Working with a man in his 50s who has just received a letter which calls him to yet another face to face Employment and Support Allowance assessment.
This has to be at least the fourth and probably fifth ESA assessment he’s been called to in three or four years. I attended two of the things with him myself. There have been so many letters from the DWP on this and PIP that we have actually lost count.
This man’s health and disability has not changed over the last few years. If anything, his health has deteriorated because of these constant assessments and the associated stress about the amount of money he will have from one week to the next. Services in his part of the country – particularly mental health services – have about completely disappeared. Even the organisation which used to help him fill in the DWP’s endless application forms is no more. His local MP is some useless Tory.
This assessment this man must attend is a complete waste of time. The DWP is perfectly aware of his health and his issues – or it should be after assessing him so often. Presume Maximus is the only outfit doing well out of this. Meanwhile, this bloke is being harassed out of sight by the DWP. He has also been put through an awful grind to get PIP. That took about a year.
This so called system is out of control. Even rightwing anti tax types ought to be waking up to this dreadful waste of time and money. This government and ridiculous Tory party is criminal. They refuse to take responsibility for this disgrace. They allow this non stop harassment of people most in need. They continue to pay the likes of Maximus god knows what to carry out these pointless assessments – they already know what an assessment will show. Is anyone in government even in charge of day-to-day operations anymore?
I hope someone will publish the total cost of this farrago – not just the cost of the assessments, but the costs to the NHS in letters to defend people’s benefits, picking up the pieces as people get even more ill defending their benefits, lost staff to the assessments (they pay double what a nurse would get in the NHS; the cost of the manditory reconsiderations & tribunals, the cost of advising people so they can win …
The moral arguments against this are strong, but they’re not working. We need to have a total headline figure to shift this mess.
Agreed. It’s the issues with cost and failed systems that will get the attention of those who don’t care about the moral or individual aspects of the thing.
It certainly ought to get their attention, as should the amount of money the Government pours into the pockets of all those companies riding the lucrative Welfare-to-Work gravytrain, getting millions of £s of public money for providing those god-awful back-to-work schemes that bully the poor & vulnerable into applying for insecure low-paid work & unpaid work placements stacking shelves in Poundstretcherwhilst under threat of Benefit Sanctions, starvation & destitution. Yet another such scheme has started in my area & I am absolutely dreading being sent on it. It’s called ‘Get Up And Go’, run bysome money-grabbing bastards called Standguard or Standright or something. Sounds too depressing & patronising for words. Please God spare me from this hell.
Me also it can be sole distroying make you feel like your worthless and your begging for money even with doctors letters concultent letters the hole processes is wrong I understand some people bend the truth to obtain money they shudnt the endless paper work may be a visit to the claimants home to see for them selfs been disabled is some times hard it’s self but the feeling of low self worth been quizzed on interviews the appointment they try to cancell less than a hr before you attend ( you can change your appointment once ) they normally try them selfs that makes two that will automatically stop your money been told that’s how they get the bonus when decent humans gets theirs stopt
Pointing out the sheer cost, inefficiency and financial waste of the whole ATOS / MAXIMUS system is far more likely to suceed with the Tories than looking at the human side of the equation. They couldn’t care less.
Obviously it is pointless to keep on with medical re-examinations people with serious progressive disabilities, and those who will die within a few months of terminal conditions.
It is brutal, heartless and deliberately vindictive as well. The United Nations have utterly condemned it.
But the Tories are shielded from any sense of wrongdoing by their ideology.
So go for the wallet, show them the money, that might work.
Even with people who seem to have lost their basic humanity.
You’re right in theory but look how many millions they wasted on things like Universal Credit and the Work Programme, whilst simultaneously pushing Austerity. Nothing they do makes any sense.
Hi, Kate
From the time I won ESA Support Group status in December 2009 via tribunal to the time I last attended a ‘Work Capability Assessment’ with ‘McKenzie Friend’ in April 2012, I was summonsed for reassessment four times, and each time was stressful.
My most acute physiological reaction was to the first one for a very special reason. From the date of my tribunal to the time the back money had got into my bank a/c, I had had to wait almost three months, and my summons to complete another ESA50 came six months after that payment of back money, and from the time I left five years’ seamless but unfulfilling salaried service in October 1977 to the time I had first applied for ESA in early 2009, my sum total of waged employment had been 19 months, 11 of which had been so part time that I had submitted fortnightly part-time earnings forms at signing on sessions.
The physiological reaction was quite understandable: lower back pain to the point that I walked in very hunched fashion for three weeks until I got experienced help from the friend of a friend. (My initial tribunal victory had been won with the help of a paid employee for a charity specialising in tribunals, and it seemed that he was concerned about the prospective impact that his defending my right to remain in the statistically more difficult to acquire Support Group status would have on his tribunal success rate of about 95%; and I did not want to risk being put into the sanctions fodder ‘Work Related Activity Group’.)
By the time of my forth post-tribunal victory WCA I was really pissed off at all the attention the government were giving me, especially given the lack of effective support that they had given me in my decades as a jobcentre, and so at my fourth WCA I made a point of emphasising that with the Atos ‘disability analyst’. He replied that he would recommend that I next be called NO EARLIER THAN TWO YEARS HENCE.
