[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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Flushed out: the Tories have not only agreed to carry out impact assessments on the effects of dumping raw sewage into UK waterways, but they must also set targets for such dumping to be reduced, and introduce fines against privatised water companies that fail to do so, or fail to properly monitor such discharges.
Don’t be discouraged by the Tory carping; this is a victory for anyone who is concerned about raw sewage being dumped into UK waterways.
Labour used an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons to put forward a motion calling on the government to
Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges
The motion also included a provision that would have given the Opposition the ability to take control of the Commons order paper in future and introduce legislation of its own.
Now, why would it do that? It doesn’t have any specific relevance to the sewage issue, as far as This Writer can see.
The Conservatives leaped on what they saw as an opportunity to humiliate Labour, with an amendment that removed the fourth part of the motion but supported the first three.
Because the amendment only deleted words from the motion, Parliamentary procedure meant it would be the first aspect on which MPs would vote – and the Tories’ Parliamentary majority meant it was passed by 290 votes to 188 against.
They then forced a vote on the amended motion. Labour MPs were ordered to abstain on it, because the Tories had amended it in their favour.
Had they, though? Had they really? It still demanded all the measures on sewage that Labour wanted.
And I don’t think anybody in the Labour leadership believed the Tories would allow them to introduce their own legislation.
The amended motion passed with 286 Tory votes – so the Tories pushed through the changes that Labour had demanded.
That means that the Tories are now obliged to
Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges
that they weren’t willing to do before.
And they’re saying they humiliated Labour?
Well, here’s a thing:
Those of us who are concerned about water pollution don’t care.
The changes have been supported – by the Tories who originally opposed them.
So who has been humiliated, really?
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I know: one article has the DWP doing something right; the next has it mistreating claimants. That’s Tory government for you.
This is not the same as the plan to record benefit assessments.
I just wanted to put that right at the top.
Here’s what it is about:
MPs are calling for an urgent government investigation into the use of “covert surveillance” of disabled people by the private sector companies paid to assess eligibility for disability benefits.
The committee received anonymous accounts from disabled people claiming they had been “tricked or tested” by their assessors.
These included claimants who were made to park further away than necessary from the assessment centre to check how far they could walk, and lifts being placed out of order to force claimants to climb the stairs.
DWP told the committee that it has no policy that allows assessment providers Atos, Capita and Maximus to engage in “covert surveillance”.
But DWP guidance does allow assessors to make “informal observations” to check if there are any “discrepancies between the reported need and the actual needs of the claimant”.
In other words, it seems the private firms contracted to assess benefit entitlement are deliberately trying to create traps for benefit claimants, and watching them to see if they fall in.
Is it fair? No.
It’s like the old “ducking-stool” method of determining if someone is a witch: if the claimant manages to attend the assessment, they’re not disabled enough, but if they don’t, they clearly don’t want to continue with their claim.
Vile trickery.
Ask yourself: would you be happy for government employees to covertly monitor your movements on the pretext that you might be lying to them about some aspect of your life?
These are the people who make a fuss about the “nanny state” – but isn’t that what this is all about – taking a supervisory position over you and punishing you for assumed transgressions?
Why do they do it? To meet targets of benefit rejection, set by the government?
That has to be unethical; immoral.
No government employee involved in benefit assessment should be acting in such a manner.
So let’s have that inquiry – as soon as possible (I bet we don’t get it).
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Water: people supported the privatisation because they were told private enterprise would invest in system improvements while making bills cheaper. How much more gullible could they have been?
Here’s a double-whammy:
Most people believe that jail sentences are a fitting punishment for water bosses when their companies are responsible for major pollution spills in our rivers, waterways and shores. The strength of public feeling is revealed by an exclusive YouGov poll commissioned by Good Law Project.
The polling of 2,112 people across Great Britain has revealed that:
60% of respondents believe that the chief executives of water companies should receive prison sentences if they are found to be responsible for serious incidents of water pollution. Only 21% disagree.
82% have heard something about sewage discharges from media coverage about the issue.
53% blame the water companies for sewage discharges into our rivers and seas.
People have had enough. This disgraceful situation needs to be brought to an end urgently.
It follows – doesn’t it? – that the privatisation of the UK’s water supply has been nothing but a horrifying failure and an ecological disaster.
And how do the water firms respond to calls for them to act?
Water firms are making ‘a mockery’ of efforts to link executive pay to environmental performance by refusing to measure how much raw sewage is spewing into rivers and seas, experts say.
