Having a Heart Attack? You Shirker...

The Daily Mirror carried a story today with what must be the most twisted and sickening tale yet of the Government's "fixing" of the benefits system. We heard a few weeks ago about ATOS writing to a woman to penalise her for not attending her disability benefits assessment - the fact that she was in hospital in a coma had apparently been lost on their thick skulls (even although they had been notified).

But today, somehow, feels worse. A man was attending a work capability assessment in Oldham when he had a heart attack and even the nurse conducting the interview decided she should terminate it (I say "even" because there have been many bizarre instances of distinctly uncaring assessments by medical staff employed by ATOS).

Two weeks later, he had his benefits stopped because the Department of Work & Pensions decided he had "withdrawn" from the assessment. Twisted beyond all measure of belief, this decision goes to the heart of this pernicious process, the signature policy of Ian Duncan Smith, who is allegedly a deep thinker.

Well, maybe he is and this is all part of his plan. While he sits in front of TV cameras trotting out platitudes of how the reassessments are designed to support people in genuine need and " not leave them unseen for years", the truth is somewhat different - hundreds of terminally ill people denied benefits in their final weeks, other people put through processes where meetings can be (and are) procedurally deemed to have happened even when they have not taken place, and then really spiteful decisions like this one - you withdrew from the assessment because of a heart attack? Man up and get back in there!

The system is dreadful and its effects sick. But that is almost certainly what its architects, the rightwing Tories and their Lib Dem Orcs, have intended.

Yet complicit in this too are the staff who take jobs with ATOS and the DWP and who then reach decisions like this one penalising a heart attack victim and then producing a letter like the one sent to him. It may be argued they need a job, but at what cost? Ian Duncan Smith did not phone up the issuing Job Centre and tell them to send out the letter to the sick man - someone on site did that.

Over two years ago, there was an instance of an ATOS employee referring online to people attending capability assessments as "parasitic wankers". He was roundly condemned. It is to be hoped that his attitude is not the default culture of DWP staff as well now - there is evidence to the contrary, but the Oldham instance begs the question and with much DWP work contracted-out to profit seeking companies, it is not at all surprising if the attitudes they engender are somewhat less supportive and humane than was the case under the old public service.

It seems that the default position, as part of the official, government-set process, is to be as harsh as possible. Otherwise caring staff appear to be being forced into dreadfully twisted decisions and positions. It is obviously down to individual conscience, but ultimately, there is a difficult choice for staff instructed to implement this vicious policy to make, one which it would be easy to trivialise or portray as simple if you don't work there for your own livelihood but a question they really need to ask themselves nevertheless: should you stay or should you go? 

ATOS Employee on Disabled People: "Parasitic Wankers"

ATOS Origin is the French-based company whose UK arm, ATOS Healthcare is employed by the Coalition Government at a cost of hundreds of millions of taxpayers' money to supposedly carry out a fair and balanced review of people who are on disability benefits. As previously blogged here and a thousand other places, there have been many, many dreadful examples of vulnerable people being mistreated during cursory assessments that have effected more miracles than Lourdes, so much so that a recent report by MPs criticised ATOS's claims to be treating people properly.

This weekend has come news that a dozen ATOS doctors are facing possible disciplinary action from the General Medical Council for their off-hand dealings with disabled and sick people undergoing assessment. And one medical professional has raised concerns that, by working for a process that deliberately aims to achieve a 20% reduction in costs, Government-driven, non-medical concerns are taking precedence over the welfare of the patient, a breach of medical ethics.

Many disability campaigners have argued strenuously that a system that sets a deliberate financial target and then masquerades as a reassessment of individual conditions can never be fair or truthful. Much evidence bears this out - including terminally-ill people being told to get back to work and blind people being assessed as seeing because they have a guide dog. With ATOS seeking to achieve Government targets rather than doing right by disabled people, it has declared the overwhelming majority of those who have been assessed as fit for work, only to see around 70% reclassified as unfit when they have appealed to panels of genuinely independent medical practitioners. In spite of this massive failure rate, the Con Dems have continued to shell out hundreds of millions of pounds to the profit-seeking ATOS Origin (to be fair, Labour originally engaged ATOS and developed a very unfair test of disability, but this was aimed solely at new claimants - bad enough - while the Con Dems have massively increased both the cost and scope of the contract with ATOS to review several million current claimants as well).

There is some hope that parts of this sorry process may be revised or dropped in the coming months. While their Commons colleagues cravenly go along with their Tory Masters, Lib Dem Peers in the House of Lords have signalled they may vote with Labour to change the process if a motion on Employment Support Allowance is passed by ordinary party members at the Lib Dem Conference in a few weeks time.

In the meantime, disabled people will continue to be served by the likes of the ironically named Anthony Treasure, an ATOS worker who decided to use his Facebook page to make clear his view of the vulnerable people he is meant to be fairly and impartially processing in his job as an ATOS Centre Administrator: "Parasitic Wankers" he declares.

Given his employers' pisspoor record attacking the vulnerable and ripping off the taxpayer, we may be entitled to ask if he means his clients or his bosses; but we think Anthony has already made his feelings quite clear.

To complain to ATOS, please contact them by:

• Email customer-relations@atoshealthcare.com 
• Write to Atos Healthcare, Block 1, Wing G, Government Buildings, Otley Road, Leeds, LS16 5PU.

