Perverting the course of justice: Once a crime, now government policy

Reblogged from Vox Political:

Chequebook justice: Your unelected government wants to ensure that nobody can challenge its policies and decisions – by putting justice within the reach of only the wealthy.

David Cameron and Chris Grayling have been messing with the justice system again. This time, according to The Telegraph, they are planning to make it “tougher” for judicial reviews to be brought to court, to stop the process being “abused” by pressure groups and campaigners.

There’s a lot of Telegraph-speak in that first paragraph, as the Tory-supporting newspaper was working desperately to make governmental perversion of justice acceptable. What this actually means is that Cameron wants to make it impossible for organisations that are capable of mounting legal opposition to unreasonable Conservative/Coalition policies ever to do so.

The only people able to seek judicial reviews of government policy would be individuals who are directly affected – and the government is hoping that these mostly poor people would be unable to afford the cost, thanks to changes in Legal Aid that mean it could not be claimed for welfare or employment cases.

You see how this works? With those changes to Legal Aid and the possibility of wholesale privatisation of the entire court system, where justice was once open to everyone, it will soon be a privilege available only to the wealthiest in the UK.

To Cameron, and his crony Grayling, justice isn’t for you. In fact, it won’t be for anyone. The UK will be about money and power, just as Michael Meacher stated in his recent blog article.

So, for example: The ‘Poundland’ case, which The Guardian reported was to be heard in the Supreme Court yesterday (Monday). The original judicial review was launched in the names of Cait Reilly and Jamieson Wilson, who were both directly affected – but were both unemployed and penniless, and therefore could not afford to take the case to court on their own. Their case was brought with the aid of Public Interest Lawyers – who would most likely be barred from taking part, being considered a pressure group with no direct interest in the matter.

The original case resulted in the government taking the unusual – and highly suspect (in legal terms) – step of passing an emergency retroactive law to legalise its employment schemes, after the tribunal ruled that all of the Coalition’s schemes were acting illegally and opened the government up to a potential £130 million worth of claims for wrongfully-withheld benefits.

PIL has now started a second judicial review – on the retrospective law – claiming it undermines its clients’ right to justice and violates article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Under the new procedures this, too, would be inadmissible.

On the same lines, the judicial review that ruled (in May) that the test used to decide whether people are fit for work actively discriminates against the mentally ill, brought by the Black Triangle Campaign with the charities MIND and Rethink Mental Illness, would also be inadmissible.

So we have examples in which it is clearly in the interests of justice for new laws to be challenged – but which would be blocked outright under Cameron and Grayling’s plan.

According to The Telegraph, “Ministers plan to change the test for applying for a review so that only people with a direct link to policies or decision can challenge it, rather than anyone with a ‘sufficient interest.’

“The concerns echo those of the Prime Minister who previously said the judicial review process was slowing the country’s economic growth as well.”

In fairness, the paper adds: “There are fears that changing the judicial review process could lead to government decisions going unchecked, and charities have also raised concerns about not being able to use the process to challenge decisions and ensure the government is meeting its obligations.”

Meanwhile, Unison has been given leave to launch a judicial review of the introduction of fees for workers seeking employment tribunals.

The BBC reported that people wanting to bring tribunals must now pay a fee for the first time since they were created in the 1960s. It will cost £160 to lodge a claim for matters such as unpaid invoices, with a further charge of £230 if it goes ahead.

More serious claims, such as for unfair dismissal, would cost £250 to lodge, and a further £950 if the case goes ahead.

The plan here is clearly to make it impossible for an unfairly-sacked worker to take a firm to judicial review; how many poorly-paid working class people (and remember, wages have fallen by nine per cent since the credit crunch) have twelve hundred quid knocking around in their back pockets?

“The introduction of punitive fees for taking a claim to an employment tribunal would give the green light to unscrupulous employers to ride roughshod over already basic workers’ rights,” Unison general secretary Dave Prentis told the BBC.

“We believe that these fees are unfair and should be dropped.”

The judicial review will take place in October. Considering Lord Judge’s recent change of heart over privatisation of the courts, it’s a safe bet that by then the government will have ‘persuaded’ any judges hearing the case to support the new charges.

As Mr Meacher wrote: David Cameron’s instincts are “that there is no such thing as the rule of law, and that the only things that ultimately matter are power, fear and money”.

Bedroom tax: the first 100 days

More than three months after the bedroom tax was implemented, one housing association reveals the impacts of the policy

The bedroom tax was introduced on 1 April 2013 and saw housing benefit entitlements cut for social housing residents deemed to be underoccupying their homes.

In preparation for the bedroom tax we took on more staff and reallocated our resources to focus on helping those affected by it. We were as well prepared, if not better, than many other social housing providers. Our staff knew customers would struggle in places and suspected the government’s prediction that it would free up larger properties for families on the waiting list was flawed, but we wanted to do our best to make the idea work.

The first 100 days

So far, out of the 460 households with spare bedrooms affected by the bedroom tax, we have only been able to move just over 40 residents to smaller houses. This includes the 18 months spent preparing for the policy‘s arrival. Nearly a quarter of those affected are disabled and have had expensive adaptations to make the home they are now under-occupying suitable – many more have more minor adaptations. Can it really make sense to move them to a home which would need further adaptations at more cost, and then to remove the adaptations in the home they left behind?

After concerns were raised about the financial impact the bedroom tax would have on tenants, the government topped up the discretionary housing payment fund – a crisis fund controlled by local councils for residents struggling with their housing costs. Yet we found that only 9% of those affected by the bedroom tax have been successful in applying for discretionary housing payments – and these payments are only a stop-gap solution. Some residents can not even reapply for financial help if they cannot prove they are making savings or working more hours.

The cash-strapped tenants who agree to move, who feel they have no alternative but to downsize when a smaller property becomes available, know the choice of a new home will be limited. They face hauling young children out of schools and away from their communities. That’s assuming we can somehow find a supply of two-bedroom homes where there aren’t any.

Our housing register is run by Central Bedfordshire council and we are part of the county-wide choice-based lettings partnership which has seen a huge rise in bids on two-bedroom homes – but only 26 of our two-bedroom homes became available during April and May. Bids on three-bedroom homes have fallen to the extent that we have three-bed homes we are now struggling to fill.

This is not unique to Bedfordshire. We know from our sister association South Northants Homes that tenants cannot downsize there because the properties aren’t available. It has 195 people affected by the bedroom tax, 172 of those needed a one-bedroom home, but only 10 are likely to become available.

Families who cannot get a home through social landlords are forced into the more expensive and less secure private rented sector. We found the cost of renting privately in the areas we provide housing to be substantially higher for tenants and taxpayers alike. In the social housing sector, the average amount of housing benefit paid to a claimant is £98.94 a week. If the claimant moves into the private rented sector, the average there is £126.92, but private rents are higher than this and private tenants are left with an average rent shortfall of £22.66 a week.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is about real people, with real fears about growing debt and upheaval – and it is also about us as a business. Rent arrears built up by residents affected by the bedroom tax have risen by £7,777 in 12 weeks, an increase of 9%, and the overall number of affected tenants who have fallen behind on their rent has risen from 187 to 279 – a whopping 49%. Arrears have risen steadily since April and we expect this to continue.

We were concerned about the bedroom tax since it was first announced and in the first 100 days our fears were confirmed. The story our figures show doesn’t look like it will have a happy ending for us, for our tenants, or even for the government.

