Questions Workfare Charities Urgently Need to Answer

Ever since Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship Work Programme was rolled out in 2011, the charitable sub-contractors involved have attempted to dodge and wriggle their way out questions relating to the nastier elements of the scheme.

When the workfare row blew up at the beginning of the year, the members of Disability Works (DWUK), a consortium of disability charities formed to maximise income from the Work Programme, vehemently denied that they had anything to do with sanctioning disabled people’s benefits.  A statement on their website reads: “DWUK members are not directly involved in delivering sanctions – this action is taken by DWP via Job Centre Plus.”

This is a deliberate attempt to diminish their role in delivering punishing benefit sanctions.  Their statement also admits:  “If an individual does not attend a referral or other activity, as required, DWUK would be obliged to report that non-compliance to the Work Programme prime provider.”

This is known in DWP jargon as reporting a Compliance Breach.  It is true that the DWP then make the final decision about whether to sanction a claimants benefit or not – but for the charities to claim they have nothing to do with the process is a bit like saying the police have nothing to do with putting people in prison.  It’s clearly bullshit and the charities concerned should stop treating their users and the people who fund them as if we are stupid.

DWUK’s statement even gives an impression that they agree with sanctioning disabled people’s benefits in some cases.   Whilst they claim that they will make the DWP aware if they believe an individual is vulnerable, they say this information will mean simply that “DWP decision makers can then be provided with all the relevant facts to help them make the right decision.”

At a recent meeting discussing fighting welfare reform a senior figure from one of the DWUK charities seemed to agree with this, claiming that they always challenged sanctions they thought were ‘unreasonable’.  Clearly DWUK think it is sometime reasonable to force a disabled benefit claimant into absolute poverty and possible homelessness because they missed an appointment or failed to start a training course.

Yesterday the DWP quietly announced that from the 3rd December this year -  International Disabled People’s Day – claimants of sickness and disability benefits, who have been judged by their own doctors as unable to work, can now be sent on workfare.

Once again the big charities involved in the Work Programme started spinning away any responsibility for their role in this brutal new regime.  Mental health charity MIND released a statement saying:  “Mind does not believe that people who have been found unfit for work should be forced to undertake mandatory unpaid work placements.”

It’s worth pointing out that they only say they disagree with this practice, but don’t say that they will not be involved in carrying it out.

Substance misuse charity Addaction (@addactionuk) responded to the post yesterday on this blog with a flustered refutation complaining that they aren’t just in the Work Programme for the money.  On further questioning they went much further than MIND, stating categorically that they have not raised any Work Programme compliance breaches (although stopping short of saying they would refuse to – as this would doubtless place them in breach of contract).

They also state that they are not involved in referring unemployed claimants into any form of workfare, will not be involved in referring sickness and disability claimants into workfare and would refuse to monitor workfare attendance and compliance if the prime contractors (their poverty pimp bosses like A4e and G4S) sent claimants on mandatory workfare.

Which is fine.  Well done Addaction, except that it is only by good luck that they haven’t yet had to refer a compliance doubt and that by taking part in the Work Programme they give charitable cover to what is turning out to be the most brutal and inept welfare-to-work scheme ever devised.

Addaction also claim they didn’t sign the gagging order which many other Work Programme sub-contractors have claimed forbids them from even criticising the Work Programme.

Finally Salvation Army have re-iterated their workfare denial, despite several appeals on their website for companies and organisations who can offer work placements.  It is impossible to know just how ‘voluntary’ these work placements are in practice, but this blogpost gives an idea of what claimants sent to the Salvation Army on the Work Programme can expect:  http://quacking-plums.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/i-fucking-hate-work-programme.html

Homelessness charities this week released a report slamming the Work Programme and its impact on homeless people.  One of the first charities to pull out of the Work Programme was the Single Homeless Project (SHP), claiming the sanctions regime could force vulnerable people to have to “beg and steal to survive”.  St Mungos, one of the UK’s largest homelessness charities, have also pulled out of the scheme.  Their reason was far more pragmatic.  They weren’t making any money.

Oxfam have refused to be involved with the Work Programme, workfare and benefit sanctions – claiming it would be inappropriate for an anti-poverty organisation.

There is obviously disagreement within the third sector about the ethics of any charity involvement in this scheme and the devastation that benefit sanctions can bring to people’s lives.

Charities have a duty to be transparent.  Perhaps they are all like Addaction, tacitly playing along whilst not referring people for sanctions or sending claimants on workfare.  If so this makes Iain Duncan Smith look like the joke he is – talking tough for the television whilst behind the scenes Work Programme charitable contractors are subverting his every move.

The only way we can finally know the truth about the involvement of MIND (@MindCharity), Mencap (@mencap_charity), Scope (@scope), RNIB (@RNIB), Leonard Chesire Foundation (@LCDisability) and all the other Work Programme sub-contractors in workfare and benefit sanctions is if they will answer the following questions.

1. How many and what has been the nature of any Compliance Breaches (your organisation) has raised with the Prime Contractors or the DWP?
2. How many people have had benefits sanctioned as a result of Compliance Breaches raised by (your organisation)?
3. Would (your organisation) refuse to raise Compliance Doubts in defiance of their contractual agreement with the DWP and Prime Contractors as Work Programme sub-contractors?
4. Does (your organisation) have a strategy in place to support Work Programme participants who have had benefits sanctioned due to compliance breaches and if so what is it?
5. Is (your organisation) involved in mandating JSA* claimants to ‘work experience’ or ‘voluntary work’?
6. Will (your organisation) be involved in mandating ESA WRAG** claimants to ‘work experience’ or ‘voluntary work’?
7. If the Prime Contractors choose to mandate Work Programme participants with (your organisation) to some form of unpaid work will (your organisation) refuse to monitor these placements and report Compliance Breaches.
8. Did (your organisation) agree as part of their Work Programme sub-contract that they will not criticise the Work Programme, meaning that (your organisation) cannot campaign against forced unpaid work being implemented for thiose on unemployment, sickness or disability benefits?
9. Will (your organisation) be actively campaigning against forced unpaid work for sick and disabled claimants in the ESA WRAG group?

Charitable organisations are now at the heart of all mandatory work placements which must be able to demonstrate ‘community benefit’.  Along with workfare for sick and disabled claimants, unlimited workfare is being planned for those leaving the Work Programme and entering the Community Action Programme.  A fierce and co-ordinated response from the larger charities could kills this form of workfare stone dead.

The question is whose  side are they on?  Will they stand with disabled, unemployed or unwell people who are already struggling desperately due to the vicious welfare cuts?  Or will they stand on the side of Iain Duncan Smith and the DWP?

* JSA means the unemployment benefit Jobseekers Allowance
**ESA WRAG means  claimants of the sickness and disability benefit Employment Support Allowance who have been placed in the Work Related Activity Group due to being assessed as being able to work at some point in the future.

Join in with the Week of Action Against Workfare Charities beginning on December 8th.  Actions already announced in Leeds, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Brighton and Liverpool:  http://antiworkfare.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/week-of-action-against-workfare_29.html

Source

Privatised job-finding fiddles rife, says agency source [The Slog]

Private job-finder intermediaries are ripping off the DWP

Through being ill-informed generally (and specifically distracted by political point-scoring) the Ed Miller Band missed an open goal at PMQs today.

Not that many people will be surprised by a headline about intermediary fiddles; but anyway, this is just to confirm what we have all come to expect from private suppliers to government in the 21st century: those providing ‘services’ to The Work Programme (and other departments in the process of finding people jobs) are scamming the system.

