ATOS

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http://i1359.photobucket.com/albums/q799/magnacube/e51d7154-047c-4a51-bcef-aa813e1d19ca_zpsee4d5349.jpg

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http://i1359.photobucket.com/albums/q799/magnacube/90c7def7-be4b-4fc9-9de0-dc70a3bfcb69_zpsd0d7a67b.jpg

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http://www.shetnews.co.uk/newsbites/6603-welfare-ammunition

 

Welfare ammunition

Thursday, 11 April 2013 | Written by Shetland News

 

NORTHERN isles MP Alistair Carmichael has promised to argue Shetland’s corner with the government over the impact of welfare reform.

 

Carmichael met with Shetland Islands Council on Thursday to hear how 170 households could lose up to £20 a week from the bedroom tax alone.

 

He promised to take figures compiled by the council over the next three months to the Department of Work and Pensions to ensure the impact of welfare reform on islanders is minimised.

 

He said he would look at how the discretionary housing fund is calculated, would examine the effect on rural areas and keep a close eye on the way claimants are assessed as being fit for work.

 

SIC convener Malcolm Bell said the council would try to provide him with all the ammunition he needed to demand changes that would make a big difference in the isles without costing much to the government.

 

Meanwhile a study by Sheffield Hallam University has shown that Shetland will be the least affected by welfare reform in Scotland.

 

While the average Shetland claimant will be £270 worse off every year, people in Glasgow, the worst hit area, would lose £650.

 

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I would say to anyone who feels that they have been wrongly been found fit for work by Atos you must appeal and also i would suggest making Mr Carmichael aware of it seeing as he says he is going to "keep a close eye" his email is carmichaela@parliament.uk

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http://tompride.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/atos-tell-woman-with-mental-age-of-3-yrs-to-get-a-job-not-satire-please-share/

 

ATOS tell woman with mental age of 3 yrs to get a job

 

Fahmeena is 30 years old. She can’t walk or talk and has an estimated mental age of about 3 years old.

 

She likes to be called Princess Meena. Here she is:

http://i1359.photobucket.com/albums/q799/magnacube/f8229dbd-373d-474c-8ba0-64d36ff865ef_zpsd3b5a776.jpg

 

ATOS – in their wisdom – have assessed her and have decided that Princess Meena doesn’t need any benefits and she should go and get a job instead.

 

So Meena’s sister – Farzana – has decided to turn to social media to ask for ideas about what job she could do.

 

Here’s some information to help you with ideas for work for Meena:

 

Meena has Profound Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD), brain damage, Cerebral Palsy, can’t talk, can’t walk, has a mental age of 3, is incontinent and likes wearing pink and Minnie the Mouse headbands as well as making turdbombs.

 

If you have any ideas for jobs that Meena can do, you can post your ideas under the hashtag #JobsforMeena on Twitter.

 

Presumably Princess Meena is an example of one of the myriad ’scroungers’ unfairly claiming disability benefits we hear so much about.

 

Not a word of this is satire I can assure you, but I’m sure many people will have the same question as I have.

 

What have we become in this once great country that we turn our backs on people like Meena?

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Scottish National Party MSP Angus Robertson musings on the death of ex-PM Margaret Thatcher.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6cEl3TNj_o

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Atos In £2k Disability Discrimination Settlement

 

I’m a 20+ years moderate to severely affected ME sufferer.

 

Atos Healthcare have paid out £2,000 + costs (in the process of being finalised) in an out-of-court settlement of a disability discrimination claim arising from an Employment & Support Allowance Work Capability Assessment (WCA) in August 2011. As far as I have been able to find out it is one of the first Equality Act discrimination claims from a benefit claimant that Atos have faced.

 

I made it clear in the ESA50 form, which is sent out as the first stage of the assessment, that I needed to be able to travel door-to-door in a car or taxi to avoid the assessment having a significant impact on my health because of severe post exertional fatigue and pain.

 

I was sent to a WCA appointment at the Atos Bradford site, which is in the city centre pedestrian zone, with no disabled parking or drop-off point. The nearest drop-off point is 60m away if you disregard parking, waiting and loading restrictions.