Debbie Stuart is assistant director of housing and support at Aragon Housing Association. 
Read the full report on the first 100 days of the bedroom tax here

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the housing network for more ideas on how to find the funding to build new homes.:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/housing-network/2013/jul/29/bedroom-tax-first-100-days

Bedroom Tax: "The main cost is the effect this move has had on my wife"

Source:

An Open Letter To Andrew Stephenson, MP for Pendle

Dear Mr. Stephenson,

As you are very much aware, I have been affected by the Bedroom Tax since April, despite the Coalition claims that disabled people like myself would be unaffected.  You are also very much aware of how much I despise this ridiculous and unfair tax on those least well off in society or, remembering that two thirds of those affected include a disabled member of the family, those who are already struggling with mental or physical difficulties.

This past weekend, thanks to the very kind assistance (aided by a small amount of cajoling from myself) of my landlord, Accent Foundation, my wife and I have moved into a one bedroom flat and out of the reach of the Bedroom Tax.  Naturally, I would think that you would call this a ‘success’, right?

You could not be further from the truth.

Despite the fact that both the Coalition government of which you are a member and Pendle Borough Council being the ones that forced my wife and I into this move, we received no assistance from either during this move.  Nothing.

Moving is never cost free.  It doesn’t matter if you get help from family and friends (which we thankfully did and I am extremely grateful to them), there are still things that need to be paid.

Getting a plumber to connect up the gas cooker, getting new curtain rails and hooks, new curtains for different sized windows, buying cleaning products and the time it takes to clean in both properties.  The stress and, for me, agony of trying to do little things to help with this.  The costs of moving gas and electricity and water (which, whilst transferred quite easily is now costing me more than before), including paying off a small debt on the gas meter that came from the previous tenants.  The damage to items during the move which will need to be replaced in the future.  The cost of petrol to go to and fro between the properties – thank goodness that they are reasonably close together.  Removal costs for the heavy items, which can be ludicrously expensive.

Covering these costs could have very easily pushed me into the arms of a doorstep loans company which would have seen me in a huge amount of debt.  As it is I got lucky and was able to get a loan from a Credit Union.  Whilst that is infinitely better than a company like Wonga, I am still now in debt because of this move.

When you add up the increased costs and the loan, I begin to wonder whether I would have been better to stay where we were.

But the main cost, the one that’s becoming increasingly hard to bear, is the effect this move has had on my wife.  Have you any idea how hard it is to sit and watch your wife sink further and further into depression and anxiety because of a move that should never have been forced onto us and, despite my anger towards this government, a move that I ultimately blame myself for?

I wonder how you would feel if it was your wife that has been in tears on many of the nights we’ve spent here, or that you watch helplessly as she struggles herself to deal with her moods.

The human cost of this bedroom tax – and don’t ever try to tell me that it is anything other than a tax – is incalculable.  These are people, like myself, who should be concentrating on their health, not having to fight an ill thought and cruel out policy like this.  Sadly, I can assure you that my wife and I are not the only ones struggling with the aftermath of a bedroom tax move, and this will only rise further as evictions rise and arrears increase.

I may be classed as being out of the bedroom tax but I assure you, we’re still feeling the effects of it and will do for a very long time, and I will continue to campaign as much as I can to not only raise awareness of this but to fight until you, or the government that follows you, does the right thing and scraps the Bedroom Tax.

Wayne Blackburn.

Wage Repression explained

Reblogged from AAV:

The objective of this series is to try to explain seemingly complex
socio-economic theories and concepts in everyday language and show how these ideas are misused, abused and ignored by governments and powerful international organisations.

  

  Number 11:        What is..... wage repression?

Wage repression is a fairly self-explanatory term meaning the deliberate undermining of wages by employers. Wage repression is most often used by private sector employers in order to cut their payroll expenditure, but taken as a whole, the state is actually the largest employer, and is just as capable of repressing wages as the private sector.

The idea that economic efficiency can be increased through the repression of wages is an article of faith for ideological neoliberals. Witness the effects of the current Tory austerity programme on wages, or think back to the 1980s when the collective bargaining rights of millions of workers were attacked by Margerat Thatcher's government.

I say that wage repression is an article of neoliberal faith because (much like a lot of orthodox neoliberal theory) there is actually little actual evidence that wage repression is good for the national economy, and in fact, a lot of evidence that it is actually harmful.

The reason that the subject of wage repression is important now, is that the UK is currently enduring the longest period of wage repression in over a century, in which the average wage has fallen in real terms every single month for three consecutive years (every month since the Tory led government came to power).

History

The idea that wage repression is actually bad for the economy is hardly a new one. Quakers and other non-conformist religious groups realised early in the industrial revolution that by paying reasonable wages, and providing additional benefits such as education and healthcare, they themselves benefited from the massively increased productivity of a loyal, healthy and educated workforce (as compared to the bitterly exploited, poor, unhealthy, malnourished and ill-educated workforces of the less ethically minded of the early industrial pioneers). Probably the most famous rejection of wage repression was the high pay / low price policy of the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford (hardly a "leftie" by any stretch of the imagination), who paid high wages and made low profit margins on his vehicles, so that his employees would return their wages back to his business through the purchase of the vehicles they themselves had been constructing.

To put the historic objection to wage repression into reasonably simple economic terms: Wage repression is bad because it reduces the disposable income of workeres - When workers have less money to spend, this results in a fall in consumer spending - When consumer spending falls, aggregate demand falls - When aggregate demand falls the economy falls into low-growth, recession or depression.

I don't think it takes a lot of brains to realise that the less money the public have in their pockets, the less they are going to spend, and that this fall in spending will have a negative knock-on effect on the wider economy.

Private sector wage repression

Ever since the global financial sector meltdown of 2007-08 the private sector have gleefully used "the crisis" to justify wage repression. Millions of workers have suffered pay cuts or below inflation wage rises year, after year, after year. Meanwhile the FTSE 100 has risen to back to pre-crisis levels, British corporations are hoarding £billion in assets and executive pay is skyrocketing.

Over the last three years private sector workers have experience real terms wage cuts every single month, as the rate of inflation massively outstrips their rate of pay increase. The average British worker has lost 9% of their salary to inflation. Meanwhile the corporate executives have got fat engorging themselves on ludicrous pay hikes and bonuses. The average salary of FTSE100 directors rose a whopping 49% in 2011 and another 27% in 2012, whilst their workers barely scraped a below inflation 1% average pay rise.

Wage repression and the welfare state

the welfare state was originally designed in order to support those that couldn't work (the elderly, the disabled, the sick, mothers with newborns) and those that found themselves temporarily unemployed.

Since the beginning of the neoliberal era in 1979, the role of the welfare state has become ever more distorted, as it has been used to facilitate private sector wage repression.

In the 1980s the Conservative government completely abandoned the idea of maintaining near-full employment and enacted policies which resulted in millions of people suffering long term unemployment. The benefits system was used to provide these millions with a subsistence income, just enough to keep them alive and available for work. The creation of mass unemployment was a deliberate strategy to aid wage repression by creating a vast standing army of unemployed people, willing to work for low wages in order to undermine workers wages. The Tory attacks on trade union rights went hand-in-hand with their policy of creating an artificial labour surplus via mass unemployment.

