Yesterday, Paul Litchfield finally released his Year 4 report into Work Capability Assessments.
There are some good recommendations it it.
- He suggests setting minimum times for reassessment after a successful appeal (6 months)
- He concludes that the process needs to be simpler and take less time
- He finds that both those attempting to claim and the public have little faith in the system. He suggests people should be treated with much more dignity and compassion
There are many other recommendations, many of which echo calls campaigners
have been making for some time.
However, do these recommendations actually matter? Professor Malcolm
Harrington, Litchfiled's predecessor, completed 3 previous reviews, but the some
of us from the Spartacus network wondered just how many of his original 25
recommendations had actually been rolled out successfully.
In Litchfield's report he says
"Of Professor Harrington's 49 recommendations, the Department
accepted 35 in
full and 10 more in principle. Of those accepted in full, 29 have
been fully
implemented, 3 have been partially implemented and 3 are in progress.
Of those
accepted in principle, 5 appear to have been fully implemented, 2
partially
implemented and 3 are in progress.
We disagree with his analysis completely. We chose to analyse the first 25
recommendations from the Year 1 Review as we felt that any effects or progress
would have had time to be implemented. Of those 25 recommendations, we found
that nearly 2 thirds had not been implemented successfully or completely.
Independent reviews are supposed to be just that.
It's hard to understand how our findings can be so very different to those of
the Mr Litchfield.
As ever, we need to make our own news, but I
know we can. The Harrington article I posted earlier is already the 4th most
read article online today because of YOUR support, YOUR RT's and shares on
Facebook and because YOU let people know about it.
We can show that we are our own media if we all
pull together.
