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- 106
Only Parliament has the power to bring about an investigation and it's not clear that any Party would have an interest in doing this. There are various levels of investigation that could be pursued - a Royal Commission would be unlikely, they are very grand affairs - apart from a couple of long standing ones - one on pollution and one on the press ? there have only been 10 in the last 50 years and the last one was on Ancient Monuments.
ATOS are only part of the problem and are anyway going to be pulling out of the ESA assessments, there's no reason to expect their replacements will be any better. There are other contractors involved in the PIP assessment (PIP replaces DLA with a less generous regime) and similar problems to ATOS are evident http://www.channel4.com/news/disability-benefits-contractor-runs-into-trouble-video
The problem with any demand for legal action is that by the very nature of the contracts involved there are major protections in place for the contractors - sections 2 and 3 of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 for example would seem to make the Act inapplicable to the effects of ATOS's reports. The Government could certainly seek to punish ATOS for doing a crap job, but it has no interest in doing that because to do so would make its other privatisation 'partners' nervous.
re: Royal Charters mentioned above - these are not really an aspect of privatised monopolies - one can argue that the Bank of England, the BBC, the Royal Mail (all have Charters) are monopolies of sorts and the Royal Mail is now part privatised as a commercial operation. The bulk of Royal Charters (700+ ?) are about giving State sanctioned entities a degree of independence from Government. The UK has a lot of arms length organisations which offer a huge level of deniability of responsibility by Government, but the bulk of privatisation is insidious and shuts off huge areas of public service from close examination under commercial confidentially agreements.
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