Three weeks ago I received information from a Slogger with family experience of what’s happening. On Monday, an insider finally confirmed some elements of the allegations. Bizarrely, yesterday the original source wrote to me again with an update. This concurred almost exactly with what I had learned the day before. Here’s the bottom line:

Employers and intermediaries are paid by results to get people into work, and providers can earn between £3,700 and £13,700 per person, depending how hard it is to help an individual. The DWP says the scheme so far has cost just over £2,097 for every participant.

A relation of my original source went to an agency for help and got risible service. He subsequently found a job himself.

“They rang me up today to check how I was doing,” he wrote, “and when I told him I had a job he seemed to perk up a bit. He said he’d give me £100 “petrol money” if I signed some paperwork to let him contact the DWP.”

In fact, the agency was after the credit for finding the job. The £100 bribe to the job-seeker gave the company a £2000 clear profit for claiming responsibility for success.

“This kind of fraud is probably quite widespread,” said my industry source, “but is almost impossible to prove either way.”

 

The reality on the ground (according to the latest ONS data) is that long term unemployed (LTU) Brits have nearly doubled in incidence since the Coalition scheme began…their numbers are up by 96%. The same source also reveals that three million British citizens are now underemployed: that is, they’d rather work full-time, but can only get part-time jobs.

 

I’ve been saying for some time that the economic model we are following in the UK simply cannot employ the huge population we now have, thanks to the immigration floods encouraged by New Labour between 1999 and 2009. As the model is down to the Tories, and the population down to Labour, we are led – as usual – to the obvious conclusion: neither major Party has a clue what it is doing to our country.

 

Related: Stand by for the next ill-conceived policy failure

 

The Slog

Sick and tired: the coalition’s war on the disabled and destitute

Being sick and tired is no reason not to keep fighting - a growing number of people are refusing to accept this new, cruel reality.

Lucy Aldridge is on hunger strike. She is disabled, but her state benefits were suspended after she received a “death-in-service” payment for her 18-year-old son William, the youngest British soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. New, harsh welfare rules mean that Aldridge, from Herefordshire, is entitled to nothing.

Christos Palmer is on hunger strike. The 32-year-old Welshman is also disabled, and has spent the past month protesting outside the Cardiff offices of Atos Origin, the private firm charged with turfing thousands of sick people off the welfare rolls. “After a few days, due to a lack of nutrients, the hunger striker will feel dizzy and faint,” explains Palmer, whose bodyweight has plummeted following his protest. “Why do people like myself and Lucy take this form of action in protesting? We see it as a last resort. No-one seems to be listening to us. We are the invisible silent minority that everyone is happy to ignore.”

A hunger strike is a phenomenal act of willpower. It’s a final attempt to wrest back dignified control of your own body when your dignity and control have been confiscated. That’s why the hunger strike has historically been a strategy employed by political prisoners and peaceful civil rights protesters: it’s the last resort of proud, desperate people with nothing to lose. It is suicide as spectacle.

The hunger strikers have assumed – as most of us did, until very recently – that the government gives a damn about whether or not very poor, sick people die early and in pain. Given recent pronouncements by the Department of Work and Pensions, this may be a dangerous assumption. Over the past four years, an all-out assault has been underway against the disabled and unemployed in Britain. The attacks have come on all fronts, from the financial to the moral – rewriting the social script in this country so that the needy are no longer full human beings with just as much right to a life as anyone else, but parasites, scroungers, burdens on the state, barely even human.

Let’s step back for a moment. Let’s take a look at how far we’ve come.The modern welfare state was founded to liberate people from hunger, poverty and want. The document that laid those foundation, the Beveridge Report, was released 70 years ago this month and it makes for fascinating reading, not least because one so seldom encounters a government document which proposes to make life better for people, rather than burying planned abuses under shovelfuls of waffly obfuscation.

Beveridge, who was far from a radical, proposed that nobody should be left destitute by virtue of being unable to work. Bear in mind that this report was written in 1942, when the nation was at war. “A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching,” wrote Beveridge in the introduction, which recommends a minimum guaranteed income level for every citizen, leaving everyone the option to earn more and improve his or her circumstances.

When the welfare state was built, the world was changing. A working class which had been asked to put itself on the line to fight fascism and protect a faltering British Empire was growing restless. For the first time, the notion that being sick, widowed or unemployed might not have to mean living in the sort of hunger and filth described in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier seemed like more than airy fantasy. In the early years of the Second World War there were still 100,000 people living in ghoulish, Victorian-era workhouses. There are no workhouses left today – they were closed after the modern welfare system was instituted, and the buildings turned into retirement homes and community centres – but the ability of those who would once have needed them to live free, independent lives is rapidly disappearing.

The Conservative front bench is keen to remind us that the world of work has changed since Beveridge’s day. One of the most important changes has been that a full salary can no longer be expected to provide any sort of decent standard of living, or indeed to cover basic rent in many cities where employment is to be found – which is why the majority of recipients of housing benefit, among other benefits, are in work. And yet the fantasy that removing benefits will “get Britain working” continues, because we allow it to.

In a time of soaring joblessness, encouraging an underpaid or unemployed person to seek work by removing their benefits is rather like encouraging a desert traveller to find an oasis by setting them on fire.You cannot simply bully people into jobs that aren’t there. Nor can you order a person to get on their bike and look for work, as Norman Tebbit did in 1981, if it is physically impossible for them to ride a bike, or, indeed, to stand.

You can, of course, bully them off the welfare rolls so that your figures for unemployment and incapacity aren’t quite so embarassing when election time rolls around. Indeed, up to 1.8 million needy new claimants may have been frightened away from applying for benefits to which they are entitled for that reason. This sort of figure-fiddling only works for so long. A dramatic increase in net national destitution tends to get noticed, after a while. If you’re going to accustom people to living smaller, meaner lives, you need to persuade them that it’s wrong to want more and always has been. You need to tell them they’re scroungers, spongers and shirkers. You need to get rid of other people’s empathy by blaming them for every possible social ill. You need to justify the degradation of the disabled.

And that’s just what’s been happening in Britain over the past decade, as the poisonous rhetoric of “shirking” and “scrounging” has come to dominate the mainstream debate about social security, the truth about benefits obscured by fairytales about welfare recipients living rent-free in mansions made of gingerbread in a magical land of full employment.

This week, a study by the Elizabeth Finn charity revealed that press attitudes towards benefit recipients have hardened considerably in recent years, and that many of the negative stories about benefit claimants parroted in the tabloid press have been instigated by a government determined not to let the facts get in the way of its philosophy of slashing state support for all but the extremely wealthy.

It's difficult to stay calm about this. I'm finding it difficult, as someone who has been writing and campaigning about the attack on welfare for four years and more, since I was a caregiver with a severely disabled boyfriend who went through the process of prostrating himself for incapacity benefits that came too late or not at all. Back then, it was the Labour Party attacking disabled people’s right to live with dignity. The Work and Pensions Minister whose offices we were picketing was James Purnell, not Iain Duncan Smith, who today mouths the same torturous rhetoric about getting people back to work by taking away their means of support.

In those four years, years in which the insanity of ripping enormous holes in the social safety net during a double-dip recession has only become starker, disability campaigners have made the arguments over and over again about why we need a welfare state. We’ve watched extremely sick people sacrifice what little health and energy they have fighting for their rights to live independently, coming back from welfare offices with stories of being made to walk until they fall over, being made to undress to show their self-harm scars, and still being turned away. We’re getting weary of explaining why blaming those who have almost nothing, not even their health, for the state of the economy is callous and evil.