When New Labour came to power in 1997 they did very little to reverse the Tory wage repression policies; unemployment declined gradually, but nothing like the full employment era of the 1950s and 60s was achieved. New Labour also kept in place all of the oppressive anti-trade union laws enacted by their Tory predecessors. In fact, in some ways they allowed things to get much worse, through their refusal to legislate to prevent the rise in exploitative employment practices like Zero Hours Contracts.

What New Labour did instead was to use the benefits system to boost low wages, essentially facilitating the payment of poverty wages by exploitative employers by topping up earnings with benefits like Tax Credits and Housing Benefits.

When the typical reactionary anti-benefits ranter sees these payments, they don't even think about the role of wage repression in the situation, they simply label the victims of this exploitation as scroungers without the slightest thought for who the beneficiaries actually are. The real scroungers in this situation are obviously the private companies who increase their profit margins by paying poverty wages, and then expect the taxpayer to make up the shortfall so that their workers actually have enough money to survive.

To me, this stuff hardly seems difficult to understand, however it does seem to be far beyond the cognitive skills of most Tory voting anti-welfare reactionaries to grasp that the real "scroungers" are not the underpaid workers that actually receive these benefits, but the exploitative employers that benefit from cheap labour whilst the taxpayer makes up the shortfall.

Now that the Conservatives are back in power, they are determined to undo the New Labour welfare reforms designed to mitigate the worst effects of wage repression. They have launched round after round of benefits cuts, always relying on the combination of "scrounger narratives" and the absurd "making work pay" fallacy to create pseudo-justifications for their attacks on in-work benefits.

When benefits like Tax Credits are used to mitigate the effects of private sector wage repression, cutting these benefits can be seen as a deliberate attempt to increase the effects of wage repression.

Public sector wage repression



Wage repression is not exclusive to the private sector, it is also used by the state on workers that are directly employed by the state. In 2013 the Tory led Government (with the backing of the ever servile Liberal Democrats) imposed a below inflation 1% pay cap on public sector workers (except for MPs themselves of course, they'll collect a vast 15% pay rise). To put this into perspective, 75% of local government workers earn less than £21,000 a year. Capping their wage rises at 1% whilst simultaneously giving an average £100,000 a year tax break to Britain's 13,000 income millionaires is frankly obscene.

Another way in which the Tory led government are deliberately increasing levels of wage repression is through below inflation rises in the National Minimum Wage. This means that the incomes of millions of the lowest paid workers in Britain are suffering real terms income cuts.

Less repressive economies

It is obviously very difficult to make analyses between different countries given that there are so many factors other than levels of wage repression that can influence economic growth, however I think it is worth noting that the five countries with the highest National Minimum Wages have all significantly outperformed the UK economy since the effects of the global financial sector meltdown hit in 2007-08.

Conclusion

It would take willful ignorance to ignore the fact that the longest period of wage repression in a Century has coincided with the weakest period of economic performance in a Century.

This period of wage repression and economic contraction has also coincided with a period of unprecedented corporate largesse, with soaring executive pay, corporate asset hoarding and lavish cuts in Corporation Tax by the Tory government.

The Tory government haven't just lavished wage repressing corporations with huge tax-cuts for the corporations and their highest earners alike, they have joined in with the wage repression too by imposing real terms cuts on public sector workers (apart from themselves of course) and on on-work benefits, and on the salaries of those unlucky enough to be earning just the National Minimum Wage in return for their labour.

The stagnating UK economy is a clear illustration of the kind of economic destruction that results from building an economy on a foundation of ruthless self-interest. When an economy is administered by a government that can't see the glaring flaws in their beloved neoliberal pseudo-economic theories, the ruling class will give absolute priority to serving the financial interests of a tiny economic minority and repressing the incomes of everyone else to pay for it. When this crony capitalist "serve the rich, smash the poor" mentality is elevated above all other considerations (such as long-term economic stability, stimulation of economic demand, combating poverty, increasing national productivity, cutting the trade deficit or improving general public welfare) the economic consequences can be dire. But worse than that, the social consequences of driving the majority into greater poverty in order to enrich a tiny minority are even worse, given the fact that most negative social indicators arise from inequality.

Read more articles in the "What is...." series

Digital By Default Abandoned In Universal Credit Pathfinder Fiasco

Far from being ‘digital by default’ the latest information on the new Universal Credit benefit system suggests that “most interactions will be face to face, by telephone or by post.”

The DWP have released a new document outlining the Claimant Journey (PDF) for those claiming Universal Credit in the pathfinder areas – the handful of Jobcentres scheduled to trial the new benefit.  The Claimant Journey suggests that except for the initial application form, which will be filled in online, Universal Credit will be a telephone based benefit.

After filling in the online form, which will have to be done in one session and won’t work with certain browsers, claimants will then be required to wait for a phone call and a text from the DWP.  It doesn’t seem to have even occurred to Iain Duncan Smith that many claimants don’t have mobile phones.

Those who the DWP manages to make contact with will then be invited in for an interview at which they will be required to provide details of identification, and other documents as evidence of their circumstances.  At this interview they will be forced to sign a Claimant Commitment, which will explain the ‘conditionality’ which will be imposed on them whilst they are in receipt of the benefit.  This ‘conditionality’ will mean enforced 35 hour a week job search, no matter where a claimant lives or how many jobs are available locally.

Claimants will then have to wait for the DWP to write to them before knowing for sure whether a claim has been successful.

It is the process on reporting changes in circumstances which reveal just how far Universal Credit has moved from the ‘digital by default’ model promised by ministers.  It appears that changes in circumstances will be expected to be reported by telephone in most cases.  The documents also warns that those in work, whose employers are not using the new Real Time Information system to report wage and tax details , will have to report income details to the DWP on a monthly basis.  The same will apply to anyone who derives some income from self-employment.  There is no information provided so far on how exactly claimants are supposed to do this, but it looks likely this will also be a telephone system.

Anyone who has ever tried to telephone the DWP only to spend an hour on hold if you are lucky enough to get through will know what a disaster this is going to be.  And just to make it worse, the DWP are using an 0845 number which could cost up to 40p a minute to call from mobile phones.

So claimants will need a computer with internet access to make the initial claim, a mobile phone to accept texts from the DWP and a landline to ensure that they aren’t paying astronomical costs to report earnings, or lack of them, every month.

How the DWP will know that they are actually speaking to the claimant is not explained.  It seems that sinister early plans for voice prints and other shadowy identification procedures have been abandoned.  Which means you’ll be able to ring up and get someone’s benefits stopped just for the shits and giggles.
In reality this is no joke.  It is exactly the kind of shit that vindictive or abusive ex-partners are likely to pull.  And this is just one of a thousand things that the DWP haven’t thought of as they charge ahead with bungled and unfit for purpose welfare reforms.

The Void

Then and Now

Internet Porn Censor To Also Block Conspiracy Theories

'The totalitarian tip-toe is tap dancing to tyranny with the proposed Internet censorship bill in the United Kingdom. In the name of keeping children safe from porn, the UK law will impose Internet filters on far more than just porn.

According to Wired: As well as pornography, users may automatically be opted in to blocks on "violent material", "extremist related content", "anorexia and eating disorder websites" and "suicide related websites", "alcohol" and "smoking". But the list doesn't stop there. It even extends to blocking "web forums" and "esoteric material", whatever that is. "Web blocking circumvention tools" is also included, of course.'