 

I was amazed when Atos told me in a letter that the ESA50 form – which has a section which specifically asks claimants about their access needs – “is not viewed in detail by the administrative staff, save to link it to the appropriate file on receipt of the completed questionnaireâ€, and that I should have telephoned to tell them again about my access needs.

 

All Atos needed to do was refer me to their Halifax or Leeds sites both of which, I have since discovered, are more accessible than Bradford.

 

It is unacceptable that a government-funded assessment which sick and disabled people, many with mobility problems, have no option about attending takes place in an inaccessible location without disabled parking or a drop off point near the door.

 

To specifically ask about access needs in the ESA50 form, and then not have adequate processes in place to respond properly to those access needs leaves me totally astounded.

 

Atos tried to argue that they were not bound by the Equality Act when delivering WCAs, and so did not need to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and also tried to claim that I was not disabled, as defined by the Equality Act 2010.

 

An expert medical report, ordered by the Court, concluded that there was “no doubt†that the impact on my condition [as a result] of the events of 9 August 2011 were “significantâ€, and that “certainly several steps could have been taken to avoid the exacerbation of symptomsâ€.

 

At the WCA I was award 0 points and assessed as fit for work, [the] DWP rubber stamped that advice. It went to appeal where I was placed in support group after a 5 minute hearing – after waiting months on reduced benefit.

 

Most of the claim/court process I handled myself, The Equality & Human Rights Commission become involved as my legal representatives a couple of months before the settlement was agreed.

 

My complaint could have been settled earlier on with a proper apology and a commitment from Atos to make the necessary changes to procedures to take into account the individual access needs of claimants.

 

Sadly, the culture at Atos appear such that they are unwilling to admit mistakes and learn from them. Throughout the process Atos refused repeatedly to commit to make appropriate changes.

 

I have recently received another ESA50 form to start the whole process again – about 10 months after the appeal decision.

 

Receiving the ESA50 without warning this morning was a sickening blow leaving me oscillating between utter despair and extreme anger.

 

How am I supposed to stand any chance of keeping my health stable, let alone managing to improve it, if the DWP are constantly harassing me and thousands of others like me with their revolving door approach to reassessment? This will be my THIRD time through this in 5 years.

 

In 2008 I went through the same charade of Atos assessment, fit for work, appeal, wait for months, full Incapacity Benefit restored and backdated.

 

So this will be my third time through the revolving door assessment scam within 5 or 6 years. More profit for Atos and to hell with the health of claimants.

 

Mr David Johnson

 

http://welfarenewsservice.com/atos-in-2k-disability-discrimination-settlement/#.UWfCn6LU8oN

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Research conducted by Demos has shown that as a group, disabled people face losing £28 billion in benefits cuts, with an individual possibly losing up to £23,300 by 2018.

http://www.inclusionlondon.co.uk/%C2%A328-billion-in-benefit-cuts-faced-by-disabled-people-research-reveals

 

Figures from Shelter reveal millions are one payday away from not being able to pay their mortgage or rent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/figures-from-shelter-reveal-millions-are-one-payday-away-from-not-being-able-to-pay-their-mortgage-or-rent-8567985.html

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http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/index/pressoffice/press_index/press_20130208.htm

 

Government must act on disability benefit decision-making and Atos medical assessment contracts

8 February 2013

 

Citizens Advice responds to damning Public Accounts Committee report on DWP management of its contract with Atos to carry out controversial work capability assessments, the medical tests used in deciding fitness for work.

 

Citizens Advice Chief Executive Gillian Guy said:

 

“The Public Accounts Committee is absolutely right in saying the way the government manages its contract with Atos must change and DWP decision making must improve. We are seeing a lot of very sick and seriously disabled people being wrongly denied ESA and suffering enormous additional stress and hardship at a time when they most need support.

 

“Wrong decisions have a human cost and a cost to the tax payer. Getting medical assessments right first time is absolutely essential to ensuring that seriously ill and disabled people get the support they are entitled to, and cutting the number of unnecessary appeals. The huge volume of unnecessary appeals is wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and risks undermining the Government's welfare reform programme.