Industry regulator Ofwat wants private water companies to align bosses’ bonuses to pollution targets.
But companies do not monitor the amount of sewage being dumped into waterways.
Instead, they collect data on when the spills occur and how long they last.
Campaigners say weak regulators and budget cuts have allowed water companies to get away with a decades-long lack of investment in the Victorian-era sewage network.
And while firms monitor when spills happen and how long they last as part of a range of performance indicators used to set executive bonuses, none of the water companies contacted by the Mail said they monitored the amount of sewage being dumped into waterways.
Bonuses can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
United Utilities, the monopoly water supplier to 7m customers in north-west England … was responsible for 40 per cent of all spills last year.
Its chief executive Steven Mogford received a £727,000 bonus last year as part of his £3.2million pay packet.
United has a £230 million investment at 15 of its 575 treatment work sites to reduce spillages ‘by more than 10m tons a year – the equivalent of 4,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools’, a spokesman for the firm said.
If United has a reliable model to measure volume then, as an environmental campaigner asked in the article,
“Why not share it with the public and the wider industry?”
And what of the regulator?
Ofwat confirmed that so-called ‘event duration monitors’ that companies are installing only measure the number of spills and their duration, not volume.
It has also drawn up plans to block dividend payments – which have totalled an estimated £66billion since privatisation three decades ago – telling boards to ‘take account’ of environmental and customer performance when deciding payouts.
But it has only fined only one company – Southern Water – since sewage spill rules were introduced in 1994.
So: a toothless regulator means privatised, profit-driven water firms have no incentive to invest in improvements to their archaic system, or to stop filling our waterways with untreated sewage.
And they’ll make us pay through the nose for this “service” so they can pay themselves a fortune each year.
Did you vote for this?
And, more to the point:
Would you vote for a political party that would put a stop to it?
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NOTE: Shortly after I published this story, Parliament’s bars announced that they will stop selling alcohol after 10pm. The reason?
MPs said the rules risked making Parliament look “ridiculous” to the public.
That was very much my intention when I wrote the following:
I think it’s great that Parliament has put up its own bars as testing-grounds for the effectiveness of the 10pm pub drinking curfew.
It seems the bars on the Parliamentary estate – the Members’ Dining Room, Adjournment, Smoking Room, Terrace Pavilion, Pugin Room and Members’ Tea Room are exempt as they provide a food and bar service:
A spokesperson for the House of Commons confirmed that the new restrictions on hospitality do not apply to the venues on the parliamentary estate, saying: “As catering outlets providing a workplace service for over 3,100 people working on the Estate, the current regulations on hospitality venues do not apply to Commons facilities.”
Some have said this is another example of Boris Johnson’s cronies setting one law for us and then breaking it themselves. Many of them made reference to Orwell’s Animal Farm (which may soon be banned under Gavin Williamson’s new education rules):
'You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege… 'The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk… ' — Animal Farm pic.twitter.com/FGM49cfGk9
“… Squealer, with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements, and a shrill voice. He was a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point he had a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail which was somehow very persuasive.” Animal Farm pic.twitter.com/3AQuvhX1hY
Others disagree with the Animal Farm reference. I haven’t read it so I’m not in a position to comment.
But I do hope that the authorities at the Parliamentary bars keep us appraised of how their brave effort to keep our democracy in alcohol goes.
They will of course be keeping details of everybody who enters, in case Covid-19 breaks out in one, several, or all of these bars.
I expect regular updates. If they show no infections, we’ll know that it is safe to open all the rest of the UK’s pubs for normal hours again. Won’t we?
Theresa May: She might get her FreeStyleLibre diabetes tool on the NHS, but her government has made sure many members of the public have to pay a fortune for it.
An apparently innocent interlude in Prime Minister’s Questions has opened up a potentially-huge controversy for the Conservative government.
Labour MP Steve McCabe noted that Theresa May uses a FreeStyleLibre diabetes tool, which monitors her condition and warns her when she needs medication. He asked when it would be freely available on the National Health Service. Here’s the dialogue, from the official record of Parliamentary affairs, Hansard:
“Even the Prime Minister’s fiercest critics—I believe she has a few—must be full of admiration for the way in which she manages her diabetic condition and holds down such a tough and demanding job. I understand that she benefits from a FreeStyle Libre glucose monitoring system. Wouldn’t it be nice if she did something to make that benefit available to the half a million people who are denied it because of NHS rationing? Perhaps we could call it “help for the many, not the few”. [907106]
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. I do use a FreeStyle Libre, and it is now available on the national health service, but it is not the only means of continuous glucose monitoring that is available on the NHS. Yesterday I saw a letter from a child—a young girl—who had started on the FreeStyle Libre, but, because of the hypos that she had been having, had been moved to a different glucose monitoring system. There is no one system that is right for everyone; what is important is that those systems are now available on the NHS.”