Read more: UK Internet Porn Censor To Also Block Conspiracy Theories

ESA-WRAG: Get Better... Or Else?

Reblogged from Where's the Benefit?:

Disabled people have precious few illusions left about how the DWP views us, but a new pilot programme is going to take that relationship into even more disturbing territory. Starting in November, 3000 disabled people in the Work Related Activity Group of Employment and Support Allowance will be forced, under threat of sanction, to attend medical interviews "to address barriers to work", or as DWP minister Mark Hoban put it in the press release "to address health problems". This is at best ethically dubious, forcing someone into a medical process without their consent and which is not with their own specialists, nor even necessarily with someone competent with their specific disability. The only other example of a compelled medical relationship* is for people sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and even they are at least guaranteed that the medical staff involved are mental health professionals and/or their own doctors, while the DWP merely state the meetings will be with "doctors, occupational health nurses and therapists".

Many of us who have dealt with corporate Occupational Health professionals will have encountered the situation where the opinion of the OH professional is at odds with that of our own specialists - in my case the OH professional actively tried to undermine a report by my own consultant and I had to exhaust the company grievance procedure before my then employers would back down and accept the opinion of the consultant who was actually treating me. Yet someone facing workplace OH processes does at least have resort to grievance procedures and the threat of an Employment Tribunal, with the right to withhold consent for the referral, or to withhold consent for a report they disagree with to be forwarded to their managers. Not stated in the DWP press release is whether the medical staff used will be feeding reports back to DWP, what data protection will be in place around that, and whether the disabled person will have the same medical protection in respect of having the right to view and potentially deny consent for release of the report as is currently the case for a workplace OH assessment.

Worryingly, the DWP press release leaves unstated what will happen if the appointment results in the patient being told to undertake treatment they disagree with, or which is even at odds with the appropriate treatment for their disability, worries that are doubled by the current hair-triggered sanction regime which DWP targets at disabled people. Many disabled people have related experiences with Atos-conducted WCAs in which the Atos 'Health Care Professionals' have proven to be utterly clueless on the specifics of the disability they are meant to be assessing, assuming they have even heard of it in the first place, and similar staff are now to be charged with "address(ing) barriers to work". There are a host of disabilities in which standard treatments for apparently similar disabilities may be contra-indicated, yet actively advocated by medical staff who don't specialise in that specific disability. If a patient, many of whom are experts in their own disability, finds a DWP OH professional pushing them towards a treatment they know their own consultants would not advocate, then what potential is there for them to say 'no' without triggering sanctions? Equally worryingly, the confrontational nature of DWP's relationship with disabled people (and claimants in general) may mean that the patient is too intimidated by the potential threat of sanctions to even think of objecting, which effectively removes any potential for the medically required 'informed consent'.

Dragging this process into even murkier ethical waters, the project is one of three trials, the others being additional support from JCP and additional support from a Work Programme provider, which are being conducted in order to determine which is most effective at getting disabled people back into work. However, a trial involving a medical process is arguably, if not by definition, a clinical trial and subject to additional ethical requirements, including further levels of informed consent, shared decision making, right to privacy, and a right to withdraw, all aspects that are likely to be extremely problematical in the process DWP appear to be proposing. Potentially any medical staff conducting these trials without ensuring these rights are in place could risk facing charges of serious professional misconduct.

This process further embeds into benefits practise and regulation DWP's belief that any disability can be recovered from if the patient really wants to ('they get better', Esther McVey, Minister for Disabled People), a consequence of the ideological indoctrination of DWP with the patient-blaming version of the 'BioPsychoSocial Model of Disability' created by American insurer Unum Provident - they of the infamous 'disability denial mills'. The problem for disabled people is that this model fails utterly to reflect the reality of disability, where many people are too disabled to work, are not sufficiently disabled to qualify for the ESA Support Group, yet have stable disabilities with little likelihood of getting either better enough to move into the workplace, or deteriorating to the point they move into the Support Group. This leaves only the ESA WRAG open to them, but WRAG assumes a person will 'get better' and pressures them to do so, pressure that will now be further increased by this new experimental regime.

A further concern is where the DWP expects to find staff for this new pseudo-medical aspect of ESA. Atos have been struggling to cope with the numbers requiring Work Capability Assessments, to the point that they have had their monopoly withdrawn and been ordered to retrain all of their staff. New competitors for WCA work are going to be appointed next year and will each require their own customer-facing medical professionals, together with other medical professionals to deliver training. At the same time Atos and Capita are creating new organisations to deliver PIP assessments, all requiring their own medical staffs, and there is little reason to doubt that the PIP assessment regime will both insist on more people being assessed and on their being reassessed on a much more frequent basis, needing a large increase in the number of medical staff required to deliver PIP assessments in comparison to DLA. And now this ESA 'initiative' is going to require yet more medical staff.  Where are they going to come from? There is a fixed pool of occupational health and rehabilitation oriented medical staff such as physiotherapists and OTs and any of us who have dealt with them on an ongoing basis will probably have encountered long waiting lists and rehab programmes that really aren't as comprehensive as even the staff would like. Trying to draw more and more staff into DWP pseudo-medical programmes is either going to put the existing pool of trained staff under ever increasing pressure, or see DWP relying on staff without appropriate training, or with inappropriate attitudes.

However this plays out, disabled people have good reason to be worried.

*Even in a workplace Occupational Health referral the assessment can only be done with the consent of the employee, and they must then consent to the release of the report to their employer. Based on my own experience I would advise that consent should only ever be given after viewing the report, a legal right, as even an apparently supportive assessment may turn out to be followed by an openly critical report.

ATOS and the DWP – A Performance With Smoke and Mirrors

Reblogged from downwithallthat::


Just a Few Bad Apples Reports

The government has been forced by public opinion, alongside a veritable tipping point of overturned decisions, to turn a critical eye on their WCA administrator, Atos. They’ve announced that Atos must produce a ‘performance improvement plan’ since too many of their HCP’s reports are below desired standard. Not, they quickly emphasise, that they are ‘wrong’, simply that they are not putting forward their case clearly enough. The ‘reasoning‘ underpinning a portion of ‘recommendations’ lacks ‘detail’, it seems. No mention of outright misrepresentation, or glaring errors, just the ‘quality’ of report-writing that is not robust enough to underpin the concluding recommendation (upon which DWP officers make their decisions).

Since all emphasis is on substandard ‘report writing’, with no suggestion that decisions derived from them were incorrectly made, I can only interpret this move as an attempt to make those reports ‘foolproof’ against tribunal scrutiny rather than to have them reflect more honestly the applicant’s authentic circumstances with regard to their impairments.

Progress?

Many among the disabled activists and those campaigning on their behalf see this news as a positive development. And it certainly is ‘something’, rather than ‘nothing’. As others have pointed out it is pathetically little, and is nothing like the wholesale denouncement that most would wish for. Sadly, even this last perception is wide of base when it comes to the WCA, and its construction and delivery.

In this situation the position that Atos hold in the system of administration of welfare to the sick and disabled is akin more to ‘useful corporate idiot’ and proof of this is available for anyone to see in the government’s own ESA Regulations.