 

“Private companies on government contracts must be accountable to the public and face penalties for poor performance. We have long said that Atos should face a fine for every inaccurate report that they produce. The government has already awarded Atos the lion’s share of the contracts to carry out medical assessments for the new Personal Independence Payment (PIP), the benefit due to replace disability living allowance (DLA) later this year. This makes it all the more urgent that regular, independent monitoring of the accuracy of medical reports is put in place before medical assessments and reports are given a central role in deciding who is entitled to PIP.â€

 

Last year (2012) CAB advisers in England and Wales helped people with 430,000 problems about Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), the benefit paid to people too sick or disabled to work - up 67% on the previous year.

 

An unprecedented 90,000 of these enquiries specifically concerned appeals. A further 70,000 were about the controversial Work Capability Assessments (WCA) carried out by Atos and used to decide if people are fit for work.

 

CAB advisers helped with almost 2.4 million benefit problems of all kinds in 2012. Employment Support Allowance generated more enquiries than any other benefit at 18% of all benefit enquiries.

 

Official government figures show the cost of appeals from 2009/10-2011/12 to be £60 million. DWP figures show 38 per cent of appeals against an ESA decision are successful and CAB advisers estimate the success rate at appeal where someone receives specialist CAB advice and is represented is around 80 per cent.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/anastasia-richardson/benefits-families-statistics_b_3060094.html

Who Are the People on Benefits?

Posted: 12/04/2013 00:00

 

In the past few weeks, many have been foaming at the mouth with rage over benefits scroungers, with the government going as far as suggesting that the welfare state lead to the Philpott tragedy. But in truth, the scroungers playing the system and the skivers having children to claim more money don't really seem to exist.

 

According to the Department of Work and Pensions, only 0.8% of benefit spending is overpaid due to fraud, costing us £1.2 billion a year. That's nothing compared to the £11 billion of benefits that go unclaimed every year. There are actually only 130 families with 10 children claiming at least one out of work benefit; only 8% of benefit claimants have three or more children. And in the past two years, 93% of new people claiming housing benefit have been working.

 

So who are the people on benefits, really? The answer actually seems to be most of us. 64% of families, and about 30million individual people - half the total population of the UK. The attack on benefits has portrayed people claiming benefits as a kind of underclass, separating them from ordinary people in low paid jobs, ordinary people looking for work, ordinary families. But really, the people on benefits are our friends, colleagues and neighbours, our families, ourselves.

 

A few people are starting to wake up, look around them and and realise that people on benefits are actually ordinary people right there in their communities. "We saw that people who we value, who we believe God values and God loves, we saw them being insulted day in and day out in the media," said Paul Morrison from the Methodist Church.

 

The people on benefits are women living in hostels with their children after fleeing violent partners, people looking for work, families working in low paid jobs and claiming income support to help feed their children, people who've just left prison and want to start a new life, people who have been made unemployed by the economic crisis or government cuts to public sector jobs, disabled people and their carers, and young people who have been made homeless, claiming benefits so they can stay in education.

 

Unite's new campaign, Our Welfare Works, has helped the truth to come out. There's Michelle, a disabled woman who lives with her 15 year old daughter, who will be pushed into 'choosing between paying the rent and eating' by the Bedroom Tax. There are the Counihans, a family with a bus driver dad whose salary isn't enough to provide for his disabled wife and their five children, who were hit with a housing benefit overpayment demand of £70,000. The family had to move miles away from their children's school, and their mother was refused a life changing hip replacement operation by the local hosipital because of her 'social circumstances'. There's a cleaner who will lose her Motability car when her son gets transferred to the Personal Independence Payment, meaning that she will have to give up her job so that her son can go to school.

 

With these stories, we move away from the almost mythical status of benefit claimants as scroungers, undeserving, wicked, murderers. We see them for what we really are - not 'them', but us. We need to realize that the attack on benefits isn't an attack on a lazy, undeserving underclass, or an attack on a group of vulnerable people with tragic lives who we have to feel sorry for. Both of these approaches paint benefit claimants as a 'them', an alien group other than ourselves.