Technically, she was correct and the FreeStyleLibre is available on the NHS.
But, thanks to Tory meddling, its availability to people with diabetes is based on a postcode lottery.
You may remember that Andrew Lansley’s hated Health and Social Care Act of 2012 imposed Clinical Commissioning Groups on the NHS. These are local organisations that decide which services should be available to patients in their areas, based on the amount of money that is made available to them. The creation of CCGs was justified with a claim that GPs would serve on them – but in fact GPs are far too busy and the work seems to have devolved to businesspeople.
Unite the Union surveyed the 3,392 CCG board members in 2015 and reported that 513 were directors of private healthcare companies: 140 owned such businesses and 105 carried out external work for them. More than 400 CCG board members were shareholders in such companies.
As a result, trust in CCGs’ ability, or indeed willingness, to provide the best-quality healthcare their budgets can afford is low. It seems the bias is more likely towards offering private firms the contracts they want, in order to appease shareholders who sit on these groups.
The FreeStyleLibre – together with those who use it – appears to be a victim of this system.
While it is nominally available on the NHS, as Mrs May claimed, it is not available to huge numbers of NHS patients because the CCGs in their area simply haven’t offered to pay for it. Instead, they have to fund it themselves at a cost of £100 per month.
That’s a “Diabetes Tax”, if you like, of £1,200 per year.
This information comes from a segment of the BBC’s Politics Live that I was lucky enough to notice:
Oh THIS is interesting! .@theresa_may lied to Parliament about her diabetes monitoring patch being available on the NHS. CCGs – brought in as part of the Tory privatisation programme – can refuse to fund it for patients. So May IS denying it to people. #PoliticsLive
Here’s the clip the programme put up on Twitter, in which Type 1 diabetic Tessa Nejranowski destroys Mrs May’s claim:
"I would say it is complete rubbish what the PM said yesterday. It's not widely available" @TNejranowski on access to diabetes patch as used by Theresa May #politicslive
The diabetes monitor that .@theresa_may uses costs £100 a month for people who have to pay for it privately because CCGs refuse to fund it. If you're diabetic, could YOU afford it? #PoliticsLive
Mrs May lied to Parliament. FreeStyleLibre is not available on the NHS – at least, not everywhere in England – and where it is not, people have to pay £1,200 a year to have it privately. That’s a “diabetes tax” imposed on people with the condition by the Conservatives.
And it’s about as strong an argument as any for the dissolution of the CCGs and the repeal of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. But you’ll have to wait for a Labour government before that happens.
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The late Cameron Minshull: This 16-year-old was killed when he was dragged into a lathe due to poor health and safety measures [Image: Daily Mirror].
Work placement providers’ duty of care for people on apprenticeships and other government-sponsored work placements is being questioned after a factory boss was jailed over the death of a 16-year-old youngster.
Cameron Minshull was dragged into a lathe because he was wearing ‘unsuitable’ ill-fitting overalls which hung from his wrists and had not been trained to use the machine, Manchester Crown Court was told.
At the time, he was being paid just £3 an hour, after being rushed into a placement by recruitment agency Lime People Training Solutions – which puts people into apprenticeships in order to get public money from the Conservative Government’s Skills Funding Agency, according to the Daily Mirror.
The factory owner was jailed for eight months and his son received a suspended four-month prison sentence after admitting health and safety offences.
But Lime People Training Solutions was let off with a £75,000 fine – equivalent to its for putting around 17 youngsters in work placements – after denying any such breaches.
This happened because the government isn’t interested in health and safety. It considers calls for proper monitoring to be over-bureaucratic and burdensome.
On the Health and Safety Executive’s website, in the page dealing with work experience, HSE chair Judith Hackett states: “Work placement arrangements are too often seen as over-bureaucratic and burdensome, putting off potential employers.”
She continues: “Employers should already be managing the risks in their workplaces and are best placed to assess whether or not they need to do anything additional for a new young person joining them.”