The Convenient Shield of Atos

Atos is the government’s shield in the symbiotic relationship between them and the DWP. From this relationship Atos draws status, legitimacy and above all massive profits. In this way it is similar to the companies who administer the Work Programme, which itself has been proven to do little more than line private pockets with massive amounts of public money (its actual results assessed as “worse than doing nothing”).

Sadly Atos’ activity, by contrast, definitely does more than nothing. It helps to cast people, whose only offence is to be ill, off health related benefits and either into destitution, or to join the competitive arena of seeking work against the able-bodied and healthy. The latter will, after a year, proceed onto the afore-mentioned, and certified useless, Work Programme, where they are likely to be ‘parked’ in favour of those it is more easy to find work for.

Atos Just Make the I.T., That’s All

What the government get in return from Atos, which is a ‘black box’ in itself, since scrutiny is inhibited by ‘commercial confidentiality’, is a defensive buffer against criticism of their policies. Atos are, in the final analysis, only the administrators of the government’s instrument. The government, through their ESA Regulations, say “This is how you assess people”, “These are the criteria to be used”. The computer driven LIMA system is simply the interface through which the government’s set criteria is ‘operationalised’, made digital. The WCA, as delivered, is an IT construct that is merely the government’s word made technological flesh, the digitalised manifestation of DWP-designed instructions. Because: Atos is an IT company. That’s what they do. They apply their undoubted expertise and experience to produce computerised IT ‘solutions’ to meet real world criteria. They don’t invent the criteria themselves, its provided to them, in this case by the UK government’s DWP.

The DWP Created the WCA

So what’s happening now? Its taken deaths, suicides in increasing numbers, at least two solid years of intensified activity by mainly sick people, who are derided as ‘extremists’ for their efforts, to arrive at this point. This point at which the evidence is so damning, so incriminating, that the facade of legitimacy of the WCA can no longer stand. The outrage that Atos draws from a sizeable portion of the public has become publically visible. But the shield which is Atos, which protects the government, which deflects from government criticism of their instrument, their descriptors, their model of sickness/disability, their deliberately designed construction of what they  will acknowledge as a sick or disabled person in need of help, still stands.

The Slickness of the Hand Deceives the Eye

Direct all your ire at Atos, they say, have said, these past years. It is the administration which is flawed, not the foundation, they claim. But that is not the case. In truth Atos are simply IT specialists who have accurately interpreted their government bosses’ instructions and are now ‘taking one for the team’. And its not a particularly harsh ‘one’ at that; some reports are not up to scratch, its a ‘quality control’ issue, bring in more ‘experts’, retrain the assessors. What a wonderful misdirection, a stage magician’s sleight of hand using smoke and mirrors. Atos is as insubstantial in the WCA process as smoke. The cards are, and have always been, the government’s own, designed, printed and laminated by them in the dark, shadowy recesses offstage. Their construction of the WCA (with the help of dispreputable insurance company, UNUM) will never be seen as long as a company like Atos is available to take the flak. And if Atos are ‘phased out’, as it seems is being prepared, the new Atos will then be the expediter of the government’s hidden programme. A programme that has a compound objective:

• To choke off the outflow of public money to the sick and disabled, and, as a direct consequence, deter people from perceiving themselves as ill, worthy of support, and therefore inhibiting their take-up of entitled benefits. But possibly incentivising them to take up private insurance instead. (See Unum below)

• To pull away the safety net of social security, without disturbing the inflow into government coffers of National Insurance contributions. (Another magician’s trick, coincidentally UNUM’s choice of visual metaphor for their ‘Backup Plan‘ tv ads -’Whip away the tablecloth, but leave the crockery undisturbed’)

• To change the very definition of sickness/disability itself, limiting qualification for benefits to only the most, and I mean most, seriously impaired – the paraplegic, those with only six months to live (I struggle to find any other categories deemed worthy, at this point).

And meanwhile, even more public money is directed into corporate coffers, through the commissioning of ‘consultants’ Price-Waterhouse-Coopers, brought in to ‘provide independent advice’ on this purported ‘quality-assurance’ issue.

Fortifying the Bad Decisions

Does anyone really think this government agenda, this pogrom programme is going to be affected in any way by cleaning up a few reports, improving grammatical and ‘reasoning’ skills? Its more akin in actuality to a further sharpening of the blade that is already being used to cull the sick. This is what Grayling meant when he resolved to address the problem of so many overturned decisions at tribunal. Its not about getting the decisions right at assessment stage, as any reasonable person would conclude. Its about making the bad decisions stick.

Atos are the necessary blind that disguises government intent. The sad thing is that all that is required is to draw back that blind and the intent is there for all to see, in the government’s own ESA Regulations. “No need for bending, kneeling in the modern workplace”. I’ll leave you to contemplate that absolute gem of contorted, deluded thinking by your government, and consider whether you think it meets the rigours of your own experienced reality.

Atos: “Leave Your Clinical Skills, (and Your Principles) at the Door”

Reblogged from downwithallthat:

Deputy Medical Director of Sally’s Atos Centre:

 “You’d better throw your principles out the window otherwise you won’t be able to work here.”

 My previous post outlined my conclusion that Atos acts as a ‘shield’ for the government, and that by having them as a ‘middle man’ between claimants and the DWP facilitates the deflection of criticism that should rightly be aimed at warped government policies. In this recording for LBC Radio Sally, a former Atos employee, describes her experience with that ‘horrendous organisation’, which she alleges cares as little for its employees as it does the vulnerable people pushed through its WCA process.

Clinical skills not required

This timely appearance of a radio interview with ex-Atos nurse ‘Sally’ goes a long way towards validating my assertion. Sally is yet another ‘whistleblower’ emerging from this firm, and her testimony is even more damning of the bad practice that is rife within, indeed is deliberately built into, their process. It is one she describes as being factory-like, with

“…no regard for your clinical skills…and most of the people who go there haven’t got any because they’ve been out of practice for so long.”

For example most GPs occupied in an Atos role, she asserts, are “…retired or semi-retired, nearing their time…”. Considering the high remuneration for doctors taking up these positions its not unreasonable to suppose that many facing retirement might see it as somewhat of a ‘pension booster’.

 Aside from GPs she criticises the substandard quality of many of the (highly paid) doctors who tend in one way or another to be among the less competent, or less experienced, of medical professionals. This, she says, is because the majority (estimated by her as between 90-95%) are foreign nationals unable to secure NHS employment, or who have failed exams that might qualify them to work legitimately in our healthcare system.

Fiddling the data

Sally also confirms previous allegations about how ratios are set, the ‘targets’ that pre-determine how many claimants should go into each group, so that considerable file ‘juggling’ must be done to make sure those targets are kept to. That revelation met with a gasp of shock by the interviewer, she goes on to say “If you didn’t get those figures right, within your file, then there was repercussions on you…”, and likely ‘disciplinary’ action taken. Its glaringly obvious to anyone that if you’re working to targets you’re not authentically assessing the patient, you’re focusing instead on how people’s data can be manipulated to fit the rigid categories set for you. If you’re led by that then you can’t possibly be led by the evidence in front of you, the claimant’s unique health circumstances.

 The part most relevant to my post, however, is when she questions why the DWP does not employ the doctors and nurses directly, a common sense idea, which, considering the huge profits creamed off by Atos, would be more economically sound.

I think the answer to that is now plainly clear.

