Isabel Hardman – The Telegraph
When government makes a mess of a big contract, the Right’s normal response is to make a fuss. Taxpayers’ money is precious, and the state should avoid wasting it. So what if I told you that both this Government and the last have struggled with a contract worth more than an annual £100 million, which has been criticised by auditors and has a costly 17 per cent error rate?
The work capability assessment, carried out by the private firm Atos Healthcare at an annual cost of £112.4 million, needs more scrutiny than it receives. There is a curious blind spot on the Right about this contract, and it is in part down to a desire for the policy – undoubtedly the correct one overall – to succeed. The Coalition continued the tests, which were introduced by Labour in 2008, so as to move claimants from Incapacity Benefit to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), or off benefits and into the workplace.
The steady drip, drip of bad news about the tests – from Wednesday’s court judgment that they disadvantage those with mental health problems to the rising rate of successful appeals – suggests that all is not well. It is no surprise that 40 per cent of the Department for Work and Pensions’s fitness-to-work decisions go to appeal, but what is astonishing is that 42 per cent of those appeals are successful. Their cost is projected to rise from £60 million to £70 million this year.
In October, the National Audit Office identified weaknesses in the Atos contract. In January, the public accounts committee sounded a similar warning, saying the DWP was “getting far too many decisions wrong” and “at considerable cost to the taxpayer”. MPs – including Conservatives – also held a Commons debate after complaints about the process jammed their letterboxes.
So what is going wrong? Atos is subject to extraordinary levels of vitriol, but charities representing sick and disabled people argue that the problem lies as much in the test itself, which was designed by ministers and civil servants. It fails to assess, beyond someone’s ability to move a cardboard box in the test room, whether they are capable of doing a real job. The activities in the test are removed from workplace realities. Can you move that cardboard box every day for a week, after travelling into the office?