 

In fact, the attack on benefits is an attack on all of us, because they are us - our granddad receiving the winter fuel payment, our parents receiving child tax credit, our colleague receiving housing benefit, us, claiming income support to help pay for the food. Because if these cuts carry on, most of our children will be growing up in poverty within two years. It is also an attack on all of us, because it could be us. Us who loses our job or has to flee from an abusive relationship, us who has an accident and can't work, and finds ourselves homeless or in debt or going hungry because the safety net isn't there anymore - because it was removed with our complicity.

 

Anyone who has ever been in a situation which they cannot deal with, a situation that's shocking and unbelievable, can understand. A situation like losing your job or business, like being evicted from your home, like having to run away from home. It's shocking. You've lost control. If there's a safety net there, you can survive, get back on your feet, and make a better life. If not... well, disaster takes many different forms. Ask a homeless person, or a mum with kids fleeing domestic violence who couldn't stay in a refuge because of the housing benefit cap.

 

Just how widespread poverty really is, and just how disastrous the consequences of removing benefits really are, is a painful truth to realise. But it's much more painful to live through. And it gives us our most powerful weapon in the 'welfare war' that has broken out: telling the truth. The lies about people on benefits being a scrounger underclass removed from the rest of society are thin and shallow, a myth hiding millions of true stories of poverty, hard work, caring for others, and survival.

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Excellent article writen by a student, Anastasia Richardson

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Atos curtailing internet communication?

 

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How the benefit cuts affect your area.

 

http://ig.ft.com/austerity-map/

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The Blame Game

http://i1359.photobucket.com/albums/q799/magnacube/a98f648d-7fde-43db-beb5-a25a720cf25c_zps3b5ae58e.jpg

The Government are playing a game. They don’t serve the needs of the pubic. They serve a wealthy elite. The Coalition don’t care about the consequences of taking money from the poorest and giving it to the wealthiest. But they won’t tell us that. They are playing the game that the game is not a game.

 

It’s called the “blame gameâ€. As welfare “reform†and housing cuts bite increasingly harder, do we ever reach the point where the Government concedes that the horror and hardship caused to many is an inevitable consequence of their own policies? Not at all. Instead we see their

adeptness at digging ever deeper holes of denial.

 

At least Thatcher admitted there was increased unemployment, that it was as a tool of economic policy, and it was, in her opinion, a price worth paying to bring down inflation. Shucks, shame that didn’t work, Maggie. Gosh darn, we had high unemployment AND high inflation. But at least she was honest about her original intent.

 

Deny that alternatives to austerity are viable.

 

As a Tory lie repetition strategy, this is based on the idea Goebbels had – repeated lies will somehow convince people that they are true. Cameron was busted when he repeatedly told the lie “We are paying down the debtâ€. Despite being rumbled, the Coalition have stuck with this lie doggedly. The bonus of the lie is that it may undermine the Oppositions’ economic credibility, and the Tories particularly delight in the lie that it’s all Labours’ fault because they “overspentâ€, as it further justifies austerity measures and starving public services of Government funding, with our paid taxes, as well as stripping our welfare provision away.

 

The Coalition have REALLY messed up the economy. We know it’s a big fat Tory lie that cutting spending at a time of economic recession will ever re-balance public finances. As many academics and economists have stated, cutting spending when the economy is flat is likely to cause further contraction to the economy, and that will negatively affect public finances, rather than help at all.

 

The Government will never confess to this because they are so tightly ideologically bound to an übertreiben Neo-Liberalism, no matter what the cost is in human terms, or even in economic terms. What we need is Labours’ expansionary fiscal policies, not contractionary ones. Real, sensible economists know that the only way to address a recession is to grow the economy, and that means more public spending in the short term, to stimulate economic activity, and cutting if needed when the economy is back on the up (which needn’t mean absolute cuts, but relative cuts because the economy is growing).

 

Repeat that implementing the cuts is avoidable.

