Tag Archives: cultural

Delays won’t stop Universal Credit’s ‘cultural change’ – to dishonesty, lies and threats

Sinking Shiplee: Howard Shiplee is the man who has been hired to spread the DWP culture of dishonesty and maladministration across all the major British social security benefits.

Sinking Shiplee: Howard Shiplee is the man who has been hired to spread the DWP culture of dishonesty and maladministration across all the major British social security benefits.

You know a Tory policy is in serious trouble when the Daily Telegraph starts publishing articles criticising it.

Today, Universal Credit is on the Telegraph‘s naughty step – not for the first time! – with current ‘director general’ Howard Shiplee (my word, they love making up impressive names for themselves, don’t they?) admitting it has been “plagued by problems”, as the newspaper’s headline puts it.

These include:

  • Technical problems in the merging of benefit office, HMRC and council IT systems
  • Bureaucratic problems
  • Scheduling problems as the scheme’s timetable has slipped further and further back
  • Personnel problems, with Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Failure Smith claiming official let him down, forcing him to employ private sector experts to get the scheme back on track (but it still isn’t)
  • Poor project management, including poor management of suppliers
  • Lack of transparency, with too much attention focused on what was working and not enough on what wasn’t

The plan was to roll out Universal Credit for all new claimants from October onwards, but this has been scaled back to just six Job Centres. It began in a single Job Centre in April, where calculations have been worked out on paper.

Ministers say the final deadline, to introduce the system for all claimants by 2017, will be met – but it seems increasingly likely that – if Labour wins the 2015 election – the whole plan will be consigned to the political scrapyard where, in this writer’s opinion, it belongs.

But Mr Shiplee said he was working on introducing the “cultural” elements of the proposed scheme while awaiting the development of a new IT system, and you need to know what that means.

It means spreading the culture of dishonesty, that has been bred and nurtured in the DWP’s handling of ESA, to the five other benefits that are to be merged into UC.

They are: Income Support, income-based Jobseekers Allowance, tax credits (child and working), housing benefit and budgeting loans.

“This is about changing the way we do business – and changing people’s behaviour by ensuring there is always an incentive to be in work,” said Shiplee. Meaning: We will lie when assessing your claims; we will intentionally mishandle your claim to make it appear that you do not deserve benefit and we will maladminister any appeals; if you do receive benefit, we will harass you to take part in our silly made-up programmes when you could be doing better things; if we find a way to cut you off, or you give up in despair, we will claim that as a positive benefit outcome; and if you suffer hardship, destitution or health problems up to and including death as a result, we will not record them because we can claim it is nothing to do with us.

That is my experience of the DWP, based on Mrs Mike’s experience with ESA.

You’ll be aware that she currently has an appeal against being put into the work-related activity group, based on medical evidence and the expert opinion of a work programme provider. The current word from the DWP is that she must undergo another work capability assessment.

The reason given is that she has claimed her health has deteriorated since her original assessment in 2012 but this is nonsense.

Her appeal was made against the original decision – based on that 2012 assessment. Another WCA won’t have any bearing on that.

Instead, the matter should have gone to a tribunal, as the DWP’s own decision maker failed to make a decision when the case was considered, in April.

That hearing could have taken place by now; instead the DWP has sat on its thumbs and done nothing, waiting for the time-limited claim to come to an end in order to claim – yes – a ‘positive benefit outcome’.

There was no communication with the claimant and therefore there was no way for Mrs Mike to know what was happening until she discovered her benefit had been stopped, a couple of weeks ago.

Now imagine that situation magnified to include not only every ESA claimant, but the many millions of UK citizens who claim all the other main benefits. What do you think will happen when this “cultural” change is applied to them?

Chaos.

Do you claim any benefits? Do you know somebody who does?

If so, you’d better do something about it, before it’s too late.

IDS off the hook with ICC – so evidence needed of Atos deaths

Brian McArdle. On the BBC’s Question Time last Thursday, Iain Duncan Smith flew into a rage when Owen Jones challenged him about what happened to Mr McArdle, “57 years old, paralysed down one side, blind in one eye; he couldn’t speak. He died one day after being found ‘fit for work’ by Atos.”