It’s a struggle to come up with new ways to reiterate the facts behind the torrent of propaganda pouring out of the Conservative press office. It’s a struggle to remind people that welfare costs have risen because wages have failed to rise; that most welfare recipients are in work; that the rates of benefit fraud, far from being a drain on the state, are as low as they've ever been, at one per cent; that the cost of corporate tax avoidance to the exchequer (£25bn a year) is a hundred times higher than the cost of benefit fraud, and yet it is the poor and needy whom the government chooses to blame for the state of the economy.

Those who’ve been fighting this cause for years are sick and tired of repeating the arguments over and over again and watching the public conversation about disability slide backwards into hate and suspicion. We’re sick and tired of hearing about another disabled person dying or committing suicide days after being found “fit” for work that isn’t there, another terminal cancer patient sent to the job centre, another person afraid to leave the house on crutches because they might face harassment, another parent or caregiver watching helplessly as their loved ones sink into despair, as their health and hope are worn away.

Right now, reading over the government’s latest plans to take away benefits for everyone under 25 who isn’t earning money, I don’t want to lay out yet another reasonable case for why humans shouldn’t have to starve because they weren’t born rich. I want to put my fist through the computer screen until it comes back bloody. I’m sick and tired of the cruelty and the lies.

But being sick and tired is no reason not to keep fighting. Karen Sherlock, who died in June after a suspected heart attack, not long after having her benefits cut and being told to seek work by the DWP, was sick, and she was tired. She was just 44 years old, and severely disabled. In one of her last blog posts, she wrote: “We need to be passionate about standing up for our rights. If we can make enough noise, and get enough people to listen then we can overturn the inhumane changes this parasitic government have made.”

There is a growing phalanx of people in this country refusing, like Karen Sherlock, like Christos Palmer and Lucy Aldridge, to accept this new, cruel reality. Disabled people and their allies are refusing to lie down meekly and accept their new status as scapegoats and social parasites. They are angry, and desperate, and prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect their right, and others’ rights, to live with dignity. If the rest of us aren’t standing with them, we ought to be.

Laurie Penny is an NS contributing editor
New Statesman

Czech Constitutional Court bring an end to 'forced labour' why don't our courts?

On November 27 the Czech Constitutional Court partially repealed a law that punishes unemployed people who refuse to accept “compulsory” jobs. “The fundamental ruling abolishes community work that the unemployed must do without pay,” writes the daily Lidové noviny.

As a result, the government must now amend the law that forced anyone who had been unemployed for more than three months to accept or find work for 20 hours a week as a street sweeper or school groundskeeper, or risk having their unemployment benefits or social benefits cut off. The objective of the law, in force since January 2012, was to lower the number of long-term voluntarily unemployed and reduce moonlighting. In October, there were 496,762 unemployed, or 8.5 per cent of the active population. The newspaper says that in its view, the Constitutional Court

" also compared the authorities' treatment of the unemployed to those made to do forced labour. People had to work without pay, often wearing the same coloured vests as convicts and people under other sanctions, which is an affront to their dignity. According to the judges, such treatment was inconceivable, considering that the same people had held down a job for years or decades. What's more, the tasks were chosen at the discretion of the authorities.

This repudiation by the Constitutional Court came as the implementation of another major reform, the first direct election of the President of the Republic, ran into controversy. It all leads Lidové noviny to describe the Czechs as a “nation of Constitutional do-it-yourselfers.”

Source; presseurop

Sick and Disabled to Be Sent on Workfare (by the same charities who claim to support them)

Sick and disabled claimants face being sent on unlimited workfare from the beginning of next month a memo issued to Work Programme providers has revealed.

Claimants in the WRAG group, who have been judged by the shabby Atos testing regime as possibly able to work at some point in the future, will from next month be mandated to unpaid community work or face losing benefits.

In a new low for the third sector, charities such as Scope, MIND, Mencap, the Salvation Army, RNIB and the Leonard Chesire Foundation will now be able to force disabled people into unpaid work or report them to the DWP for benefit sanctions.

Astonishingly these charities will also be able to use workfare workers in their own businesses, meaning that charity shops could soon be staffed by sick and disabled claimants forced to work without pay under threat of poverty and possible homelessness.

The memo (spotted by the ever vigilant consent.me.uk) can be read at: http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/work-programme-memo-082.pdf

This appears to be a brutally flawed measure to toughen up the Work Programme after yesterday’s disastrous performance figures (more on these later by the way).

Workfare for sick and disabled claimants, some of whom may have cancer, serious disabilities or severe mental health conditions, has long been floated by the DWP as part of the war on welfare claimants.

The work must be ‘community based’, meaning that claimants will be sent to work for charities and voluntary sector organisations.  Under the ‘black box’ approach on the Work Programme, which means providers can mandate participants to whatever they see fit, there is no time limit for workfare on the two year scheme.

Charities will both administer and benefit from this vicious new attack on disabled people and those who are too unwell to find work.  They can also stop it in its tracks.

A new militancy is required and these charities need to know that we will not accept their greedy money grabbing activities on the Work Programme or any other workfare scheme. And they will no longer receive a penny of our money.  If they exploit us we will shut them down.  Start by telling them what you think of their connivance with the Work Programme and join the Boycott Workfare Week of Action Against Workfare Charities beginning on December 8th: http://www.boycottworkfare.org/?p=1741

Charitable Work Programme sub-contractors include @scope,  @MindCharity, @mencap_charity, @RNIB, @LCDisability, @salvationarmyuk, @AddactionUK

Charities who exploit workfare staff include @thebhf, @barnardos, @age_uk, @CR_UK

If you donate to a charity contact them today and demand a written assurance they will not use workfare staff or carry out government contracts to force anyone into unpaid work or sanction benefits.

Source

Future Jobs Fund vindicated

Last week the government finally published its impact report on Labour’s Future Jobs Fund. According to the report, two years after starting their jobs with the scheme, participants were 16 per cent less likely to be on benefits than if they had not taken part and 27 per cent more likely to be in unsubsidised employment. The net benefit to society of the scheme was £7,750 per participant, after accounting for a net cost of £3,100 to the Treasury.  Not bad for a scheme condemned as a failure by the current government, and certainly better than anything that replaced it.

The Future Jobs Fund was introduced in 2009 to address the problem of long-term youth unemployment. About 100,000 people in the 18-24 age group out of work for a year or more were guaranteed a job for six months. Later the threshold was reduced to six months. An additional 50,000 guaranteed jobs were available for people of all ages in selected unemployment hotspots.

The idea of addressing long-term unemployment through job guarantees is not new. A number of such schemes were created in Depression-era America, putting young people to work in the National Parks, among other places. An economic rationale was provided by the economist Hyman Minsky. Many schemes for the unemployed focus on skills, and making people more employable, but don’t address the lack of demand for labour. Especially in times of recession and economic stagnation, the big problem is that there simply aren’t enough private sector jobs to go around. Minsky’s solution was for the state to act, in his terminology as ‘employer of last resort’, and provide work at the minimum wage (though I’d prefer to see people paid a living wage). This way the state is not competing with the private sector, merely providing a buffer in hard times.

Direct job creation schemes fell out of favour in the 1970s and 1980s, and the focus shifted to other active labour market policies. Poorly designed job creation programmes are beset by a number of serious problems. The FJF was designed after a careful study of the failure of earlier schemes, drawing on best practices from around the world, and ironing out potential faults. The scheme provided real jobs, not workfare, which created real benefits in the community, paid at the national minimum wage, with time off to look for other, unsubsidised jobs. It seems that the current government never understood the idea of transitional jobs. Anyway it was Labour’s idea, so it must have been bad, right?