And she states: “Schools and colleges… should not be second-guessing employers’ risk assessments or requiring additional paperwork.”
This next part is absolutely appalling: “An appreciation of risk and how to deal with it can be one of the biggest benefits offered by a placement.”
Is this appreciation to be gained through the death of an apprentice?
Work placement organiser companies are told: “If you are advised that a particular placement is not possible due to health and safety, the person giving you that advice may well be wrong – there are very few work activities a student cannot do due to health and safety law.
“Remember that the placement provider (employer) has primary responsibility for the health and safety of the student and should be managing any significant risks.” The only step the organiser is advised to take is to talk through the work required of the apprentice/person on the work placement, and discuss relevant precautions. There is no requirement to ensure those precautions are in place.
So that’s all right then. There’s no need to worry about health and safety concerns; they are somebody else’s problem.
Employers are told: “Under health and safety law, work experience students are your employees. You treat them no differently to other young people you employ.
“Simply use your existing arrangements for assessments and management of risks to young people.”
There you have it.
There is no legal requirement for extra measures to ensure the health and safety of young people placed with employers – and nobody checks an employer’s practices to ensure they conform with legal requirements.
The death of Cameron Minshull could have been prevented – but the government couldn’t be bothered.
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Earlier today, Vox Political reported that Labour’s Lord Carter had claimed some hip operations were “costing more than double the amount that they should, with some expensive replacements not lasting as long as cheaper ones”.
A quick stroll through the Internet has now turned up an example of the kind of operation it is likely he meant – and, don’t be surprised, it’s by a private healthcare company.
The report is a few years old (from 2012) but there’s no reason to believe standards have improved at all. Here’s what the Daily Mailhad to say about one person’s experience:
Mrs Collett had been sent to the Haslar Hospital in Portsmouth, under a contract agreed between the NHS and Netcare, a South African health company.
When she came round from the surgery, she was shocked to be told she’d suffered a third-degree burn to her foot, which was scorched almost to the bone.
But worse was to come. She was also in constant pain from her hip replacement.
Within two months, it dislocated twice.
Mrs Collett says a GP told her the prosthesis in her leg was too short and was also loose because insufficient cement had been used to fix it.
The Mail reckoned 17 per cent of hip replacements were being carried out privately in 2012. It seems doubtful that this number has fallen in the years since.
Private healthcare is now monitored by the Care Quality Commission – but that organisation has itself come under fire for failings of its own.
A report by the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, dated August 2014, states very clearly that the NHS is gambling with patients’ health every time it passes them on to the private sector:
The same requirements to report incidents do not apply to private providers as they do to the NHS, which in itself makes it hard to monitor how safe or otherwise private services are. Information about clinical negligence claims against private providers are not publicly available, as they are in the NHS.
Patients themselves have fewer rights in the private sector. Whilst there is a general requirement to operate a complaints procedure, unlike the NHS complaints procedure, those used by private providers afford no statutory rights to the complainant and there is no recourse to the Health Service Ombudsman in the case of private care. There is no statutory requirement to provide for independent advice and support with complaints which is the case with the NHS. Consequently it is much harder to hold a private provider to account.
Even taking legal action for clinical negligence against a private provider is more problematic than with the NHS, where everything is overseen by the NHS Litigation Authority. A claimant against a private provider can be faced with complications over whether it is the hospital or the individual surgeon or sub-contractor who is liable.
All too often, in addition to the patient who is harmed through no fault of their own, it is the NHS which ends up picking up the pieces (and the tab) when things go wrong in private healthcare.
Worse still, the Conservative Government is clearly complicit in this failure of care:
Bizarrely, as recently as [2014] the Government passed the Care Act, which exempted providers of privately funded care from the new criminal offence for providing false or misleading information to the regulators. As if this could only happen in a publicly run service.
So, if you’re an NHS patient sent to a private hospital for a hip replacement, you could come out in worse condition than you went in, with very little ability to gain financial redress or even to have the mistake corrected – and this is the way the government wants it.
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It seems there are very few, if any ‘qualified providers’ from the private sector currently working in the English National Health Service, according to the latest issue of Private Eye (#1382, p38).
It states: “When the government decided to flog off large chunks of the NHS, it insisted that private providers must ‘qualify and register’ before being allowed to offer NHS-funded services.
“But the NHS regulator Monitor never carried out the promised ‘assurance process’ to test whether providers were suitable or not. It confirmed that it held no register of ‘any qualified providers’ and a spokesman even said it would ‘love to know where there is a list’.