It is clear too, that those medical professionals employed by Atos are not there for utilisation of their medical skills, but merely to lend an aura of respectability to a process that has no medical legitimacy, nor even medical relevance, whatsoever.

Spirit Of The Workhouse Alive And Well In Tory Britain

As the Government pushes through increasingly savage cuts to social security, it has been ideology along with cost cutting that been at the heart of welfare reform.  And that ideology is based on the very same Victorian principles which underpinned the brutal and hated system of workhouses for the destitute.

In the early 1800s unemployment soared as 400,000 demobbed soldiers returned home from the Napoleonic Wars.  This led to increased spending on the patchy system of welfare made up of workhouses and ‘outdoor relief’ – goods or money distributed to the poor – which had existed funded by local taxation since the late 1500s.  Spending on welfare was out of control, and tough new measures were required.

In 1834 Parliament introduced the Poor Law Amendment Act which along with abolishing outdoor relief  created a new, vicious regime in the workhouse.  A belief had emerged that a feckless underclass were responsible for the rise in spending on poor relief.  Unemployment was seen as being the fault of unemployed people, the undeserving poor, and new laws were required to force them to work.

It is easy to see why this became a popular idea amongst the ruling classes.  Any attempt at creating a low wage economy must first start with ensuring that life without wages is as horrific as possible.

Therefore the changes to the Poor Laws were based on the principal of ‘less eligibility’ which meant that somebody who was poor and out of work:  “on the whole shall not be made really or apparently as eligible as the independent labourer of the lowest class.”

This meant that life in the workhouse had to be worse, or more uncomfortable, than the life of the lowest paid labourer.  Workhouses were intended as a deterrent to being poor, or pauperised as it was known, through unemployment.  The new regime was as much a form of social control as an attempt at relieving poverty.

When Iain Duncan Smith insists that no-one on benefits should receive more than someone in work – despite the fact that no-one does – he is echoing the principle of ‘less eligibility’.  Instilling social control and and keeping wages low is every bit as important to his welfare reforms as the stated aim of bringing down the benefit bill.

The problem for the workhouses was that wages were so low that the lowest paid labourers faced desperate poverty.  This problem persists today, with many of the poorest working families dependent on in-work benefits to survive.  The challenge for the Victorian workhouse, and Iain Duncan Smith today, is how to create a regime so oppresive that it is worse than a life of minimum wage work and poverty.

One way to fix this side of the  ‘less eligibility’ problem is to drive benefits down to near starvation levels.  Some people are now left with a just a few pounds a week after the bedroom tax, council tax reform and other cuts to benefits.  Others have had benefits sanctioned, leaving them with nothing at all.  A horrifying social experiment in just how poor can you get away with making some of the population, is well underway.

People in the workhouse could hardly be called well fed, but they were usually provided with three meals a day – more than many struggling families on benefits can afford today.  Workhouses often had healthcare and educational facilities which were not available to the poor outside. Whilst conditions varied, and in some areas workhouse inmates were subject to the most appalling conditions, there was an attempt to control nutritional standards at a national level.  Other means were created to ensure that life in the workhouse was ‘less eligible’ than a life of poverty wages outside.

Reluctant to use starvation as a weapon of social control, the Victorians turned to discipline, forced labour and shame to make the workhouse regime as unbearable as possible.  Inmates had to carry out ‘irksome’ work, such as stone breaking, or bone crushing.  Alcoholic spirits and tobacco were banned and food was kept as plain and unappetising  as possible.  Inmates were forced to wear a uniform and keep to a strict time-table of work.  Usually they were not permitted to leave without permission and workhouses were built to resemble prisons; austere, uncomfortable and imposing.

By far the most severe element was the break up of families.  Men who found themselves destitute and condemned to the workhouse were judged to have relinquished their responsibility for looking after their family and were separated from them.  As their wives and children were essentially seen as property which the men had to forsake, they were punished with this separation almost by default.  This casual collective punishment of families is not unlike the current impoverishment of children when benefits are stopped or sanctioned due to the Jobcentre invented crimes of their parents.  Just like today, in Victorian times when it came to punishing parents for being ‘workless’ or promiscuous, almost no-one thought of the children.

Children in the workhouse were separated from their mothers from the age of 7 and sometimes even deported to the colonies, often without the consent of their parents.  It was the horror of being separated from loved ones, and the shame that this brought, that fully enshrined the principle of ‘less eligibility’ and the popular terror of the workhouse.

Whilst this kind of draconian regime might appeal to the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, there  is no money to pay for it today.  Workhouses were expensive, more so than the system of poor relief they replaced.  Therefore different means of establishing ‘less eligibility’ for those on benefits must be found in the present day.

The endless shaming of single mothers on benefits in the national media, egged on by the DWP,  has been one way to meet this goal.  The benefit cap,  which means forced relocation for some families away from loved ones and into cities where they may not know a soul, is another method of punishing poor parents and their children.  Tellingly the benefit cap does not apply to those in full time work.  This is not about saving money, but making life ‘less eligible’ for single parents, usually mothers, who are forced to rely on social security.

Workfare is one of the more obvious examples of ‘less eligibility’ – a sort of workhouse on the cheap.  This in itself meets of the test of the workhouse principles – working full time for benefits is ‘less eligible’ than working full time for a wage, even if only just in some cases.

Workfare doesn’t quite provide the solution Iain Duncan Smith desires however. Just like in Victorian times, the main reason for unemployment today is simply that there isn’t enough paid work for everybody to do.  This was the reason workhouses could rarely turn a profit and inmates were often left doing completely pointless, if back-breaking work.  Today it means workfare shrinks the amount of paid jobs available as companies use unpaid workers to cut down on wage bills.  This can be permitted on a small scale and it was probably assumed it would go unnoticed.  The fact that it didn’t shows workfare is not a politically or economically possible solution if applied to over 2 million unemployed people.

The realisation of this is almost certainly one reason why the proposed Community Action Programme – six month rolling periods of workfare for everyone leaving the Work Programme – has been quietly abandoned.
With neither workhouses or mass workfare being a viable solution to Iain Duncan Smith’s attempt to morally educate and eradicate the poor, his attempts at achieving ‘less eligibility’ for those on benefits are becoming ludicrous.  The latest weapon in his crusade is ‘conditionality’, meaning ever more draconian conditions for receiving benefits.  Claimants are soon to be expected to spend 35 hours a week endlessly looking for jobs which don’t exist.  People living in smaller towns could be forced to visit the same shops, every single week, to hand in CVs – a nasty trick which not just wastes someone’s time, but ensures they are continuously shamed for being unable to find a job.

In this context, Universal Jobmatch, the new government job seeking website, could be seen as the first virtual workhouse.  This website gives Jobcentre staff the ability to remotely monitor claimant’s online job-seeking activity.  The idea is that claimants can now be forced to sit at a computer for hours on end, clicking through job vacancies and sending off huge numbers of applications for jobs that they may not even be qualified to do.

It does not matter that the majority of jobs on Universal Jobmatch are part time, or flaky self-employed opportunities which often require cash up front.  It doesn’t even matter that many of the jobs on the website don’t even exist and are simply employment agencies fishing for unemployed people’s CVs to keep on their files.  The purpose of Universal Jobmatch is not to help people find a job, but to spy on claimants to ensure they are carrying out sufficient ‘work related activity’.   Instead of breaking rocks in a workhouse yard, the poor are now to be kept in poverty at home, forced to pointlessly click away at scam and spam job advertisements on the internet with the intention of making their lives as uncomfortable and boring as possible.

