Suella Braverman: we don’t have an image showing her expression when she was challenged to correct the record but you can bet it was close to this.
This is yet another shocking display of contempt for Parliament by Suella Braverman.
The Home Secretary gave a statement to MPs yesterday (June 5, 2023) on the number of people awaiting an initial decision on whether they would be granted asylum in the UK – and it was inaccurate, according to the official figures.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper pointed this out in a point of order but the Deputy Speaker, Eleanor Laing, did not demand a correction, as you can see below:
#SuellaBraverman brazenly lied at the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons (again), but refused to correct the record.
Dep. Speaker cared more about how the liar was called out than that she had lied.
The figures show that the total number of cases has indeed increased, as Cooper said:
Here’s the table showing total backlog of asylum decisions awaiting an initial decision up from Dec 2022 when pledge was made. It does show “legacy backlog” down – which is cases lodged before June 2022. But newer cases is sharply up so the total is up too. https://t.co/bAnO4NLVHopic.twitter.com/HauV8iGd41
This Writer can’t actually see the numbers that either politician mentioned in the figures provided; the total number of people waiting for a decision seems to have been more or less static for months.
But that’s not a fall, so Braverman should have corrected the record either way.
Not only has she not done so, but she has actively refused.
That’s contempt of Parliament, as far as I can tell. It is a serious breach of the Ministerial Code and she should be brought to book for it.
But will that happen?
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[Benefit fraud] investigators may … check … social media accounts and search … online profiles for pictures, location check-ins, and other evidence which may or may not be useful to them. Those who use social media a lot will leave a trail of their life and habits, often allowing investigators to piece together a picture of what that person’s life actually looks like.
If this is not consistent with the details of that person’s claim for benefits, that evidence may end up being used against them.
Who decides what is “consistent with the details of [a] person’s claim for benefits”?
The DWP is currently recruiting, as decision-makers, people who have no qualifications whatsoever for making such decisions.
What do they know about how people with disabilities live their lives – or the people who care for them (like This Writer)?
Terrible mistakes have been made in recent years, with payments withheld from people who deserved them – based on the flimsiest excuses.
Now it seems Tom Pursglove is opening the door for more – and worse.
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The Department for Work and Pensions has unilaterally decided to ignore a ruling by the Parliamentary Ombudsman that it should pay compensation to 118,000 people who suffered maladministration at its hands.
The decision sets a deeply worrying precedent as it could lead to other people suffering maladministration receiving no rectification or compensation.
Here are the details in a handy YouTube video:
And journalist David Hencke, on his Westminster Confidential site, had this to say:
Since seeing this I have contacted Sir Stephen Timms, Labour chair of the Commons Works and Pensions Committee, to see if, as they promised the Ombudsman, the DWP had alerted him to the decision. Initially he said he could not recall getting this and promised to investigate what has happened.
There is another big issue. This could impact on the Waspi campaign and the all party state pension inequality group of MPs to get compensation for women through a report from the Ombudsman. If after the Ombudsman says compensation is due the DWP follows this practice for the 3.8 million – six people will get compensation and the remaining 3.6 million still alive will have to write individual letters outlining their case to the ministry for any money due which will take even more time to resolve. You have been warned.
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Yet again: the PPE used in UK hospitals at the start of the Covid crisis is pictured bottom right. The infographic was made when the UK had hardly any personal protective equipment – but now Matt Hancock is trying to save his job by claiming there was never any shortage.
The Death Health Secretary is trying to rewrite history:
Health Secretary Matt Hancock shamelessly refuses to apologize, show any regret or remorse for breaking the law, says what he did was in national interest & tries to rewrite history saying because of what he did there was no national shortage at any point of PPE
The Tory government of the day was told in 2016/17, after Operation Cygnus, that the UK’s health service would be unable to cope with a pandemic virus infection without plentiful supplies of protective equipment for health workers… and decided that such an investment was too expensive.
This led to a situation in March 2020 when an NHS procurement chief, Alan Hoskins tweeted: “What a day, no gowns NHS Supply Chain. Rang every number escalated to NHS England, just got message back — no stock, can’t help, can send you a PPE pack. Losing the will to live, god help us all.”
The tweet was subsequently deleted, possibly under duress as even then the Tory government was trying to hide the facts. As This Writer put it on April 3 last year: “it seems doctors have been warned not to make any comments about shortages on social media, as well as avoiding talking to journalists, and NHS England has taken over media operations for many hospitals and health trusts in order to ensure that they all stay “on message”.”
On April 17 I brought public attention to the plight of nurses who had been forced to wear bin bags instead of proper protection. According to Metro,
Three nurses who wore bin bags on their shifts due to a shortage in personal protective equipment (PPE) have reportedly tested positive for coronavirus.