Job guarantees have big advantages. For building confidence and job-readiness it’s hard to beat – the best way to prepare people for the job market is to give them a job. It is also visibly fair. Rather than leaving people idle, we are deploying our nation’s key resource in carrying out important work, be it caring in the community, working in schools, or preserving the environment. Also, boosting the incomes of people who would otherwise be unemployed constitutes a highly economic effective stimulus, one that, at a relatively low wage level, is unlikely to be inflationary. Finally, such a scheme will be cost-effective. A job guarantee is a more efficient use of money than other, broader stimulus schemes, as it is specifically targeted at a clear objective. The job guarantee is cheap for what it can achieve, far from being unaffordable.

Labour should be proud of the FJF and of its 2010 manifesto pledge to extend it to all adults out of work for two years or more. Now that the FJF has been vindicated, it’s time to reaffirm our commitment to a job guarantee, and make it a central part of a full employment policy. A robust job guarantee, once turned into an enduring institution, may not be a silver bullet for all our problems, but will go some way to addressing the misery and waste of long-term unemployment, in this downturn and in future recessions.

——————————————

Tanweer Ali is a member of Progress. He tweets @Tanweer_Ali

Source

The Work Programme destroyed a job for every £4600 it spent

Not a paragon of efficiency.

The government is now trying to spin the Work Programme figures, as expected, by focusing on the initiative's "cost effectiveness". The BBC's Nick Robinson, for instance, writes:

Ministers claim that they are meeting their "off benefit targets" and that they are saving money too. The cost of every job secured under their Work Programme is, they say, just over £2,000 compared with a cost of almost £7,500 under Labour's [Flexible] New Deal because the contractors are only paid 60% of their fee once someone is in a sustainable job: ie for six months.

It's certainly the case that Labour's programmes were more expensive than the coalition's replacements. But what this spin demonstrates is a serious failure to control for background noise. The Work Programme is, so far, worse than nothing at ensuring "job outcomes" – that is, people in unsubsidised work six months after they leave the programme. In the first fourteen months, 3.5 per cent of participants achieved job outcomes, but for people not on the programme, 5 per cent were expected to get jobs, according to Labour's shadow minister Liam Byrne.

(The news shouldn't be hugely surprising – one very effective way to get a job is to spend all day every day applying for jobs. Any training programme has to overcome that hurdle.)

Some quick back of the envelope maths, here. The full data is simply not available, but if ministers are saying that the Work Programme cost £2000 per job, and we know that there have been 32,310 job outcomes, then presumably they are claiming a budget to date of £65m.

Given that 5 per cent background rate, we can expect that if the Work Programme had never been instituted, there would have been 46,000 jobs in the normal process: 14,000 more.

In other words, the Work Programme did not cost £2000 per job. Instead, for every £4,600 it spent, it destroyed one participant's chance of employment.

Updated: The effect of the work programme was on the 14,000 job difference, and so the effect is one job destroyed for every £4,600, not for every £1,400. 3.5 per cent is the result for the first fourteen months, not the first year. Clarified the source of the 5 per cent figure.


By Alex Hern
New Statesman

50,000 'denied treatment' to save NHS cash, claims Labour

More than 50,000 people were “denied treatment” on the NHS last year to cut costs and keep them off waiting lists, Labour claimed last night.

 

 

Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said he had new evidence that English NHS trusts had restricted access to 125 treatments over the last two years.

He claimed access to interventions like varicose vein operations, cataract removals, carpel tunnel syndrome surgery and tonsillectomies was commonly being restricted to improve NHS waiting time statistics.

Labour said the situation amounted to “Cameron’s health lottery” and has called for an immediate reversal of rationing decisions that leave patients in severe pain or with restricted mobility.

Speaking in the Commons, Mr Burnham told Dan Poulter, the health minister: “An estimated 52,000 patients in England are being denied treatment and kept off NHS waiting lists because of new restrictions imposed by your Government on cataracts, varicose veins, carpal tunnel syndrome and other serious treatments.

"You boast of lower waiting lists - it's because you've stopped people getting on the waiting list in the first place.”

He added: “Patients in pain and discomfort, unable to work, are being forced to pay for treatment."

His aides found 46 of 100 local health bodies which replied to Freedom of Information requests admitted restricting or decommissioning services since the general election.

Trusts have restricted access to 125 services, including 22 that have been entirely stopped in some areas.
For the eight most commonly restricted treatments, admissions dropped by 51,815 between 2009/10 and 2011/12, according to Labour’s analysis of NHS statistics. That drop includes 22,942 fewer operations to remove skin lesions for cosmetic reasons.

Labour found 21 health bodies had put in place new restrictions on knee surgery, while 18 had tightened access to hip operations. Twenty-four has restricted tonsillectomies and 16 cataract removals.

Mr Burnham said of the restrictions: “Many of them will leave patients in pain, discomfort, unable to work or, sadly, facing the choice of having to go private given how crucial these treatments are."

But Dr Poulter retorted: “We are very proud of our record. Sixty thousand fewer patients are waiting more than 18 weeks than they were under the previous government, and over 16,000 fewer patients are waiting longer than a year than in 2010.

"Waiting times are coming down, infection rates in hospitals are coming down and people are getting better care.

"It's this Government that ended the worst scandal in healthcare of all, which was that people with cancer were not getting access to the drugs they needed."

A Department of Health spokesman said that rationing on the basis of cost alone was "wrong and compromises patient care".

He added: "Decisions on treatments, including suitability for surgery, should be made by clinical experts taking the needs of each individual into account.

"We have already written to the NHS to set out clearly that access to services should not be restricted on the basis of cost."

Telegraph

WCA Deaths and Suicides: more evidence needed for justice

At DPAC we receive regular emails from people who have lost loved ones and attribute this to the process of the WCA, indeed with recent evidence of 73 deaths and suicides per week we are seeing these emails increasing.  December 3^rd is being marked as a day of remembrance for all Atos victims. Disability activist Samuel Miller from Canada is taking this outrage against human rights as far as he possibly can in an effort to secure justice.

Samuel has made many efforts at the United Nations level on behalf of disabled people in the UK and the constant attacks they face under the Tory regime. We all owe him a debt of gratitude. He is looking for evidence of linked Atos deaths. DPAC supports this and want to help in any way we can –below we repost the blog from Vox Political with permission from Mike from Wales.

Please help if you can by publicising and also subscribe to Vox Political at: http://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/ids-off-the-hook-with-icc-so-evidence-needed-of-atos-deaths/

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IDS off the hook with ICC – so evidence needed of Atos deaths

Brian McArdle. On the BBC’s Question Time last Thursday, Iain Duncan Smith flew into a rage when Owen Jones challenged him about what happened to Mr McArdle, “57 years old, paralysed down one side, blind in one eye; he couldn’t speak. He died one day after being found ‘fit for work’ by Atos.”

 

People whose family members have died while going through the DWP/Atos work capability assessment are being urged to contact a disability specialist - who has been seeking international legal action against the austerity-enforced injustice.

Vox Political reported back in September that Samuel Miller had contacted the International Criminal Court in The Hague, intending to file a complaint against Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling and Maria Miller, the ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions, considered most responsible for “draconian welfare reforms and the resultant deaths of their society’s most vulnerable”.

Mr Miller got in touch over the weekend, but said that the result had been disappointing: “They stated that the International Criminal Court has a very limited jurisdiction. The Court may only address the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as defined by Articles 6 to 8 of the Rome Statute.”