Update - see ATOS response to my complaint - Comment 3 below; please write to your MP!

Crippling the Disabled - Where Compassion Comes With an Invoice

The last twenty four hours have seen Britain's social care system plunged into genuine crisis on several fronts.

Most graphic has been the secretly filmed abuse of residents with learning difficulties at a hospital facility in Bristol. An undercover journalist spent five weeks posing as a member of staff to record images of residents being doused with water for not obeying instructions, beaten, stamped on and verbally abused by the people responsible for their care and well being.

Next came the news that Southern Cross, the country's biggest care provider and landlord to over 31,000 elderly people with care needs, is in deep financial trouble. It has staved off bankruptcy by securing temporary rent reductions from its own landlords, but only until October.

And finally, but by no means least, a group of senior clinicians wrote to the Guardian condemning the Con Dem Coalition Government's heartless pursuit of hundreds of thousands of people with mental health problems on Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance. Since their election a year ago, the Government has massively revamped the already widely criticised tests for disability brought into operation for new claimants only in 2008. In addition, it announced that all claimants are to be reviewed, eventually every six months, in what amounts to a blatant attempt to hound some pretty vulnerable people off benefits into an uncertain future where jobs are relatively thin on the ground and where many employers are clearly deeply prejudiced against disabled people to begin with. The result, the clinicians warn in their letter, has been to increase the stress and mental health problems of the people targetted, with growing evidence of both attempted and actual suicides by deeply distressed people facing the loss of the pretty tenuous safety net that has been in place until now.

But what if they can't work?

ATOS Origin, a large French-based IT and facilities group, has been engaged to carry out the review, which will cover some 1.5 million people. Buttressed by pronouncements by Conservative Ministers that at least 20% of people on disability benefits should be in work (a rather arbitrary figure with no research to support the assertion), ATOS to date fail or cut payments to over 90% of people who go through what should be a comprehensive assessment lasting an hour or longer. Many claimants emerge with tales of 10 minute gallop-throughs, with surreal lines of questioning including imagining how people with walking difficulties might cope better in a wheelchair; or how a blind person with a guide dog has consequently no disability. Terminally ill people have been ordered back to work - though perhaps the most bizarre incident was where a woman dismissed by her employer as permanently unfit for work after an assessment by an ATOS occupational health therapist was sent for a IB review with ATOS, who decided there was nothing wrong with her.

On appeal up to 2/3s of people have their benefits reinstated, but only after some months and after a deeply worrying time for them. And many are then called back almost immediately for a new assessment - harassment in all but name. With the drip-drip of Government propaganda increasingly portraying disabled people as a burden on society, the last year has seen a rise in aggression and violence towards disabled people according to a survey by Scope, and terms of abuse such as "spastic" and "mentalist" are creeping more and more into the acceptable lexicography of the mass media. So-called comedians such as Frankie Boyle are feted and awarded TV shows in spite of "jokes" about disabled babies.

Disability has long been an awkward issue for society. I have worked with organisations providing disability support for the last 21 years and can only put this down to ignorance at one end of the spectrum and real, genuine evil at the other. The media is frothing spectacularly at the abuse filmed in Bristol, but this is the same media that routinely denounced those with mental health and other less physically evident disabilities as scroungers, malingerers and frauds. The Con Dems play up to this with stunts like the list of excuses put forward by people found to be defrauding disability benefits earlier this week - implying that fraud is widespread when in truth every audit carry out confirms the level as around 1% of total spend, costing the exchequer some £2 billion p.a. - not insignificant and not to be ignored, certainly, but where is the same pursuit of tax avoidance which robs the nation of at least £20 billions p.a. in lost revenue?

Misleading headlines stigmatise claimants

Of course, the elephant in the room with all three of the crises brought to the public's fleeting attention is that the profit motive features in all of them: the Bristol hospital is run by a private contractor, Castleback Care. Southern Cross, meantime, is a large business, complete with its Investor Centre (click here). which has happily ratched up five figure profits in the not-distant past (and its former Chief Executive was personally £13 millions richer when he left them after heading up a tendfold their expansion in Southern Cross' operations). Meantime, ATOS Origin stand to make over £300 million from their efforts to stamp down on disabled people, with unconfirmed rumours that additional bonuses (or perhaps bounties would be a more appropriate word) payable for each person knocked off the incapacity benefit or DLA registers.

Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that the disability of his late son, Ivan, had opened his eyes to the prejudices and barriers facing people with disabilities. Poor little Ivan is sadly gone now, but his father's awareness appears to have passed away with him - referring to disability benefits as a "something for nothing" culture and slashing hundreds of millions from local authorities social care budgets, leading to the closure of day centres and the isolation of thousands of disabled people, unable to leave their homes or access any sort of beneficial social interaction. And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, he seems content with arrangements that pour good money after bad into the pockets of companies that seek to make a profit out of welfare, creaming off cash from compassion.

Society, it has been said, even by Mr Cameron, is judged by how it treats the vulnerable. By that standard, Britain is failing badly and its Prime Minister is encouraging its failure, forging a society where compassion comes with an invoice. Good care and support is not cheap; it comes at a price, one which society should be more willing to meet, rather than take the narrow view that sees vulnerable people as a burden on everyone else. If for no other reason, the blinding truth is that effective welfare and social care is important to us all because, whether we like it or not, in the end, we are all at least potentially vulnerable
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