In Victorian times the workhouses quickly filled up with the elderly, orphans, disabled people, and the physically or mentally unwell.  The non-disabled and healthy feckless poor who the workhouses were aimed at, by and large did not materialise.  It’s almost as if they didn’t exist, or at least not in any great numbers.  Instead it was those who were genuinely unable to work who were punished by the austere and inhuman workhouse regime.

150 years later and it is disabled people who face losing their homes due to the bedroom tax and other benefit cuts.  Single parents are soon to be forced to abandon their teenage children from dawn to dusk to attend workfare or other ‘work related activity’.  Those who are unemployed because there are no jobs face workfare and sanctions.  Welfare reforms are not just forcing people into poverty, unpaid work, or job seeking activity that won’t help them find a job, but increasingly people are losing their homes.  Less eligibility in the modern world means homelessness, not a bed in the workhouse.

And once again an onslaught on the living conditions of the poor is being justified by lurid tales of an army of feckless scroungers who no more exist today than they did they were used to excuse the horrors of the workhouse.

The Void

BBC colluding in gov't attack on benefit claimants

The cruellest thing about the benefits cap is not that it could make thousands of people homeless or force more families to depend on food banks (three of these open every week). It’s that it’s not really about people on benefits at all.

Nick and Margaret with some of the "stars" of their BBC show. Photograph: BBC

The camera may not lie but sometimes it tells truths you weren’t expecting. As the government’s flagship benefits cap is rolled out across the nation, amid protests from homelessness charities, women’s rights groups and food banks already overwhelmed by demand, the BBC is devoting hours of its prime-time schedule to pitting the underpaid against the unemployed. The spectacle of one single mother telling another in the tin-can aisle at the supermarket that she’s greedy because she wants her kids to have a hot meal says a great deal about modern Britain. It tells us whose suffering matters and whose children will never have their dinner dissected for our scorn on national television.

The BBC1 programme Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits (11 and 18 July, 9pm), echoing the rhetoric of the Department for Work and Pensions, pits “taxpayers” against “shirkers” and asks how we can “make work pay”. Of these gristly little semantic nuggets of state propaganda, “making work pay” is the most noxious – a mantra that’s incanted by every jobsworth Tory in every debate, in line with the logic that if one repeats a lie for long enough it will function as truth.

Taking away benefits will not “make work pay”. The reason why work doesn’t pay is not that benefits are too high. It is that wages are too low. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that, with the rising cost of living, there have been 40 consecutive months of contraction in real wages in the UK. In many occupations, the basic pay is too low to cover rent, food and bills, especially in London and the south-east, where housing costs are out of control. This is why a large proportion of housing benefit is paid on behalf of those who are in work, straight into the pockets of private landlords.

Then there’s “the taxpayer”, a phrase that is deliberately misused to imply that only those in waged work pay taxes. Everybody who buys a warm Cornish pasty puts pennies into the Treasury. Drawing an arbitrary distinction between “taxpayers” and “people on benefits” implies that those who rely on state support are taking money directly out of the pockets of workers, when they are being supported by a system to which we all contribute, which is there to help all of us should we find ourselves ill or unemployed.

The anxiety to separate the interests of “taxpayers” from those of the unemployed falsely suggests that unemployment benefits are now the main drain on the state. Despite savage welfare cuts, state spending on unemployment remains high because unemployment remains high, for the simple reason that one cannot “incentivise” people into jobs that aren’t there. A far higher proportion of state spending goes on subsidising tax cuts for multinational corporations and arms dealers, maintaining our nuclear weapons programme and having a military presence abroad. “Taxpayers”, though, are not being invited into the homes of devastated Afghan families, taken on tours of the Trident base or shown around the mansions of offshore millionaires and asked to make judgements about how their taxes are being spent. The idea is preposterous. Poor people are supposed to make moral judgements about other poor people only. We can afford to offer Vodafone billions in tax breaks but God forbid some kids in Ipswich get a second-hand PlayStation.

That’s the judgement call that representatives of the working class are invited to make in We All Pay Your Benefits, deciding whether or not the unemployed are being indulged, as Nick and Margaret, a pair of well-spoken, pension-age presenters, ride around in a taxi prattling on like something out of a David Lynch film. For most of the show, the camera leers at the jobseekers but the truly fascinating characters are those who have been invited on to the show to judge.

Their anger that their hard slog has not raised them above the level of a family on Jobseekers’ Allowance is distressing to watch. Clearly they all work hard – for not enough money and with few prospects of improving their circumstances as rents rise and essential services are dismantled. It is hardly the fault of a disabled single father-ofthree that a care worker who runs her own business is still struggling to cover the bills. But that is the only conclusion that this programme and this government are permitting us to voice.

On any other channel, a programme such as this could be written off as a crass cash-in on public mistrust of the welfare system, treating the unemployed as a telegenic cross between criminals and animals in a zoo. That it was given the green light by the BBC, a publicly funded and supposedly impartial broadcaster, indicates something more. It suggests a culture shift: the wilful misdirection of public anger towards those who least deserve it.

The cruellest thing about the benefits cap is not that it could make thousands of people homeless or force more families to depend on food banks (three of these open every week). It’s that it’s not really about people on benefits at all. They aren’t the voters this government is interested in attracting. It’s about placating public rage and persuading people who would vote for a tin of beans if it had a Tory ribbon on it that this government is tough and in charge.

Like any pack of bullies, the Conservative Party likes to prove its strength by picking on the weakest people within reach. In this case, the targets include single mums and the mentally ill. That tens of thousands of children will spend their school years going to bed hungry because of this policy is incidental. The benefits cap is first and foremost a public relations exercise. With a former PR man for Prime Minister, what else would it be? Behind the relentless campaign of spin, though, is the truth – and the truth is that those on benefits have nothing, absolutely nothing, to be ashamed of.

Laurie Penny is the contributing editor of the New Statesman
New Statesman

SERCO, Work Programme Providers, and Fraud.

This is the story that’s caught people’s attention – from the Independent.

In an announcement that throws the Coalition’s privatisation drive into disarray, the Serious Fraud Office was called in to investigate G4S, the world’s largest security company, over contracts dating back over a decade. 

Serco, one of Britain’s largest companies, also faces an inquiry by auditors over its charges for operating tagging schemes. 

The firms supply an array of services to the public sector from running courts, prisons and immigration removal centres to managing welfare-to-work schemes and the Atomic Weapons Establishment. 

Between them the two companies receive around £1.5bn a year from the taxpayer, but their contracts are worth billions of pounds because the vast majority run for several years.

We have been waiting for more news on this.

But it’s worth noting (as Private Eye has) that SERCO, under investigation for fraud with G4s, is a leading Work Programme provider.

Serco delivers two Work Programme contracts on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions in:

• Coventry and Warwickshire, Staffordshire and The Marches; and
• South Yorkshire.

There is of course no need to worry about SERCO’s involvement with the Work Programme.

Lord Freud himself has said so,

Welfare Reform Minister Lord Freud visited the Inspire to Independence (i2i) site in Coventry in March, to find out more about Serco, our network of providers and our involvement in the Governments’ Work Programme. 