The Rome Statute is the document under which the ICC was established. Article 7, which covers crimes against humanity, states: “For the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

“(k) Inhumane acts … intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”

I thought this – Article 7 (k) – was a perfect description of what the DWP and its ministers are trying to achieve, and Mr Miller agreed. But he said: “Clearly the ICC is striving to discourage the filing of austerity complaints.”

There is a way forward. He added: “On a welcome note, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently acknowledged that austerity measures may violate human rights — which certainly is a step in the right direction.”

He’s right. The chair of the UN committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Ariranga Govindasamy Pillay said on October 23 that, although member states face tough decisions when dealing with rising public deficits, austerity measures are potentially violations of their legal obligations to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

“All States Parties should avoid at all times taking decisions which lead to the denial or infringement of economic, social and cultural rights,” Pillay said, citing an open letter to States Parties from the committee earlier this year that clarified the committee’s position on austerity measures.

By ratifying the Covenant, member states like the UK have a legally binding obligation to progressively improve, without retrogression, universal access to goods and services such as healthcare, education, housing and social security and to ensure just and favourable conditions of work, without discrimination, in accordance with established international standards. These rights must be achieved by using the maximum of available resources.

Pillay pointed out that austerity measures are also a disincentive to economic growth and thereby hamper progressive realization of economic and social rights.

The committee had pointed out that social insecurity and political instability, as seen in parts of Europe today, were also potential effects of the denial or infringement of economic, social and cultural rights.

The poor, women, children, persons with disabilities, older persons, people with HIV/AIDS, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and refugees were particularly at risk, the committee had noted.
Having identified the possibility, we come to the burden of proof. Mr Miller said: “My best hope lies in procuring coroner’s reports where the cause of death is found to be destitution and/or suicide.”

Inevitably, there is a problem. The UK Coronial system does not involve the collating of such information, nor does it look for national trends. The role of the Coroner is case specific, so wider information is not available. This is because the system of inquests into deaths was never intended to investigate whether those deaths were being caused by insane decisions of the government itself.

The law in relation to death certification may be amended in 2014 to provide for Medical Examiners whose role will be to examine such matters – but that is two years from now, and the DWP/Atos system could pile up another 7,600 bodies in that time (using the generally-accepted average of 73 deaths per week).

Mr Miller has written to the DWP, seeking a change of coroners’ duties to allow proper and robust reporting of trends such as stress-related deaths, suicides and/or destitution deaths of welfare recipients and recipients who perished shortly after being stripped of their benefits can be reported to both the DWP and the Ministry of Justice.

But I think we all know there is little chance of success there. This government is hardly going to hand over the tools by which its own ministers might end up in an international court. They’re insane, but they’re not stupid!

So people are going to have to do it themselves. We know about high-profile cases in which deaths have been blamed on Atos. Information about the others needs to be available now.

This is why I want to appeal for anyone who has lost a loved one because of the DWP/Atos work capability assessment system to get in touch with Mr Miller. He needs to know the verdict that was reached at the inquests into their deaths.

His email address is disabilityinliterature@gmail.com

I would strongly urge that anyone writing to Mr Miller keeps their correspondence to the point. It is to be hoped that he will receive a strong response, but this entails a large amount of work. It is therefore important to make that work as easy as possible, perhaps by putting the deceased’s name, address and the verdict at the top of your email.

Follow mike on twitter :@MidWalesMike

Iain Duncan Smith's callous disrespect for the dead [Another Angry Voice]

I pretty much always attempt to write about politics in objective journalistic style. I feel that I engage more readers with this style of presenting facts, conducting rational analysis, and attempting to restrict my own personal opinion. However, in this case, I'm going to say what I really think.

The Tory Welfare minister Iain Duncan Smith is an odious shit.

Just take a look at the embedded video below, which is a clip from Question Time on 22nd November 2012. In the clip, the panel are discussing the question of government welfare policy and the author Owen Jones (who wrote Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class) tried to confront Iain Duncan Smith with the names and circumstances of death of just two (of the thousands) of severely disabled/terminally ill people that have died having been declared "fit for work" by the Tory - DWP -Atos "disability denial factory".

Iain Duncan Smith's response to these details of people's deaths was a palpable demonstration of the man's utter lack of human decency.

 

Here's a transcript of the discussion:

Owen Jones: "There is a point that has to be made about the treatment of disabled people in this country. There's two names I want to give Iain ... Brian McArdle, 57 years old, paralyzed down one side, blind in one eye, he couldn't speak. He died one day after being found "fit for work" by Atos. Another example, Karen Sherlock..."

Iain Duncan Smith: (interrupts angrily) "Hang on a minute, we've heard a lot from you..."

So there you have it, Iain Duncan Smith cares so little about the suffering and death of actual, real, named people that he would disrespectfully interrupt the description of the circumstances of their death with an angry political tirade. Viewers never even got to find out the circumstances of Karen Sherlock's death, thanks to Iain Duncan Smith's interruption and David Dimbleby's cowardly decision to shut down the debate (instead of chastising Iain for interrupting so disrespectfully, or intervening to allow Owen to complete his point, as any decent moderator would surely have done). For those of you that are interested in the circumstances of Karen's death, here are a couple of heartbreaking links detailing the appalling suffering of this poor woman, much of it directly attributable to Iain Duncan Smith's Welfare regime. (RIP Karen Sherlock, Karen's story, pieced together from her own words). Seriously, I challenge you to read either of these articles and remain completely unmoved by her suffering. If you do remain completely unmoved it must be that you, like Iain Duncan Smith, lack a single shred of empathy or basic human decency.

Anyone with a shred of decency would have waited for Owen to finish speaking of the dead, then offer condolences to the families of the dead before attempting a counter-argument, but not callous Iain. He clearly couldn't care less about the families of the deceased.

So there you have it; in video and in writing. Iain Duncan Smith has no respect for the dead, or for the families of the dead. In fact, hearing about the dead actually inspires him to launch into angry and defensive political tirades. One of the most shocking things for me, was the fact that Iain Duncan Smith's revolting display of disrespect for the dead actually elicited a round of applause from the crowd. I'm not normally one to blame the collective for the actions of individuals within the collective, however, as British people we should all hang our heads in shame that people amongst us would actually applaud such a revolting display of callous disrespect for the dead.

Lets try a simple thought experiment: Say a Question Time panellist is detailing the tragic circumstances of death of some British soldiers in Afghanistan, when he is angrily interrupted by another panelist who happens to be a Muslim. She points her finger and shouts "hang on a minute, we've heard a lot from you..." followed by a tirade against Britain's foreign policy. Even if the criticisms of British foreign policy made by our hypothetical Muslim panelist are entirely accurate, would you expect her to get a round of applause from the audience after disrespecting the dead? I hardly think so. In fact, I'm fairly sure that our hypothetical Muslim panelist would be booed by the audience and then be rapidly transformed into a national hate figure by the right-wing press for her display of contempt for the dead.

I really don't know what else to say. If you're a tribalist Tory voter, you'll continue to vote for grotesque people like Iain Duncan Smith, no matter what they say or do. If it is wearing a blue rosette, it doesn't matter whether it is a donkey or despot, you'll vote for it. No matter how demonstrably revolting the Tory regime becomes, and no matter what people like me say, you'll still jump to Iain's defence because you're so mired in confirmation bias, that you will continue to swallow every feeble Tory justification narrative and remain steadfastly incapable of even acknowledging any alternative side to the debate.