 

The trick is to give the impression that all the cuts can be made painlessly by eliminating luxuries and sacking “backroom staffâ€. Cameron used this one at PMQs last week when he accused Councils of making high-profile cuts “to try to make a pointâ€, and not because they need to. Delivered with a straight face and psychopathic calm, this sounds like a feasible lie that some will believe. So, Central Government is severely reducing budgets to Local Authorities, leaving them with a kind of impossible table cloth pulling trick to accomplish. Rip away the funding and hope the contents of the table – local services and provisions – stay put, and don’t crash to the floor. Of course, Labour Councils will be affected by the cuts more than other Councils, too. That also works out well for the Coalition.

 

Blame the previous Labour Government.

 

“It’s all their fault we have too few homes.†The Coalition focus on the fact that housebuilding in Labours’ very last year was the worst they achieved, even though we know that was because of the credit crunch. The Government won’t admit either that housebuilding under the Coalition is on average 45,000 homes less per year than the output under Labour, or that 2010/11 and 2011/12 were the two worst years since the war for English housebuilding. They don’t mention that Thatcher sold off all of the social housing stock, either. Again, they blame Local Government. Westminster is putting homeless families up in expensive hotels and Camden’s sending them to Coventry (or Leicester, Liverpool, or somewhere else absurdly far from London). The Government say, hiding their smug smiles, how stupid this is, and tell them to stop it, even though both they and we know they cannot.

 

(See also The UK deficit scam: George Osborne is nailed , we are paying down the debt and rumbled).

 

Don’t admit that cutting welfare will affect anything else.

 

Cuts in all benefits for private tenants will mean that more of them will become homeless, and more people will need accommodation with lower rents in the social sector. The Government deny that this will happen. Most of the political debate at the moment is focused on the consequences of the bedroom tax, and the implications of private sector high rents, local rent allowance caps, (and in some areas, Councils are quietly imposing a bedroom tax on those in privately rented properties, too, despite the rhetoric that this will affect only those tenants in social housing) the poll tax style council benefit reductions and DWP related benefits cap have been somewhat obscured. Current debate does not, and probably cannot cover the depth of utter disruption and destruction to people’s lives that these changes are going to bring about. That is partly because the full details of the changes are not being released by this Government in a transparent and timely manner.

 

If any evidence emerges that shows them to be wrong, under no circumstances will the Government agree with it. All valid criticism and evidence will be passed off as “scaremongeringâ€. Better still, the Government don’t read the evidence then no-one can accuse them of knowing the facts but ignoring them. Alternatively, officials may be able to find an obscure or outdated source that on the surface appears to contradict the evidence.

 

Blame the victims

 

Extravagant housing benefit claims may only happen in a few isolated cases, but even so the press will amplify and stigmatise those few, especially if they are large families, unemployed, migrants or – even better – all three. The Government gives the impression that such claims make up most of the welfare budget. They won’t ever admit that over half of welfare spending goes to older people, as they are seen as deserving of it, by the general public. If the Coalition is talking about housing benefit, they will try to give the impression that it’s spent by the tenants themselves to fund their indolent lifestyles – they won’t ever confess that the money goes directly to landlords who are pushing up rents because there are insufficient houses available. There is the old Poor Law binary conceptual schema, especially resurrected to inform Tory narratives – the notion of â€deserving†and “undeserving†poor, which is implicit in all of their anti-welfare and anti-public service rhetoric.

 

The Government use keywords and sound bites in debate, speeches and in the media. They repeatedly refer to “scroungersâ€â€™, â€the workshyâ€, “strivers†not “skivers†and talk about “subsidised housingâ€,and not council homes. (£23,000,000,000 every year is given to private landlords in subsidies by the tax payer). This helps “confirm†the impression that most welfare spending is a waste of (“striving†tax payers’) money. Suggestions for new and even more derogative terms are always welcome. IDS has made a good attempt to link welfare recipients in the public collective consciousness with drug addicts and alcoholics. Other MPs are following his lead. Again, evidence that is presented to the contrary is dismissed, usually with angry derision and a renewed psychological and linguistic assault on the victims, and/or the label of â€scaremongering†directed at the critic that presented the evidence.