People whose family members have died while going through the DWP/Atos work capability assessment are being urged to contact a disability specialist – who has been seeking international legal action against the austerity-enforced injustice.

Vox Political reported back in September that Samuel Miller had contacted the International Criminal Court in The Hague, intending to file a complaint against Iain Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling and Maria Miller, the ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions, considered most responsible for “draconian welfare reforms and the resultant deaths of their society’s most vulnerable”.

Mr Miller got in touch over the weekend, but said that the result had been disappointing: “They stated that the International Criminal Court has a very limited jurisdiction. The Court may only address the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as defined by Articles 6 to 8 of the Rome Statute.”

The Rome Statute is the document under which the ICC was established. Article 7, which covers crimes against humanity, states: “For the purpose of this Statute, “crime against humanity” means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

“(k) Inhumane acts … intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”

I thought this – Article 7 (k) – was a perfect description of what the DWP and its ministers are trying to achieve, and Mr Miller agreed. But he said: “Clearly the ICC is striving to discourage the filing of austerity complaints.”

There is a way forward. He added: “On a welcome note, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently acknowledged that austerity measures may violate human rights — which certainly is a step in the right direction.”

He’s right. The chair of the UN committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Ariranga Govindasamy Pillay said on October 23 that, although member states face tough decisions when dealing with rising public deficits, austerity measures are potentially violations of their legal obligations to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

“All States Parties should avoid at all times taking decisions which lead to the denial or infringement of economic, social and cultural rights,” Pillay said, citing an open letter to States Parties from the committee earlier this year that clarified the committee’s position on austerity measures.

By ratifying the Covenant, member states like the UK have a legally binding obligation to progressively improve, without retrogression, universal access to goods and services such as healthcare, education, housing and social security and to ensure just and favourable conditions of work, without discrimination, in accordance with established international standards. These rights must be achieved by using the maximum of available resources.

Pillay pointed out that austerity measures are also a disincentive to economic growth and thereby hamper progressive realization of economic and social rights.

The committee had pointed out that social insecurity and political instability, as seen in parts of Europe today, were also potential effects of the denial or infringement of economic, social and cultural rights.

The poor, women, children, persons with disabilities, older persons, people with HIV/AIDS, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and refugees were particularly at risk, the committee had noted.

Having identified the possibility, we come to the burden of proof. Mr Miller said: “My best hope lies in procuring coroner’s reports where the cause of death is found to be destitution and/or suicide.”

Inevitably, there is a problem. The UK Coronial system does not involve the collating of such information, nor does it look for national trends. The role of the Coroner is case specific, so wider information is not available. This is because the system of inquests into deaths was never intended to investigate whether those deaths were being caused by insane decisions of the government itself.

The law in relation to death certification may be amended in 2014 to provide for Medical Examiners whose role will be to examine such matters – but that is two years from now, and the DWP/Atos system could pile up another 7,600 bodies in that time (using the generally-accepted average of 73 deaths per week).

Mr Miller has written to the DWP, seeking a change of coroners’ duties to allow proper and robust reporting of trends such as stress-related deaths, suicides and/or destitution deaths of welfare recipients and recipients who perished shortly after being stripped of their benefits can be reported to both the DWP and the Ministry of Justice.

But I think we all know there is little chance of success there. This government is hardly going to hand over the tools by which its own ministers might end up in an international court. They’re insane, but they’re not stupid!

So people are going to have to do it themselves. We know about high-profile cases in which deaths have been blamed on Atos. Information about the others needs to be available now.

This is why I want to appeal for anyone who has lost a loved one because of the DWP/Atos work capability assessment system to get in touch with Mr Miller. He needs to know the verdict that was reached at the inquests into their deaths.

His email address is [email protected]

I would strongly urge that anyone writing to Mr Miller keeps their correspondence to the point. It is to be hoped that he will receive a strong response, but this entails a large amount of work. It is therefore important to make that work as easy as possible, perhaps by putting the deceased’s name, address and the verdict at the top of your email.