What did we expect? Benefit assessors haven’t progressed towards improving safeguards for the vulnerable
This should make your blood boil.
Yes, there’s a crisis going on involving the coronavirus pandemic. That shouldn’t mean work on other life-threatening issues should stop.
And this is a life-threatening issue. Jodey Whiting is only the most well-known among many people who have died because the Department for Work and Pensions ignored its own rules for safeguarding vulnerable people.
And now we find that after an entire year, the companies involved in assessing people for disability benefits have made no progress in improving their safeguarding procedures. None at all.
Last year, freedom of information responses from more than a third of councils across England, Scotland and Wales showed that Atos, Capita and Maximus had made just four safeguarding referrals to those local authorities over the previous three years.
Now a fresh series of freedom of information requests has shown the three outsourcing giants appear to have taken barely any notice of those concerns.
Despite repeated warnings about the need to inform social services departments when there are clear and significant concerns about a claimant’s safety or welfare, they issued a total of just two referrals each during 2019 and the first month of 2020 across 89 councils.
It seems to This Writer that the lives of benefit claimants mean little to these money-making giants – or to their client, the Department for Work and Pensions.
And why should they? Every time someone dies, the DWP and the Tory government sweep the facts under the carpet.
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in that case then there should be a petition for a independent complaints procedure along the lines of NHS Pals, that way the bad worms will be thrown out fairly quickly, considering that this lot could go back into nhs and with the warnings of various amounts of due diligence it is only a matter of time before there a proper case, I cannot actually mention the case however it was contributory suicide and the company involved ended up with a extremely heavy compensation, a few of those on the dwp doorstep and they won’t last long, hitting capita and atos with that, yeah I like to see that, the legal costs would bust them eventually