Some paperwork is almost unbearable. Sitting in the living room of his Essex home, Peter Wootton sifts through his wife Linda’s files with a sigh, pointing out where an Atos assessor judged her fit to work in January 2013.
Linda could lift a mobile phone. Linda could rise. Linda could walk across the testing room. So Linda was fit to work. “The test only took 20 minutes,” Peter remembers. “She was crying for longer than that beforehand. I’ll keep these documents forever, no matter how painful they are.”
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Linda, a double heart and lung transplant patient, died on April 25 last year. Only nine days before, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) finally rejected her claim of employment support allowance (ESA) of £108.05 a week, sending her a curt letter while she lay desperately ill in hospital.
She had scored zero points on her Atos test. In her final months Linda was on 10 prescription drugs a day, suffering high blood pressure, renal failure and regular blackouts.
“The benefits were actually stopped on February 14,” Peter explains. “Happy Valentine’s. She was in hospital with a chest infection, typing her appeal on her iPad, crying her eyes out. We were lucky because I earned a salary that meant we were OK and we didn’t lose the house.
"But she felt distraught about it. She’d say to me, ‘I’ll have to go back to work then.’ It was only in the days before her death she said, ‘Well, maybe I wasn’t fit for work.’ Only when she had been told she was going to die...
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