 

Another strategy employed by the Tories is to manipulate the victims of their savage cuts via propaganda, so they blame each other. Those in low paid work can blame the poor unemployed for the economic recession and the misery of the cuts, those unemployed people can blame poor immigrants, and everyone can blame the poor “feckless†and “fraudulent†sick and disabled people. The Coalition are very adept at creating folk devils and moral outrage. It’s an old and established bullying tactic to blame the victim, as this serves to cover up the abuse of the victim or to “justify†that abuse. The Tories managed to use others to persecute victims further in order to oppress and silence them. Scapegoating victims and persecution is also one of the hallmarks of an authoritarian Government, one that does not serve the needs of the public, but rather, sees the public as a means of serving Government needs.

 

Deny that the cuts are taking place.

 

The Government will point out if there is any part of any budget that they decided to protect, however small, and they will grossly exaggerate its importance. Take a lesson from Grant Shapps: every time someone has said funding for homelessness is being cut and services are being decimated, he would point to his Department’s small fund for homelessness prevention, and claim that because it hadn’t been reduced, other services had been unaffected, or – oh yes of course – any cuts are the fault of the Local Authorities. The ones that have had their funding drastically cut by Central Government, and that will face even more cuts once the Localism Bill is implemented.

 

It’s obvious to a fool that the scale of the welfare cuts in reality must mean massive suffering and hardship. Furthermore, Labour find and present deserving examples of cases , such as people dying of cancer, homeless ex-servicemen, that sort of thing. (There are many, many deserving examples of cases, too.) One Tory tactic is to almost always offer to investigate the particular case, implying they may do something (even though they won’t). Another is that they point to the money that’s been set aside for special cases (e.g. Discretionary Housing Payments). They never fail to give the impression that this is sufficient to deal with any genuine hardship. Usually there is mention of an amount e.g. Discretionary Housing Payments total £60 million in 2012/13. This will seem a large sum to the public even though it’s only a tiny fraction of the cuts taking place. There isn’t a chance in hell that such a small amount of funding “on one side†will alleviate the chaos, suffering and mass homelessness that is to come when the bedroom tax, new council ‘poll’ tax and benefit cap are implemented and their effects hit hard, which they undoubtedly will despite the pseudo-reassuring Tory rhetoric that glides with glib indifference over the surface of these horrors.

 

Stick a public plaster on it.

 

Unfortunately some problems are so big and so obvious that the Coalition have to pretend they are doing something about them. For example, every fool knows builders have almost stopped building. Given that the housing budget had one of the biggest cuts of all in the Spending Review, there’s precious little they can can do, but they will pretend otherwise. Firstly, they argue that output is going up even when it’s going down (Tory tip – don’t appear on Sunday Politics, choose programmes where they don’t do their research). Secondly, the Coalition always have to hand some useful initiative available that sounds like it might solve the problem, even if it’s far too small to make any difference. Grant gave us NewBuy and FirstBuy, which both sound sufficiently impressive, but then they may need to invent one or two more when people realise how inconsequential they are. The Coalition have said they are selling more homes under the right to buy Scheme, as if this helps solve the problems, even though they aren’t and it doesn’t.

 

Richard Vize made an excellent point in the Guardian last week that Cameron and Co. are undermining Local Government and failing to prepare people for the depth of the cuts that are now hitting them – with much worse still in the pipeline. He says that ministers are “giving the impression that public services can indeed manage cuts without pain or profound change. They can’t.†How on earth can the Coalition expect to be taken seriously as a Government, if they make cuts on an unprecedented scale over a dangerously tight time-scale, but refuse even to admit there might be consequences for public services?

 

Perhaps the frightening answer is that they refuse to admit it because their intention is to push ahead relentlessly, and regardless of public opinion, and that they don’t care about the consequences.

The Tory-led Coalition denies that there is unemployment. Or indeed any hardship at all, or sacrifices made through elitist economic policy-making. They blame anyone other than the ministers who have instituted the cuts. Whenever some new example of the horrendous effects of their policies is presented to them, they have a range of stock responses. You have to wonder if there is a standard Whitehall crib sheet for ministers. Well here is what the cheat sheet looks like, in the interests of democracy and open Government:-

http://i1359.photobucket.com/albums/q799/magnacube/f37f14c8-bfc1-494b-b101-c5e5139fabe6_zps664d0dca.jpg

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Would you believe it he is -

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http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/13/iain-duncan-smith-accused_n_3075494.html

Iain Duncan Smith Accused Of 'Misrepresenting' Benefit Statistics By Economist Jonathan Portes

 

The work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has been accused of "misrepresenting" statistics on welfare to falsely praise the the effects of the government's new benefit cap.

