Daily Telegraph: Why the Right could doom welfare reform

[Firestormm]

23 May 2013
Why the Right could doom welfare reform

Disability testing isn’t working as it should – and Conservatives must have the courage to admit it

When government makes a mess of a big contract, the Right’s normal response is to make a fuss. Taxpayers’ money is precious, and the state should avoid wasting it. So what if I told you that both this Government and the last have struggled with a contract worth more than an annual £100 million, which has been criticised by auditors and has a costly 17 per cent error rate?

The work capability assessment, carried out by the private firm Atos Healthcare at an annual cost of £112.4 million, needs more scrutiny than it receives. There is a curious blind spot on the Right about this contract, and it is in part down to a desire for the policy – undoubtedly the correct one overall – to succeed. The Coalition continued the tests, which were introduced by Labour in 2008, so as to move claimants from Incapacity Benefit to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), or off benefits and into the workplace.

The steady drip, drip of bad news about the tests – from Wednesday’s court judgment that they disadvantage those with mental health problems to the rising rate of successful appeals – suggests that all is not well. It is no surprise that 40 per cent of the Department for Work and Pensions’s fitness-to-work decisions go to appeal, but what is astonishing is that 42 per cent of those appeals are successful. Their cost is projected to rise from £60 million to £70 million this year.

In October, the National Audit Office identified weaknesses in the Atos contract. In January, the public accounts committee sounded a similar warning, saying the DWP was “getting far too many decisions wrong” and “at considerable cost to the taxpayer”. MPs – including Conservatives – also held a Commons debate after complaints about the process jammed their letterboxes.

So what is going wrong? Atos is subject to extraordinary levels of vitriol, but charities representing sick and disabled people argue that the problem lies as much in the test itself, which was designed by ministers and civil servants. It fails to assess, beyond someone’s ability to move a cardboard box in the test room, whether they are capable of doing a real job. The activities in the test are removed from workplace realities. Can you move that cardboard box every day for a week, after travelling into the office?

Read the full article...

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Two words:
F*** 'EM !
prefferably with a succulent desert-dwelling plant up their colonic orifice....

It's bureaucratic, ideologically-driven insanity.If it continues down "the rabbit hole" of state sponsored lunacy, they'll eventually have doctors sorting out those who go to the "showers" or not....

 

[Esther12]

Ta Fire. There are good and bad things about this article, and I get the impression that the writer hadn't done much research for it. So a big improvement on most of the coverage we've seen!

 

[Firestormm]

Ta Fire. There are good and bad things about this article, and I get the impression that the writer hadn't done much research for it. So a big improvement on most of the coverage we've seen!

Interesting development (can't recall if it was in the opinion piece above or not now). Hit the news in the past couple of days, that a govt. department had flagged Universal Credit with an 'Amber Warning'. Meaning that the chances of success were not as good as promised (my interpretation). Red meaning failure. Green meaning success likely.

DWP responded saying that the data upon which this had been based were 8 months old and that Universal Credit was on-track for successful implementation. So who knows? Disaster waiting to happen? Personally I have always believed a simple-system would be best - but I think it will be the computer-software that lets clients down.

There is much that can go wrong with this...

 

[alex3619]

http://atosvictimsgroup.co.uk/

This is a good source for such information earlier ... I saw this article earlier. However do be warned that the editorials are becoming increasingly more strident, empassioned, and read like propaganda from our side. Sigh, things are getting tough for many over there. I wish I could do more.

 

[Esther12]

The recent benefit reforms have really screwed over a lot of really sick and disabled people - it's hard to talk frankly about that without it sounding off-puttingly like propaganda. I'm sure that it does put some people off though.