The Minister conveyed how pleased he was with i2i and Serco’s Work Programme involvement and positive impact in supporting people into work.

It is well-known that not a single Work Programme provider (er hum,. except……) has ever been accused of fraudulent practices.

Source

EU planning to own and operate spy drones and an air force

The European Union is pondering an EU Commission proposal to acquire a fleet of surveillance drones, satellites, and planes as part of an “ambitious action” to boost the European defense industry. It follows revelations of the NSA’s spying programs.

The European Commission has issued a 17-page report, proposing some concrete steps that would encourage pan-European defense cooperation.

“Maintaining and developing defense capabilities to meet current and future challenges in spite of severe budget constraints will only be possible if far-reaching political and structural reforms are made. The time has come to take ambitious action,” the Commission’s report said.

One of the actions suggested in the report is funding a pre-commercial procurement scheme to acquire prototypes of some technologies – including drones.

The full list of technology candidates includes equipment to detect chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives threats (CBRNE), “communication equipment based on software defined radio technology,” and remotely-piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), otherwise known as drones.

An Airbus A310 MRTT tanker transport aircraft (L) prepares to refuel two Eurofighter jets (R) as they are accompanied by a Tornado fighter jet at the ILA International Air Show in Schoenefeld south of Berlin.

According to Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the report, the European Commission has for long been eyeing the possibility of using drones over Europe.

“The European Commission has long identified the potential of this emerging technology and supported the market by investing in research and innovation relevant for RPAS through the Framework Programme for Research. A broad stakeholders’ consultation has demonstrated the necessity for action at EU level, setting as priorities the further development of RPAS civil applications and the integration of the systems into the European air space as soon as possible,” the document said.

It also claimed it would “take into account the data protection and privacy concerns associated with the civil use of RPAS.”

The drones are also proposed to be used in conjunction with other surveillance technologies, including aircraft and satellites.

A man is at work during the set up of the “UAV Show Europe”, an International Drone fair.

Lamenting the absence of a structural link between civil and military space activities in the EU and saying that Europe “can no longer afford” the economic and political cost of such a divide, the Commission focused on several technologies that are said to be able to serve both civilian and defense objectives.

These include space surveillance and tracking (SST), which are said to be aimed at protecting satellites from space debris, boosting satellite communications (SATCOM), and building a pan-EU cutting-edge satellite surveillance capability.

The report said it is “crucial” for a number of technologies to be explored and developed in the EU, including “hyper-spectral, high resolution satellites in geostationary orbit or advanced ultra-high resolution satellites in combination with new sensor platforms such as RPAS.”

The Commission has yet to estimate to what extent the proposed moves are useful for EU security. Based on the assessment, it will “come up with a proposal for which capability needs, if any, could best be fulfilled by assets directly purchased, owned and operated by the [European] Union.”

A response to Snowden’s NSA leaks?

The Commission’s report is part of the ongoing debate on the common EU defense policy which is set to culminate in a summit of European leaders in December.

Media reports have said that the European Commission and Lady Ashton’s European External Action Service actually want to create military commands and communications systems to be used by the EU for internal security and defense purposes.

The UK, which stoutly opposes such motion, is said to be leading an intense behind-the-scenes battle against establishing an EU military operations headquarters in Brussels.

A French Rafale fighter jet.

Curiously, senior European officials regard the plan as an urgent response to the recent scandal over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations on American and British communications surveillance.

“The Edward Snowden scandal shows us that Europe needs its own autonomous security capabilities, this proposal is one step further towards European defense integration,” a senior EU official said, as quoted by the Daily Telegraph.

However, plans to create the EU’s own security and spying agency and employ spy drones and satellites for “internal and external security policies” – which would reportedly include police intelligence, internet surveillance, protection of external borders, and maritime overwatch – will likely raise concerns that the EU is creating its own version of the NSA.

The Open Europe think tank has already warned that the EU “has absolutely no democratic mandate for actively controlling and operating military and security capabilities.”

“The fact is, European countries have different views on defense and this is best served by intergovernmental cooperation, not by European Commission attempts at nation-building,” Open Europe research analyst Pawel Swidlicki said.

Source: http://rt.com/news/eu-drones-proposal-nsa-678/

Bedroom Tax Judgement, High Court, July 30th 9.30 am

9.30am Tuesday 30th July
Vigil outside Royal Courts of Justice
Bedroom Tax Judicial Review Judgement

Join us to gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice as the judgment in the ‘bedroom tax’ legal challenge is handed down.

In May, lawyers for 10 disabled people and their families challenged the government’s decision to cut housing benefit for recipients living in properties deemed too large during a three day hearing.

The bedroom tax discriminates against disabled people who need extra rooms for reasons related to their impairment and who cannot take up government suggestions of going out to work to make up the shortfall.
Two thirds of the 660,000 people affected nationally by the bedroom tax are disabled. The government knew the bedroom tax would have a disproportionate impact on disabled people but decided not to make an exemption for disabled adults because the scheme would then have been unable to make the savings they intended.

Linda Burnip from Disabled People Against Cuts said,

” People who have had thousands of pounds worth of adaptations made to their homes are being forced to move. Replacing those adaptations will cost councils far more money than this policy will save. As usual with DWP policies it is ill-thought through and makes no financial or moral sense to penalise disabled people in this way.”

We say that no one should have to move and the answer is to build more social housing. A legal victory against this rotten policy would highlight how unworkable and unfair the government’s so-called welfare reforms really are.

Bring banners, placards and solidarity.

DPAC

Ex-Atos nurse tells of disgust at Assessments

Reblogged from Diary of a Benefit Scrounger:

It's clearly not enough for sick and disabled people to tell of their horrific experiences of an Atos Assessment for Employment and Support Allowance.

It's clearly not enough for journalists to write exposes and TV companies to produce documentaries.

It's clearly not enough for politicians from all sides of the House to debate the failings and iniquities of the Atos test and demand that it be improved.

It's clearly not enough for the BMA and the RCGPs to demand the immediate withdrawal of the test.

It's clearly not enough for it to be found unfit for purpose by every major study into it and for every major charity and DPO to denounce it as cruel and inhumane.

So perhaps it will be enough for you to listen to this nurse, who used to work for Atos, carrying out the assessments, her professional disgust, how demoralised she felt, how disgusted by the targets and criteria she was set, the poor quality of the doctors, the insistence that she reject a % of claims every day regardless of merit.

Will this be enough? Will we listen to this? Will we wake up and stop this assault on  decency and dignity? At some point we will. It's just a matter of time. And how many innocent, vulnerable people suffer until we do.  

Listen here on LBC Radio : http://t.co/BkCFIFKJCv

Ambulance drivers told not to take 'death list' patients to hospital: Patients who tell GPs they want to die at home could be denied vital emergency treatment

'Ambulance crews are being told not to take patients to hospital if they have been put on controversial ‘death lists’ drawn up by GPs.

Serious concerns were raised last year after it was revealed that thousands had been placed on ‘end-of-life’ care registers so they could be helped to die rather than receive hospital treatment.

Now The Mail on Sunday has learned that ambulance crews responding to 999 calls are being alerted if a patient is on a list, and can refuse to take them to hospital if they have previously expressed a wish to die at home.'

Read more: Ambulance drivers told not to take 'death list' patients to hospital: Patients who tell GPs they want to die at home could be denied vital emergency treatment