“Monitor only licenses organisations that hold NHS contracts worth more than £10 million a year. This leaves the vast majority of smaller ‘alternative’ providers and non-profit businesses unchecked.
“NHS England doesn’t check them either. Not only does it not hold any list, but it has also stopped providing support to local clinical commissioning groups to enable them to check the credentials of companies that are bidding for contracts. It has closed its online ‘Any Qualified Provider Resource Centre’, along with the Supply2Health website which at least listed contracts and current providers.
“All that can be found after a determined trawl through the Care Quality Commission website is a cobbled-together list of 41 mainly small-care providers, many of which have not been inspected, leaving the issue of whether they are ‘qualified’ open to question.
“Responsibility for deciding who ‘qualifies’ to carry out NHS work falls therefore not on those who are supposed to scrutinise and regulate NHS services but on local health purchasers. As the Health and Social Care Act doesn’t define what ‘qualified’ means, health ministers have neatly opened up a postcode lottery in healthcare when certain companies may be accepted as qualified by some local commissioning groups, but not others.”
In fact, it’s worse even than that.
Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) were sold to the public on the premise that they would be composed of doctors – mainly GPs. But the CCGs’ own management teams are in fact steered by private sector consultants – McKinsey, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Capita, you know the names because they belong to all the usual suspects (see NHS SOS, Jacky Davis & Raymond Tallis (editors), pp24-25). Some of these organisations provide their own healthcare services, creating an opportunity for corruption that makes utter nonsense of the assurance ‘no decision about me, without me’ made by Andrew Lansley when he was pushing the Health and Social Care Act through Parliament.
So, if you live in England and you are told you need a health service that is only offered by a private provider – you demand to see proof that they are qualified to run the service. Who checked them? To what standard? Don’t be fobbed off with an assurance that the CCG has given them the thumbs-up – ask what organisation advised the CCG. Get to the bottom of the matter.
You might find that your ‘qualified provider’ doesn’t have any qualifications at all.
And then who’s liable if your treatment goes wrong?
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This week the Labour Party will be launching its formal defence of the National Health Service, after the Coalition government stealthily slipped a “negative resolution” to enforce privatisation onto the books before the Parliamentary recess.
The resolution, as mentioned in a previous Vox article, will force clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England to introduce competition to provide all services for which it is practical (in other words, almost everything), whether or not they believe it to be in the best interests of all concerned.
Its arrival means either the government lied when it gave the promise that neither the Health Secretary nor Monitor would be allowed to force health commissioners to put services out to competition, or it has decided to break firm, formal promises, written by Andrew Lansley in a letter and spoken on the record in Parliament.
Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, has announced that the party will ‘lay prayers’ against the resolution in both Houses of Parliament, and will fight “tooth and nail” to defeat it. He has repeated his firm, unambiguous commitment to repeal the 2012 Health and Social Care Act as a priority once Labour is back in government, and to restore the lead on the commissioning of health services to local government.
If Labour win the next General Election, he will reintroduce a preferred provider policy that will allow genuine NHS organisations to be named as the providers of choice, thus ensuring that the NHS remains, at its core, a public institution. This will restore the NHS to leadership of health service provision, alongside local government as the commissioning lead.
But by that time much irrevocable damage will have been done, so concerted interim action is needed – and it is heartening that CCGs in Haringey and Bristol are already leading the way.
In Haringey, the CCG has been persuaded by campaigning organisation 38 Degrees to adopt amendments to its constitution, ensuring that they will only invite competition to buy services where “necessary or appropriate”. Contractors/providers must be “good employers” – be reputable, meet tax and NI obligations and keep to EO legislation. Other amendments exclude companies convicted of offences, and prohibit companies that use improper tax avoidance and off shore schemes.
That is just the start of the battle for the NHS – but it’s a good one, and an example that can be taken forward.
Haringey has accepted that there is a case for arguing that awarding tenders to private providers will cause genuinely public structures to atrophy as funds are taken out of the public health economy and turned into private profits. This would be to the long-term detriment of the NHS, meaning an award to a private bidder is worse value, even if the headline price is lower.
If you are in England and concerned about the decline that the government’s negative resolution will instigate, why not get in touch with your own local CCG, ask them to examine the actions of their colleagues in Haringey, and politely request that they go and do likewise?
Expect much more on this issue in the future. It will be published here as it becomes available.
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