You lot are such die-hard Tories that you'd even applaud Iain's callous disrespect for the dead. you sicken me almost as much as he does, but your saving grace is your ignorance. Iain Duncan Smith is an intelligent man that knows exactly how harmful his disability scapegoating campaign has been: You are perhaps too intellectually challenged to accept the reality that thousands of people are dying after being declared "fit for work", 100,000s more are suffering unimaginable stress, the Tories and the right-wing press are deliberately  orchestrating a disability witch-hunt and, there has been a massive rise in disability hate crime and unprovoked violent attacks against the disabled. Even if that doesn't bother you, surely you can't approve of the vast waste of public money as 10,000s of absurd "fit for work" rulings are expensively overturned in court, at the expense of the taxpayer (at no cost to Atos, the company that made the often appallingly bad decisions to find so many terribly disabled and even terminally ill people "fit for work"). Perhaps, despite all this evidence you still side with Iain and prefer to continue blaming the victim.

I know I won't convince people like you with my usual strategy of explaining things clearly, presenting evidence and conducting rational analysis, so just this once I'll allow myself to express my feelings instead.

Iain Duncan Smith is a callous, disrespectful, self-serving monstrous shit of a man. It sickens me that a man with such a demonstrable lack of basic human decency could have risen so high in British politics. He is odious and obnoxious and vile. He is so malicious he sorely tests my pacifist stance. I sincerely believe that violence begets violence and almost always worsens any given circumstance. Despite this, I imagine that I'd find it extremely difficult to resist the urge to smack this guy hard in the mouth. If a nefarious cretin like Iain Duncan Smith can work himself into a rage when confronted with the names of dead people (real people with actual lives that have been lost, and actual families that mourn for them) then I think I can be excused for allowing myself, for a moment, to express my feelings of revulsion at this odious moral vacuum of a man in emotional (rather than objective journalist) language:

Iain Duncan Smith is an odious shit.

Another Angry Voice

Useful idiots at work [reblogged]

Ever since the Savile story broke, quickly followed by the Bryn Estyn affair, there has been a steady stream of mainstream media articles ready willing and able to turn public opinion away from the abused victims that these revelations brought to light, to a state of move along, nothing to see here.

These writers have worked  hard to portray the alleged abusers as the victims, victims of the accusation, victims of the heartless users of the internet, victims of those who would repeat the allegations on twitter. That there is an establishment agenda in place for regulation of the press and internet is now I think beyond doubt, and no-one must ever be allowed to think that any member of the elite and privileged could possibly be an abuser.

It must all be the victim’s fault, it must be the victim who lies, it must be the victim who must be destroyed, because such abuse as they describe it couldn’t possibly happen. Such vilification of the victim is all too common, often leading to depression, suicide or a life hidden away under the Mental Health Act.

We only have to remember the Mail on Sunday article which David Rose and Bob Woffinden put out regarding Steven Messham. A hatchet job if ever there was.

That these allegations are not new appears to be irrelevant, but what I want to do now is ask you to think, away from the bread and circus media barrage that you are currently getting, and think about the work that these useful idiots do to continue the cover-up for the rich and powerful.

I have borrowed the following from an extremely well run forum that is running its own investigation, nearly 1100 pages so far of facts, tit-bits of information and a lot of joining of dots.

Going back to the Tribunal (Bryn Estyn) again, this is an interesting link between Rantzen and the Waterhouse Inquiry.

I was thinking of That’s Life last night and the other people who were on it. Rantzen had 2 young reporters/presenters, Glyn Worsnip and Kieran Prenderville, and an elderly comedian Cyril Fletcher. Prenderville went on to write for television, working on episodes of Boon and Roughnecks and is probably best known for being the creator of Ballykissangel! But in 2000 he wrote a very hard hitting docu-drama called CARE shown on BBC1. CARE won many major awards and was highly thought of, “Prendiville’s treatment of the story was described by the Guardian as ‘a deeply necessary film that never avoids unpalatable truths’”. It is the ‘fictional’ story of a young man in care who is horrifically abused and the subsequent libel trial, which is thrown up after a freelance journalist persuades the young man to repeat certain allegations in a local newspaper…………

I haven’t managed to find a copy of CARE to post, but it must be on You-Tube.
If you google the search term CARE along with Kieran Prenderville the major item that stands out is an article by a writer/journalist named Richard Webster, who appears in Wikipedia listed as a ‘cultural historian’.
http://www.richardwebster.net/print/xcare.htm

This (I think un-published) piece appears to be a total de-constructing nay say of the whole Bryn Estyn affair, rather similar in style to the DM article which David Rose and Bob Woffinden put out regarding Steven Messham. In fact Webster wrote a book on the subject: The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt.

Richard Webster died last year, an obituary appeared in The Guardian………….. look who wrote it. – one Bob Woffinden.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20…bster-obituary

He has also co-written other articles with Webster which appear on Webster’s web-page,
http://www.richardwebster.net/
including a long piece about the ‘Danesford Two and Terry Hoskin’ which sits alongside ‘What the BBC Didn’t Tell Us’, these are both under the ‘False Allegations’ section at the bottom of the page. Also take a look at at the article regarding the child abuse scandals in Portugal, called ‘Casa Pia’. At the end of which he touches on all the British scandals from Kincora to Jersey and back.

David Rose crops up in there a lot as well, particularly in the article named ‘We have not a shred of evidence……….’ which is all about Haute de la Garenne.

So why are these three determined to rubbish and gainsay everything connected to abuse scandals??? Who actually are (or were) they?

I think that there is a lot more info there. Certainly it seems that something made Prenderville decide to write that drama, which he spent 2 ½ years researching? And something else is behind the continuing negative rubbishing that is still going on !

Same people, same method, same message. Move along, nothing to see here.

Now please, start thinking for yourselves, see the BBC and other news outlets for what they are – maintainers of the status quo, where the real truth will not, must not, be told to the public, lest we rise up as the Belgian public did and nearly destroyed the government as the Marc Detroux case ripped their elite and privileged apart.

Remember, those that have been accused by the many victims of child abuse are not special, we do not tremble or bow before them, they do not need to be revered or looked up to. They eat, shit and fart the same as you and I. All we ask is that the law be applied equally to them as it would be applied to others.
We have a right to demand that the Police investigate, the CPS prosecute and they do their jobs properly, without useful idiots in the press and media spending their time destroying what is left of the victims already devastated lives.

Source

Iain Duncan Smith losing his temper with Owen Jones .

Why we’re worried about the new benefit rules [Jane Harris]

by Jane Harris

As MPs publish a review of the government’s plans to introduce Universal Credit, Jane Harris, our Associate Director of Communications, explains Rethink Mental Illness’ concerns about the system.


While there has been much fevered debate over the last couple of years around the roll-out of the Work Capability Assessment and the new Personal Independence Payment, there has been a lot less attention paid to another major change to the benefits system – Universal Credit. Universal Credit will bring together a whole host of existing benefits such as income-based jobseeker's allowance, income-related employment support allowance, housing benefit, working tax credit, child tax credit and income support. The idea is to simplify payments and ensure people are better off in work than unemployed.

In principle, we are all for a simpler benefits systems. Our members have told us for years about how much they struggle with the bewildering array of different benefits, different rates and different application forms. The last thing you need when you're dealing with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or personality disorder is the hassle of navigating your way through all this.

What we are concerned about however, is that these changes are brought in a way that is fair for everyone – including vulnerable groups such as some people who have a severe mental illness. Government needs to act fast to make sure this good idea works out for the people we represent.