Just weeks ago, the nurses had shared a photo of themselves with clinical waste bags on their heads and feet as they issued a plea for proper masks, gowns and gloves at Northwick Park Hospital, in Harrow.
I wrote: “One of them had said they were all “terrified” that this might happen, knowing that colleagues had caught the disease from patients, and having treated those colleagues. They had seen what the illness does… We know what the government that failed them is going to give them: Platitudes.”
How right I was.
On April 19 I quoted a Sunday Times piece on the Johnson government’s PPE failures that showed he had sent 278,800 items of protective kit to China in February – immediately before the UK had needed it:
Downing Street admitted on February 24 — just five days before NHS chiefs warned a lack of PPE left the health service facing a “nightmare” — that the UK government had supplied 1,800 pairs of goggles and 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China.
Don’t worry – it seems we may be getting some of it back. It’s just that the government isn’t sure, having lost £15 billion worth of PPE, some of which it has bought (back?) from other countries including China:
The government is not sure where billions of pounds worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) is located, the head of the National Audit Office has disclosed.
Gareth Davies, the comptroller and auditor general, said outside consultants had been brought into Whitehall to find all equipment, which is stored at different sites around the country, or is in transit from abroad.
Under questioning from the public accounts committee, Davies said: “We have been working closely with the DoH. It has commissioned consultants to advise it on first of all understanding where all the PPE that has been bought actually is. It sounds like a strange question but it is a really big issue because it is not all standing neatly in an NHS store somewhere.
“We have amounts in containers, in storage around the country, there’s some on the docks and there is some en route somewhere from China.”
On April 18 last year, I quoted a Mirror report that
NHS doctors and nurses will be asked to treat patients infected with coronavirus without full-length gowns – or re-use the ones they have, it has emerged tonight.
The Government has been under fire for weeks over the distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE), with some frontline staff warning that they have had to work in situations where they feel unsafe.
Public Health England guidelines currently state that full-length waterproof surgical gowns should by worn by medical workers to stop Covid-19 spreading into someone’s mouth or nose.
However, there has now been a U-turn advising staff to wear a flimsy plastic apron when gowns run out or not wear one at all
And Matt Hancock has the cheek to tell us now that there was never a shortage.
Here’s a tweet about PPE availability in one hospital on April 19:
Well this is some gold dust…
A minister has tweeted the PPE stock levels and really importantly the daily usage rates of PPE at their local hospital trust in Lincolnshire – pointing out that such transparency helps confidence… pic.twitter.com/jTTpueK6Mg
The following day we learned a much-touted delivery of PPE from Turkey would last just three days. It had been previously reported that Boris Johnson had refused to join an EU scheme to provide PPE where it was needed (see the Peter Stefanovic tweet towards the top of this article).
The UK’s stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) for use in a pandemic… has been outsourced to a private company, Movianto, which was sold two weeks ago for $133m (£107m) by its owner, a large US healthcare group.
Later in the Covid crisis we learned that the Tories were using the emergency procurement system which bypasses the competitive tendering process and allows the government to purchase items and services direct from chosen firms, was being abused.
Tories were giving cash to their cronies in return for equipment that simply wasn’t fit to be used.
The classic example is that of Board of Trade president (and cheese queen) Liz Truss, who spent £150 million of your money on 50 million face masks for the NHS that couldn’t be used.
She had been approached for the contract by one of her long-standing friends and advisors, Andrew Mills. Oh, and apparently it was sourced through a tax haven so this guy can keep all the money.
Mills was subsequently removed from his advisory position. But Truss didn’t go anywhere.
All the way down the line the Tories have failed us.
They gave away our PPE when we needed it.
They failed to join an international scheme to provide it where it was needed.
They failed to source it themselves.
They gave money to their friends and cronies who had no experience in providing PPE, and received trash in return.
As a result, health service professionals caught Covid-19. Many of them died.
And Matt Hancock, who is on video record from last year, saying he wished he could wave a magic wand and eliminate the PPE shortage, is now telling us he shouldn’t have to resign for breaking the law by hiding contract details – because he made sure there was never a PPE shortage.
He is a LIAR.
He should resign NOW.
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Uncannily accurate: The Conservative government’s genuine policy towards PIP claimants may as well be as it appears in this cartoon from 2017.
It would be easy to forget – during the general election campaign – that Conservative government policies have contributed to the deaths of thousands of disabled people.
According to the Department for Work and Pensions, they died after the government rejected their claims for Personal Independence Payment – or before the government could be bothered to make a decision.
I refer to official figures released on February 1 this year.
They state that 7,990 claimants, who died within six months of their claim being registered, had had their claims rejected. Can anybody doubt that these decisions were wrong?