 

Duncan Smith announced on Friday that figures showing the number of people expected to be hit by the cap - which comes into force this week in London before being rolled out through the rest of the country - had fallen from 56,000 to 40,000, with 8,000 claimants finding work through JobCentre Plus.

 

"Already we've seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs. This clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact," the Conservative MP said.

 

However, Jonathan Portes, a leading economist and director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and former economist for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), disputes Duncan Smith's claims.

"The actual analysis published by the Department for Work and Pensions makes it quite clear that they do not attempt to analyse any impact of behavioural change and that there is as yet no evidence one way or the other that there is behavioural change," Portes told the BBC's Today programme on Saturday.

 

Portes was careful not to criticise the DWP, saying their statistics are accurate, but that the statistics have been misused by Duncan Smith.

 

"I think it is very unfortunate. These statistics are very important. Government analysts, economists statisticians work very hard to produce and they provide important information to the public," added Portes, who regularly writes on economic policy and the misuse and misrepresentation of statistics on his own blog, Not The Treasury View, the Guardian and the Huffington Post UK.

 

"It is very important that ministers should not seek to misrepresent what those stats actually do or don't show. That detracts from the public's faith in the analysis produced by government statisticians.

 

"This is, I am afraid, a consistent pattern of trying to draw out of the statistics things which they simply don't show."

 

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Not again Ian! Well you certainly are consistent i will give you that, and with the amount of mistakes you are making i am sure you would get a job with Atos anytime!

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http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2013/04/atos-flaws-in-the-governments-case-exposed/

MP Michael Meacher

Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton

 

Atos: flaws in the Government’s case exposed

April 14th, 2013

 

Several recent events have further highlighted the fault lines in government policy and practice over the Atos work assessments:

 

1 The debate which I initiated in the House on 21 March finally revealed, when the stand-in junior minister Esther McVey finally got around to it after all the padded guff, that the reason the minister Mark Hoban refused to meet the delegation from Spartacus was a single sentence in a near-100 page Spartacus report which was anyway a quote from an external expert, not written at all by the authors of the report. I therefore wrote to Hoban on 26 March renewing my request for the delegation, but have so far not heard, so I will look out for him in the lobby tomorrow and trust this time he will not fob me off with another false or lame excuse – particularly when there have been some significant developments on another, related front.

 

2 Atos, the French IT business, has now been awarded the lion’s share of the new PIP contracts to which people are being transferred from DLA, but what is striking about these latest arrangements is that the face-to-face interviews will be carried out by 14 Atos sub-contractors – one does wonder why Atos is needed at all, and why the DWP can’t arrange directly with these sub-contractors. The latter are mostly NHS trusts, enabling work to be carried out in the community. Lanarkshire NHS, for example, are using trained physiotherapists, occupational therapists and medics to carry out the assessments. So the real point is obviously this: if these trained medical personnel employed by an NHS trust are being used for PIP, why not also for the WCAs?

 

3 Atos are also now saying that for the PIP contracts they will present information from a wider variety of sources, at an earlier stage, thus reducing the number of successful appeals. Nick Barry, general manager of the PIP contracts for Atos, says “We don’t make the rules; we apply the DWP criteria. I can’t control the policy, but I can ensure we have sensitively trained staffâ€. Bully for him, so why not apply the same methods for the WCAs?

 

4 It has now emerged that in one place at least in England the Harrington recommendations have been implemented in full, notably lengthy and detailed interviews which explore the capability for work very thoroughly. It means that the DWP guidelines (we mustn’t say targets) of undertaking 11 interviews a day are reduced to 4, but the result is that the assessments have been found to be almost 100% correct – quite apart from avoiding all the fear, pain and distress caused by superficial examinations and wrong conclusions. So why can’t these methods be introduced everywhere?

 

We want an answer, urgently, Mr. Hoban, on all these points.