So imagine the mental state I was thrown into when I got summonsed to do another ESA50 in January 2013, at least one year earlier than promised. I felt just about suicidal. So although I was with Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group at the time and we had people accompanying people to their ‘assessments’ and tribunals, I took my case to Claire Glasman of WinVisible [Women with Visible and Invisible Disabilities] in the same postcode area as me at the time. With help from WinVisible and its companion group Payday Men, and using Emergency Regulations, I/we appealed against the necessity of my being retested so early. And with the help of documentation and copying in my then MP Frank Dobson — with whom WinVisible had a good relationship — and scourge of Atos the now sadly deceased Michael Meacher MP, that ESA50 became redundant.
(The next I knew was a letter from DWP saying that my benefits had been worked out again following a recent change, which in plain English meant that my entitlement had not stopped. And in late 2016 a DWP reply to my complaint to Keir Starmer MP in which I objected to previous DWP harassment, the DWP said I would “next be due for reassessment in April 2017.”)
So I would recommend that if people do not like being reassessed, they take every formal opportunity they can to say so to their assessors and DWP, etc, and even to check in the ‘disability analyst’ reports of their latest WCA when it actually says that they should be due for retesting. And yes, they should use the Emergency Regulations too, which is something WinVisible is very keen on doing.
The Tories do not care how many ill and disabled people they kill as long as they are able to reduce the Welfare Bill. Reducing the Welfare bill will produce Tax cuts. Tory voters will be able to invest the money in more useful things, other than keeping poor sick and disabled people alive. They know exactly what they are doing and Neoliberal philosophy says each man for himself and devil take the hindmost. They intend to make claiming on your National Insurance Rights, as harrowing an experience as they can get away with making it. They only care about the rich and the rich have never had it so good. Private debt is ballooning. and I cannot tell you how many Tory voters are getting richer and pension pots fuller from that, while for the majority, there is falling living standards and earnings. All part of the Tory plan to create a society of Masters and poverty struck servants. Let’s just watch the bodies pile up with little or no comment from the mainstream media.(sic).
It has been proved that the costs of all these assessments whether ESA or DLA to PIP has cost billions more than it saves.
I had DLA for life now PIP to 2018 but can’t get any help to change my disability. So why are they doing this! TO GRIND US DOWN!!!!!! That’s why.I will not allow them to deny me something I am not in control of. Osteoarthritis is painful, enough if they want to deny me the help as proved the no. Of people committing suicide will increase or perhaps there goal. I cannot understand how so called intelligent people reckon we can live without this money. All it does is allow us to have some sort of a life. We still carry the pain. I’m sitting here on my notepad in agony but trying to communicate that we are absolutely fed up with the dale standards disabled ex soldiers are applauded on there sporting achievements and so they should but if you’d lost your limb through anything else you’re accosted with cost to the country. This taxpayer for no one 40 years is claiming what I need to get from a to b and do not feel I am a threat to society in fact I still have a lot to offer. My body is broken but my spirit and my mind are rock solid.
A better question:
As a ‘jobseeker’ how many damn times does the DWP need to assess my unchanged unemployment status?
I didn’t have a job last week, don’t have one this week, and hopefully won’t have one next week…
So why am I called into the jobcentre for a stressful assessment almost weekly ????
In a way the disabled and fake disabled are lucky they only have to be assessed every year or two
I attended fortnightly signing-on for several years as a disabled jobseeker before taking the advice of a sympathetic jcp worker, that I should apply for ESA when that was new. The occasion of that advice was a much more intensive than fortnightly six-monthly review. The jcp worker involved had previously been the one I had seen in early 2005 after I had had my claim suspended for missing one signing-on session after Christmas/New Year, while I was stressed out by waiting for the result of a 23 December job interview.
I believe that the real issue here is two-fold:
1: The fortnightly reviews are much less intensive than the more long-term period reviews; and
2: The reviews are predicated on the assumption that the ‘unemployment’ is the fault of the benefit claimant, who has no real bargaining power. When I was a Jsa claimant I was far from idle, constantly attempting to maintain and upgrade my skills base and attempting jobsearch activities.
So when I am recalled for ESA/Work Capability Assessment, much of the stress I experience is due to the fact that the reassessments are like Russian Roulette, and could set me back in terms of income level and lack of safeguarding against sanctions. Perhaps one of my strongest arguments is that in the period from November 1972 when I first became an ESA claimant in early 2009, the sum total of my waged employment was 19 months, 11 of which were so part-time that I was submitting fortnightly part-time earnings sheets at Jcp.
Fortnightly signing-on while on Jsa can become a routine, however depressing; the much less frequent reviews can drive a person to worse health problems and even proneness to suicide. The welfare reforms of Lord Freud that were largely ‘ghost written’ by an American health insurance company of ‘disability denial factories’ called Unum Provident/Unum as ‘advisers’ to UK Government since the 1990s were based on smear stories rather than real evidence.