The good news is that the Commons Work and Pensions Committee have published a review of the plans and have highlighted a number of concerns, which echo ours. They are:

• Online access only – The government is really keen for people manage their Universal Credit online. That’s fine if you’ve got a computer, internet access and the right skills, but not everyone does. The Committee is worried that the government haven’t presented clear plans for how they will ensure people who can’t make an online claim, won’t lose out. Especially as this will disproportionally affect the most vulnerable. 
• Getting advice and support – The online only system makes it much harder for people to get independent advice over the phone from organisations like Rethink Mental Illness and the Citizens Advice Bureau.
• Monthly payments – Universal Credit will be paid monthly instead of fortnightly or weekly. The Committee is worried that many people will struggle to manage their money monthly and could therefore end up being exploited by loan companies and get into debt.
• Direct payment of housing benefit - at the moment many people get their housing benefit paid directly to a landlord, but under the new system people will be given the money directly as part of their universal credit. This means some people, who aren’t used to managing their own money, might get behind on their rent payments and end up being evicted. The government says they’ll make an exception for ‘vulnerable groups’ but have failed to define who exactly they mean by this.

We’re really pleased that the Work and Pensions Committee has highlighted these problems, which are likely to affect our members and supporters. Now it’s essential that the government listens and makes changes, so that vulnerable people don’t lose out on vital support.

Source

DPAC Survey Exposes “Bullying” Atos Assessments

Press Release From Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC)

DPAC Survey Responses On WCA: Atos And DWP Exposed

(Supported By Black Triangle and Social Welfare Union.)

98.4% said that they would prefer the WCA to be recorded

Almost 70% were not aware that they could ask for a recording. The lack of any mention of recording of the WCA in the Atos literature helped the ‘lack of demand’ issue.

For those that had asked for a recording but were refused one almost half 40% were not given a reason for the refusal of the remainder: nearly a quarter (24.5%) were simply told they were not allowed a recording, 20% were told the machines were broken and the remainder were told Atos staff did not like recordings.

Of those refused a recording 65% were told they must attend their appointment without recording or be classified as a ‘no show’. While 23% were not aware that a recording would not be carried out until they arrived at the assessment centre where they faced the choice of returning home and risking loss of benefits or staying and going through the assessment without recording.

74% said that it was difficult for them to travel to the assessment centre, we heard from those who were sent for assessments away from their closest centre with complicated travel routes

Almost half (47.5%) were not aware that they could ask for a home assessment, of those that did and asked for a home assessment none believed they received a satisfactory response to the refusal to grant a home assessment

64% of those that said their doctors were told not to provide written support said this was because of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

Some respondents said that the DWP had written to their doctors to tell them not to issue ‘fit notes’ or written support, others that doctors resented such directives and would supply these based on their expertise and knowledge of the individual.

The survey drew 733 responses. It asks questions that were not asked in the Harrington review, questions on issues of recording, access, doctors input and the apparent increasing influence of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on doctors’.  As such it represents the first evidence based research report on these issues.

The responses contribute to a growing list of criticisms on the experiences of the WCA, welfare reform/cuts and their impacts on the lives of disabled people. It also adds to the growing list of criticism against Atos the company contracted by the Government to carry out assessments, at the cost of 1.10 million pounds per year. Significant concerns are being raised on the financial cost of appeals against Atos WCA decisions, currently running at 60-80 million per year[1], but it is the human cost of suicides and premature deaths rising from 32 per week to 73[ii] a week of those undergoing this process that represents a larger cost. It is a UK outrage that these assessments continue.

The survey responses show the tricks, barriers and bullying tactics used to prevent audio recordings. How difficult home assessments are and how centres, access and travel are made problematic and the ways that doctors input is being ignored and appears to be increasingly directed by the Department for Work and Pensions. The survey is a collection of the ways people are being driven to crisis point, and worse by a system with no clear public accountability. (See also 76% entitled to support after appeal figures and appeals increase by 40%)

DPAC, Black Triangle, and Social Welfare Union, along with the British Medical Association and a growing number of organisations and MPs condemn the WCA and call for its immediate end. We hope the contents of this report will help those who fail to understand why these calls are being made to begin to understand why this is the only justifiable option.

One person said:

If I filled a benefit claim form in and deliberately lied, misled with my answers and omitted information / events relevant to my claim with the view to gain financially – I would have my ass hauled into court on charges of benefit fraud. The DWP and ATOS are doing exactly those things with the farce they call an assessment and are both gaining financially by, dare I say, producing fraudulent reports when assessing peoples eligibility for benefit. I suggest people pool together, write statements describing their experience with ATOS and the assessment, highlight the discrepancies between what was said / happened in the assessment and what was written into the report .. and when enough statements are gathered, hand them to the top cop in the country and demand they launch an investigation into the activities of both ATOS and the DWP on the grounds of fraudulent behaviour.

From the quotes and responses to our survey the comment is entirely valid.

Download the report in WORD by clicking this link: final wca surveydpac

Download the report in PDF by clicking this link: final-wca-surveydpac-1

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[i][http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19244639

[ii] http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/adhoc_analysis/2012/incap_decd_recips_0712.pdf

When the Establishment declares war on its most vulnerable [reblog]

Ten days ago on the 9th Nov 2012 the online magazine The Firm wrote an article called ‘Schofield, the decoy witchhunt and the black arts of spin’.

In that article The Firm describe how they were sent an email the very same evening that they had written a previous article contrasting the TV and newspapers’ observance of the Waterhouse report’s anonymity order on the names of abusers in North Wales, with the online world’s easy slippage of the legal noose, an email that they regarded as threatening.
The Firm explains:

At 9.51pm on Wednesday, an email popped into my inbox from an individual I had never encountered. No introduction, no pleasantries, no context, and no frame of reference, except the line in the subject box: “Newsnight & the guilty men”. The tone was brusque, abusive and could even be construed as threatening, and it was an attempt to steer me off any further reporting of the online naming of the figure or figures at the heart of the abuse scandal.
And it came from a producer at the BBC.

Why would someone in such a post at the institution which occupies such a central role in the Jimmy Savile story, try to persuade me that abuse survivor Steven Messham’s testimony was “unreliable”, and that he was a “damaged individual”? Newsnight certainly didn’t feel that way, and as we have learned this week, a deluge of formerly concealed corroboration of systematic abuse claims similar to Messham’s has come to light. And last night, a former Clwyd council worker revealed revealed a list of 56 alleged abusers whose identities were protected by the Waterhouse report, 30 of whom were never spoken to by the police. Three, it is claimed, were recognisable names in authority at the time.

The intervention and objective of this figure in the BBC was not isolated. Messham himself, who only took to twitter this week, had complained earlier in the day that a reporter from the Daily Mail had phoned him and was compiling a story that said Messham was telling lies, and that he had not been resident at the infamous North Wales care home at all during the key periods.

A little earlier than that, ex-Newsnight reporter and now Channel 4 correspondent Michael Crick had declared via twitter that he was “more and more sceptical” whether the (then) largely unnamed figure from the Thatcher cabinet was guilty as alleged.

And thirdly, at the same time, the Guardian had run an online news story headlined “Inconsistencies found in child abuse allegations against senior Tory”, which narrated some contradictions in the various accounts of abused children. Two national newspapers have now run stories excluding one senior former Tory from connection to these events, although that intervention doesn’t get anyone any closer to securing justice.

Philip Schofield has now become the subject of much challenge and criticism over his handling of his interview with the Prime Minister, but his sudden vilification carries a ring of familiarity.

People in my trade learned (or ought to have) how what has become known as the “dark arts” are perpetrated, and thanks to The Thick Of It, so have most of the public.