And 5,219 claimants died after registering but before the government made a decision on their claim.
Now, I’m not saying that all 13,119 of them would be still alive if their claims had not been handled under Conservative government rules.
But I’m absolutely sure the Tories did not treat them reasonably and many of them may still have been alive today, under a different system.
The newspapers – and This Site – have been full of stories demonstrating the ways in which the Tories have mistreated vulnerable people.
It is clear that anybody voting for the Conservatives supports the untimely deaths of people with disabilities.
But now the people have a chance to put and end to the cruelty.
All we have to do is vote for a Labour government.
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If you thought the Department for Work and Pensions was a slaughterhouse with people running it, when they let machines administer benefit claims we’ll see some real maladministration!
That’s my opinion, anyway.
We live in a society in which more than seven-tenths of appeals against benefit denial are successful – indicating a serious procedural failing that the Conservative government has ignored entirely.
Worse than ignored, in fact.
It seems the Tories are diverting millions of pounds away from benefit payment, to develop artificial intelligences capable of cocking up claims in worse ways than even the human beings currently assigned to that task.
In fact, I’m wondering whether one of these automated systems has been deployed to screw up Mrs Mike’s claim for ESA.
We received a letter last week, retroactively refusing her claim for income-related ESA from August 2012, on the basis that I had been working more than 24 hours per week.
I’m on Carers’ Allowance; Vox Political is a sideline that I carry out in my spare time which – so far – has provided me with earnings within the limit placed on people in receipt of that benefit.
And on the date mentioned, it was just a hobby; I wasn’t trying to earn money with it and I wasn’t carrying out any other work either.
It is an entirely false claim.
Sure, it may be possible for a human being to make such a mistake – especially a human being working for the DWP. I think it is even more likely that a machine could do so.
And I’m not alone:
The UK government is accelerating the development of robots in the benefits system in a digitisation drive that vulnerable claimants fear could plunge them further into hunger and debt, the Guardian has learned.
Claimants have warned the existing automation in UC’s “digital by default” system has already driven some to hunger, breakdown and even attempted suicide.
One described the online process as a “Kafka-like carousel”, another as “hostile” and yet another as a “form of torture”.
Several said civil servants already appeared to be ruled by computer algorithms, unable to contradict their verdicts.
There is evidence of rising error rates in parts of the welfare system that have already been automated.
A system of realtime data-sharing between the HMRC tax office and the DWP about universal credit claimants’ earnings is triggering more and more disputes, with the rate rising fourfold between May 2017 and October 2018, according to the government’s own figures, with up to 5,700 people a month affected.
Serious questions are being asked about the validity of the sources being used by the automated systems:
The DWP has refused freedom of information requests to explain how it gathers data on citizens.
The ministry has previously told parliament it gathers data from private credit reference agencies, the police, the Valuation Office Agency, the Land Registry and the National Fraud Initiative, which gather information from public and private bodies.
But it is now declining to update the list, claiming it would “compromise the usefulness of that data”.
It seems more likely that it would reveal the uselessness of that data, and the DWP is trying to hide the use of false information to wrongly push people off-benefit.
I’ll keep you all updated about my own case.
Hopefully we’ll know something conclusive before anybody else dies.
I would appreciate your comments on this development.
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Boris Johnson: One may imagine that his face had a similar expression after he was woken up to be told the Supreme Court’s decision.
This morning, Boris Johnson was being urged to resign for giving public money and a place on trade junkets to a personal friend. Now he’s facing a much more serious charge.
Boris Johnson has tried to overrule Parliamentary democracy, and he has manipulated the Queen in order to do so.
The only proper course of action for him now is to come back from the UN with his tail between his legs and offer the Queen his resignation.
But you can bet he won’t do that willingly.
In less than two months, he has made himself the worst prime minister the UK has ever had. The government falls further into disgrace with every day he remains in position.
But it is what he has always wanted so, like a spoiled child, he’ll stay right where he is until someone forces him out.
Let us hope that happens sooner, rather than later.
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Liz Truss’s claim to have “inadvertently” approved the sale of military hardware to Saudi Arabia should be enough to have her sacked for incompetence – but there is a better use for her.
The decision has put the International Trade Secretary in contempt of the Court of Appeal, which ordered the Tory government not to approve any new licences to Saudi for use in Yemen and to retake all the decisions on existing licences in a legally compliant manner.
It seems clear that these orders have been ignored by a government department that has a “longstanding and shameful” policy of maximising arms sales regardless of the consequences.
As Andrew Smith of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade points out in his Independent article:
This surely discredits the government’s tired old mantra that the UK supposedly has some of the most “rigorous” and “robust” arms export controls in the world.
