Is mainstream news at last realising how government harms disabled people?
This i article is a breath of fresh air. Is mainstream news at last realising how government harms disabled people?
The system to decide people’s personal independence payment (PIP) claims is “horrific” and “target-driven”, former assessors have warned.
The whistleblowers said intense pressure to hit daily targets for the number of disability benefits cases they dealt with affected the quality of their assessments, while the lack of training in complex health conditions made it difficult to write fair reports.
One claimed the system “sets disabled people up to fail”.
This Writer doesn’t have much sympathy for the assessors who were put through stress by the private companies hired by the Tory-run Department for Work and Pensions to thin the number of people claiming PIP. But their revelations about the tricks they were told to use are welcome. Here’s ‘Nicola’ (not her real name):
Nicola worked at Independent Assessment Services (IAS), run by Atos, for almost six months between 2022 and 2023.
“There were lots of things they got us to ask so that we could disprove something later,” she said. “One example is, if they [the claimants] drive and have a licence then it indicates adequate intellect and limb movement due to the action of driving.”
Nicola also said the process did not provide enough flexibility for people with fluctuating conditions. “Anything they couldn’t do on a bad day was only relevant if bad days were over 50 per cent of the time.”
And here’s ‘Daniel’:
Daniel, who worked as a PIP assessor at Capita, another of the companies used by the DWP, said he found the work he had to do “horrific”.
“It’s a system that sets people up to fail. If you can get a bus to a face-to-face assessment, then an assessor can say you can read a timetable, can sit up, and engage with other people, which can all be used against people.”
He said it was “common enough” for Capita’s internal auditors to ask for descriptors – the descriptions of a disabled person’s ability to complete tasks – to be changed so less points were given.
Finally, here’s ‘Karen’:
Karen, a PIP assessor at Atos-run IAS between 2014 and 2016, said the questions put to claimants were “confusing” and made it “immensely difficult to prove people couldn’t do something”.
The trained nurse hated some of the “appalling” queries. “We were told to casually ask them how they got there [to the assessment]. If they had got the bus, we knew it was well over 20 metres away and so some nurses would put that down and they got less points.”
There is nothing new here; This Site has been telling the world the same for more than a decade.
The difference is, i isn’t censored by social media platforms – that newspaper isn’t prevented from making its point by an algorithm that shoves its output so far down readers’ newsfeeds that they’ll never get to it.
That’s the challenge faced by sites like this one.
And that’s why it’s so refreshing to see a mainstream news outlet actually publicising government practice – for the world to see.
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I don’t think the problem has been a reluctance from mass media to cover the deaths and suffering caused by changes to the benefit system. That has been happening. What isn’t being covered is the reason it is happening.
This is all NOTHING to do with attempts to cut the cost of the benefits system. It never has been. Pretty much none of the changes to sickness and disability benefits have saved a penny. It is all about creating a fear amongst healthy people in well paid jobs that they won’t be able to rely on state benefits if they get ill or have an accident, and thus frighten them into taking out private income protection insurance policies to deal with something they have already paid for through tax and NI.
What we need is NOT more coverage of the devastation this is all causing. We need coverage of why this is being done, who is making the profit from it, and how the guilty insurance companies are funding the established political parties.