood that the majority of allegations concern the treatment of vulnerable people when the government's controversial "work capability assessments" were carried out, but the GMC refused to comment on individual cases. The development will add to fears over the pace and radical agenda behind the government's welfare-to-work policy, which led to protests in Westminster in May by thousands of disabled people. It will also raise concerns about ministers' commitment to Atos Healthcare, which was recently granted a three-year extension on its contract.
The government has repeatedly publicised figures showing that the "vast majority" of claimants for employment support allowance (ESA), which has replaced incapacity benefit, are fit for work. But four out of 10 of those who appealed the decision by Atos - whose parent company is run by a former French finance minister, Thierry Breton - to deny them benefits are successful on appeal, a process that costs the taxpayer £50m a year.
Last month Atos, whose staff assesses around 11,000 benefit claimants a week, was savaged by the cross-party work and pension’s select committee after it found that many people had "not received the level of service from Atos which they can reasonably expect".
MPs further claimed that a combination of the company's conduct and the test itself had prompted "fear and anxiety among vulnerable people".
One GP who attended Atos recruitment fair told the Observer she feared doctors could become "agents of the state" who were de-professionalised by involvement in a system that did not make patient care its first concern.
Campaigners for the disabled seized upon the development, claiming the government needed to go back to the drawing board. Richard Hawkes, chief executive of the charity Scope, said: "If the government wants to get disabled people off benefits and into work then it needs to get its assessment right. The test should be the first step on the road to employment. But disabled people's confidence in the work capability assessment is extremely low – and today's news will send it to rock bottom.
"The test is massively flawed. Now it appears that it is being carried out by a large number of doctors who are under serious investigation."
Neil Bateman, a solicitor who handles ESA appeals, said on two occasions his clients had been successful because, among other reasons, the doctor assessing them had qualified in Romania and registered with the GMC but had not been licensed to practise in Britain.
Citizens Advice told the Observer it was compiling a dossier showing the problems being faced by those assessed by Atos staff, who can be nurses or physiotherapists in cases where there are no potential neurological disorders. It said it regularly found inaccuracies in many of the medical reports featured in ESA appeal papers that could affect people's chances of receiving benefits. It also found a lack of consideration for those being assessed.
A spokesman said a barrister who was unable to practise because of cancer and lymphoma had described the assessment as being like an "interrogation" led by a computer. The assessor moved the client's legs, which caused her great pain, even though the client had warned that this would happen. In another case a claimant with learning difficulties who went for an assessment was found fit for work because he had found his way to the assessment centre on his own.
When asked about this by Citizens Advice, he reluctantly explained that he had got up very early, taken the bus to the town centre, and then kept asking passersby for directions. He couldn't follow their instructions, so he would show the letter, walk in the direction they pointed, then ask again until he arrived.
Two doctors employed by Atos have already been taken by the GMC to an independent panel for adjudication on their fitness to practise. Dr Alexandros Mallios, who it was claimed had not carried out a proper examination of his patient during an assessment, was cleared by the panel last October. Dr Usen Samuel Ikidde, who qualified in Nigeria, was given a formal warning in January, to lay on his records for five years, after he was found to have worked for Atos while on sick leave from an accident and emergency department.
An Atos spokesman said: "Atos Healthcare is committed to providing a high-quality, professional service and requires these standards of all its employees. While we cannot comment on individual cases, any complaint made about an employee is taken extremely seriously.
"In addition to our own rigorous internal investigations we will co-operate with any external investigation to ensure all facts are properly established and the appropriate action taken."
The Labour government introduced work capability assessments in 2008 when it replaced incapacity benefit and income support for new claimants with employment and support allowance. The government has accelerated the changes and started retesting all 1.5 million incapacity benefit claimants to see whether they are eligible for the new benefit.
A GMC spokesman said: "We can and do take action to remove or restrict a doctor's right to practise if there have been serious failures to meet our standards."
Please click on the link to see the original article
WE ARE NOT ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
Carer Watch, 26 July 2011
WE ARE NOT ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
Everyone is facing cuts and people with disability and ill health and their carers expect to face their fair share of cuts.
But what is happening is not a fair share
Long before the banking crash the last government supported by the opposition had decided to move to a US style non-welfare system, which offered far less support to people with health problems and their carers. This withdrawal of support is now coming on line with alarming momentum. This is happening without full and open public debate because it is being lost in the massive general fiscal crisis.
We have to make sure that this systematic withdrawal of support is brought out in to the light and done openly instead of by stealth.
So CarerWatch members were delighted to read an interview in the Guardian with Richard Hawkes, Chief Executive of Scope, in which Mr Hawkes covered many of the issues raised by our own members. We contacted Richard Hawkes and asked him to outline the situation in a statement that could be shared across the online community and we are delighted to present this statement now. (see below)
This is by no means the first time that we have campaigned on these issues. After the Emergency Budget last year CarerWatch campaigned to protect the Disability benefits yet it is obvious that time has not improved the Coalition government’slistening ability. They are quick to make it known that they meet with disability/carer organisations but when these groups endlessly come away disappointed that their concerns not being taken seriously, where do we go from here?
We decided to contact as many individuals/groups/charities requesting a statement from them regarding Welfare Reform and this blog will record their replies.
If you would also like to participate
1. Feel free to send your own thoughts to admin@carerwatch.com or leave a comment below.
2. Contact any groups you belong to and ask them to forward us their statement, detailing their concerns with this current Welfare Reform Bill.
3. Share this link with your friends/contact lists via email, Facebook, Twitter.
4. Forward the details to your MP
WE ARE NOT ALL IN THIS TOGETHER