Since the bombing of Yemen began in March 2015 the UK has licensed £5.3bn worth of arms to the Saudi regime, including fighter jets, bombs and missiles. These weapons have played a central role in the brutal war, which has created the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.
The extent of the UK government’s support was on display last week when a Saudi military delegation was invited to London by Truss’s department for Defence & Security Equipment International 2019 (DSEI), the biggest arms fair in the world.
While at DSEI, Saudi representatives will have been welcomed by UK civil servants and lobbied for further sales by the world’s biggest arms companies. Nobody will have dared to utter a word about the abysmal state of human rights in Saudi Arabia or the human cost of its bombardment of Yemen.
At the heart of discussions will have been the prospect of further fighter jet sales. Since 2016, the government has been in negotiations with the Saudi Royal Family and the UK’s largest arms company, BAE Systems, to secure the sale of 48 Eurofighter jets.
The deal, which appears to have been put on hold following the court verdict and the international condemnation of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, is thought to be worth £10bn. With that kind of money on the table, government ministers have been prepared to act as cheerleaders for the arms industry.
Mr Smith says 60,000 Yemeni people have already died. If this £10 billion deal goes through, many thousands more are also likely to perish.
Because Tories believe money is more important than lives.
That is the only explanation that allows us to understand why the Conservatives are willing to put themselves in contempt of the UK courts (and consider what this portends for the Supreme Court’s decision on Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament, next week).
I don’t want to be complicit in the murder of thousands more innocent people, encouraged by my government.
The only way to stop it, it seems, is to ensure that the dimwit who has been allowing it is made to do what she should have been doing in the first place.
Let’s see Liz Truss stay in post, for now – but only to show us how she is putting the Court of Appeal’s order into practise, and the concrete results arising from it.
Time is ticking down: But the wheels of justice move slowly.
The BBC ought to have a slapped wrist for the headline on one of today’s (August 30) biggest stories.
Judge refuses to halt Parliament suspension plans implies that a legal challenge to Boris Johnson’s prolonged prorogation of Parliament has been stopped altogether, and that isn’t correct.
No – the bid by 75 MPs to secure an interim interdict, ruling it illegal and unconstitutional for the shutdown to take place now, has only been delayed.
The Scottish judge, Lord Doherty, wants access to the arguments of both sides – including the government – before making a decision.
His announcement is therefore expected on Wednesday – which is still in good time before the prorogation can come into effect.
A Scottish judge has refused to order a temporary halt to Boris Johnson’s plan to shut down the UK Parliament.
A group of 75 parliamentarians were seeking an interim interdict – similar to an injunction – at the Court of Session ahead of a full hearing.
Their request was declined by Lord Doherty, who said he was not satisfied there was a “cogent need” for an interdict.
However the full hearing will now be heard next Tuesday, rather than Friday.
Lord Doherty said this was because it was in the interests of justice, and in the public interest, for the case – which is opposed by the UK government – to proceed as quickly as possible.
The judge will not decide on the merits of the case until he has heard legal arguments from both sides on Tuesday, with his final ruling potentially being delivered the following day.
Whatever the outcome next week, the prorogation challenge is likely to be appealed – to the Inner House of the Court of Session and the UK Supreme Court.
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Department for Work and Pensions: Not to be trusted to judge benefit claims?
There are two sides to this question.
On one, as “some researchers” mentioned in the Disability News Service article – quoted below – make clear, DWP decision-makers are said to be upholding too many of the recommendations by discredited government contractors Atos and Capita.
But on the other, we are faced with the possibility of DWP decision-makers deciding cases on a political basis, under orders from the Conservative government – and we know that those orders would be to fail a high percentage of claims.
From This Writer’s point of view, it seems the appeal process is vital; it is its slowness that should be questioned.
Claimants have to go through a process called Mandatory Reconsideration (MR) before they can even start an appeal against a wrong decision, and this can leave them penniless and struggling to survive for months at a time.
This is highly prejudicial against innocent people who have made their benefit claims in good faith, and whose health may suffer in the time they are forced to wait.
I would call for MR to be scrapped and the appeal process to be sped up, for the sake of claimants’ health.
New figures show that Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) civil servants are questioning only a tiny proportion of the benefit assessment reports written by discredited government contractors Atos and Capita.
Campaigners have been trying for months to secure evidence that would explain why such a high proportion of personal independence payment (PIP) claims that are taken to appeal are successful.
Figures from social security tribunals show the proportion of claimants who won their PIP appeals rose by seven percentage points in a year, from 64 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2016-17 to 71 per cent in the same period of 2017-18.
The new figures, secured by Disability News Service (DNS) through a freedom of information request, may help to explain why so many appeals are successful.
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