And of course, since then there have been numerous main stream media stories undermining the credibility of Steven Messham, most notably the David Rose hatchet job in the Mail on Sunday.

That master of the dark arts, Alistair Campbell, coined a term for what I experienced yesterday, and narrated it in his memoirs when discussing the “sexing up” of the dodgy dossier which was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Campbell aggressively attacked the notetaking capabilities of Andrew Gilligan and the editorial judgement of the BBC, and as Nick Davies describes it “used it as a decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story”.

“This move finally established the decoy story as the main media line,” Davies continues.
“The original questions about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were shunted into the sidings. Several political reporters wrote at the time that this looked like a diversionary tactic.”
In his diary for that day, Campbell noted: ‘Flank opened on the BBC.’

The exact repetition of the tactic in this instance, and the apparent outrage expressed by MP Rob Wilson, who has spearheaded the Conservative party’s attack on Schofield, mirrors the flanking operation undertaken by Campbell, and is indeed quite successfully diverting the main media line away from the acts of abuse at Bryn Estyn, and onto the manner in which it is being reported.

Nothing to see here, move along. Diversion, an age old tactic, but the public are not buying it this time as can be seen in the comments sections of those msm outlets that still allow uncensored comments, or in the host of internet forums, alternative news media and websites where this and other abuse stories are being discussed and investigated.

The Firm’s challenge to that email and its conclusions:

I challenged the individual who contacted me, a person who is -as far as I am aware- unconnected with Newsnight, and challenged them on why they would seek to divert me, and evidently others too. The response went on to denigrate Newsnight for their “absence of judgement”, and my second attempt at seeking an answer was met with a withering traducement of Angus Stickler, the investigator who had sourced the Newsnight story in the first place.

Then silence.

The BBC are in a tough spot just now, criticised for dropping their exposure of Jimmy Savile last year, and for enabling his activity over all those years. Newsnight’s subsequent story into North Wales has threads that appear to lead to the heart of the Tory Government of the 70s and 80s, a place, coincidentally occupied by that same Mr Savile, who boasted of spending fireside Christmases on ten successive occasions with Mrs Thatcher at Chequers in each year of her office. I cannot speculate as to why someone in the heart of the BBC would want to steer inquiry away from the North Wales story, but as I assured them, it got my nose twitching.

And I smell a rat.

Those who have followed the Hollie Greig story for the past 12 years know all about that rat, indeed we know it well. They will be fully aware of the same tactics used to undermine victims of abuse, destroy the credibility of those who would dare to report such abuse along with their supporters and attempt to portray the abusers as the victims.

On the Hollie Greig abuse alone there have been millions of pounds of taxpayers money spent on such tactics, hundreds of hours of court and police time and lawyers fees, intervention by police and MoD hackers, lawyers lent on to back away, BBC promises to investigate and air followed by sudden withdrawal and denials, anti Hollie Greig websites and facebook pages and of course a well timed hatchet job in the The Herald, all in an attempt by those in a position of power to silence the accusations of abuse made by Hollie Greig and to undermine the unswerving support of her mother Anne.

That such a monumental effort has been made to make the Hollie Greig story go away only serves to give it legs, and legitimises it beyond reproach.

There is a lot at stake here, both for the HDJ campaign and the exposure of child abuse nationally. The government, the State, the establishment have declared war on their own citizens and are determined to regain total control of the media and to silence anyone who would dare to suggest that some of those in positions of power are depraved and evil.

That there are so many willing and able to cover-up for such evil is a sad indictment on our society as a whole, but when the State and its establishment believes that protecting itself is more important than protecting the most vulnerable, our children, it is an unacceptable evil in its own right.

Original Article at Hollie Demands Justice http://holliedemandsjustice.org/content/when-the-establishment-declares-war-on-its-most-vulnerable/

Source

Man with learning difficulties loses JSA and steals to feed himself

Christopher Brooks was given an absolute discharge at South Tyneside Magistrates’ Court, after pleading guilty to stealing £12 worth of meat from Asda in Station Road, Hebburn.

The 50-year-old was also ordered to repay the £12 to the store.

Brooks, of Westmorland Court, Hebburn, had entered the store with an empty carrier bag on Friday, October 26, and took a piece of beef and a piece of lamb on display, then left the store without paying.

He jumped on a Metro train to Jarrow and sold the meat. Brooks was captured on CCTV carrying out the offence, and was later arrested by police.

The court heard that Brooks used the cash from the meat to feed himself, as he had missed a week of Jobseeker’s Allowance due to a mix-up over the date of a meeting about his benefits.

Glenda Beck, prosecuting, said: “He was relying on soup kitchens for food.

“He saw the lump of beef and piece of lamb and put them on the floor near some boxes.

“He then left with them without paying. He knew what he did was wrong.”

David Forrester, defending, told the court: “Christopher is a vulnerable adult with learning difficulties

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/news/crime/thief-has-1-5k-in-unpaid-fines-1-5145321#.UKqNs2SQi7s.twitter

ATOS call back cancer and dementia sufferers

NEARLY 20,000 cancer sufferers have been forced to return for repeated fit-for-work tests carried out by controversial French firm Atos.

The company have a £100million-a-year contract with the UK government to test whether disabled people are capable of working.

The government say the scheme helps weed out cheats, but the Department of Work and Pensions are asking people with incurable, life-threatening conditions to undergo multiple checks in order to keep benefits.

New figures reveal that 18,450 cancer sufferers have had to undergo multiple tests between October 2008 and February this year.

Another 2320 people with multiple sclerosis have been through repeated work capability assessments as well as hundreds of others with Parkinson’s and dementia.

Employment Minister Mark Hoban insists not all the tests involved face-to-face assessments.

But Tom Greatrex, the MP who has campaigned for reform of the fitness to work test, said: “It beggars belief that people suffering from illnesses like cancer and dementia are having to go through this process over and over again.

“If someone with an incurable and progressive condition like Parkinson’s isn’t fit to work after the first test, where is the sense in assessing them again?

“At a time in their lives when sick and disabled people need to be supported by the government, they are actually being hounded in the cruellest way.

“Tory-Liberal ministers need to get a grip on this chaotic and uncaring system.”

Maggie Mackay, an antique restorer before being diagnosed with breast cancer, has had to undergo two tests for benefits.

She was assessed as fit to work in 2010 when she was still recovering from chemotherapy but successfully appealed against the decision.

Maggie, 52, of Glengarnock, Ayrshire, who underwent another assessment last month, said: “I think it is an abomination that people like me have to keep going through this.

“It is despicable that people who have worked all their lives before falling ill are having to fight for their benefits.

“If my doctor thinks I’m not well enough to go back to full-time work, why is the government over-ruling what she says?”

Charities also hit out at the multiple tests.

Elspeth Atkinson, director ofMacmillan Cancer Support, said: “We need the benefits system and the NHS to work more closely to stop repeat assessments of people who are clearly unable to work during their illness.”

And Becky Duff, of the Multiple Sclerosis Society, added:

“The Work Capability Assessment is particularly inappropriate for people with complex and fluctuating long-term conditions like MS. It produces huge numbers of incorrect decisions, and has denied many people vital support.”

 

Kirsty Yanik, awareness manager at Alzheimer Scotland, said: “The change from the former benefit structure to this new system can be particularly confusing for people with dementia. They are likely to struggle with some of the administrative procedures.”

A DWP spokeswoman said: “Individuals with conditions where a return to work is unlikely will only be reassessed after two years and, where possible, this assessment will be paper-based.”

Atos stress it is not up to them to decide who they assess and if people are entitled to receive state benefits.

Daily Record