I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at a fringe meeting of the WCA Action Group in Manchester last week. It was literally on the fringe of the Conservative Party conference, being right next to the turnstiles and high mesh fence that kept the blue-lanyarded delegates safe from the outside world.
I met many interesting people with a wealth of knowledge of the WCA. I particularly liked the idea that, at the end of a face-to-face assessment, the History section of the report should be printed off and given to the claimant. This is technologically easy and, I reckon, legally sound. It would go a long way towards giving a much more accurate account of a claimant's medical history and their reported day to day function.
Otherwise, what stands out from the main conference?
- It was the Chancellor, not the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who made the grand announcement that job-seekers would have to take part in unpaid work in the future, in return for their JSA.
- A right-of-centre political journalist reported that George Osborne privately thinks that Iain Duncan Smith is "thick" - something publicly denied by George Osborne and laughed off by IDS.
- IDS was relegated to playing second fiddle to Boris Johnson on Tuesday, with the result that Boris stole all the headlines the following day.
- IDS's speech was also about job-seekers, not the long-term sick, and focused on mandatory attendance at Job Centres in return for JSA [yawn].
- He mentioned his late son, Ivan, and sounded appreciative of the help that his family had received from the welfare state as a result of Ivan's profound disabilities.
- He made great play of the perceived unfairness of the allocation of benefits in general, at a macroscopic level.
- He made no mention of Incapacity Benefit or ESA.
- He gave IDS what sounded like a valediction.
- "I want to thank the most determined champion for social justice this Party has ever had: Iain Duncan Smith. Iain understands this isn't about fixing systems, it's about saving lives"
So, all in all, there was nothing about the WCA in any of the main speeches.
What does it all mean? Well, it looks like IDS will be ushered out of the door of the DWP next week, in the reshuffle that was delayed from the summer. I thought the Tories had decided to come out fighting on benefit reform but were switching their line of attack to job-seekers and away from people on IB, ESA and DLA.
Lord Freud has already said that a further announcement on Atos and the WCA will be made "in the autumn". It is now autumn. With the party conferences out of the way and when IDS is put out to grass, will we see the DWP hold its hands up to inventing the bogus rules of thumb, which were a key factor in biasing the WCA against the claimant? Or will they point the finger of blame at Atos?
