Tag: Atos

Deborah, her ATOS debacle, and the missing coat mystery

Deborah, her ATOS debacle, and the missing coat mystery

Deborah Ruby, who had her ESA stopped, despite her multiple chronic health issues.
Deborah Ruby, who has had her ESA stopped, despite her multiple chronic health issues.
Deborah Ruby struggled into this London Trussell Trust food bank with her voucher. She’s a 51-year-old lady with multiple health issues. These include, but are not limited to, arthritis in the lower spine, hips, neck and knees, depression, severe Irritable Bowel Syndrome and congenital heart problems. She has been separated from her husband for 12 years and has four children – the youngest of whom is still at school.

A social worker gave her a voucher for the food bank after her employment and support allowance (ESA) was stopped on July 25. This stoppage followed her ATOS work capability assessment in June. Atos Healthcare is of course making an early exit from its contract to carry out “fit for work” tests on disability claimants. If Deborah’s experience is typical, the ATOS assessment process is if possible leading to ever more unfair outcomes for individuals. She describes the worst sort of bureaucratic bungling, and a medical report that appears to bear little resemblance to Deborah’s account of the ATOS medical interview it was based on.

Given what Deborah says happened at the medical, it’s hard to see how she wouldn’t succeed in her appeal. But the likelihood of a successful appeal at some future date isn’t any consolation to someone in her position. For nearly eight weeks she’s had no ESA and no money for food. Her sister – the only sibling who could help – had been able to offer some assistance over the summer. But now she’s had to go back to her home outside the UK. So last week Deborah hit a full-blown crisis – and has no idea if or when she will receive any benefits again. Now that her ESA has been stopped, her housing benefit has also been stopped – pushing her into arrears.

Deborah says she brought along a letter from her doctor to the Croydon medical, describing all her medical conditions. She says that at the medical, she was having so much difficulty moving around – she needs two knee replacement operations – that the doctor had to help her on and off the couch. She was in pain throughout the assessment.

The letter that followed informing her of the decision and the medical report was both contradictory and wrong, says Deborah. While there was a statement at the top of the letter from the Department for Work and Pensions saying that she would be receiving an award and that they would write to her in due course, the assessment and medical report contained in the correspondence told her that she had failed the medical and had in fact been given zero points. She would have needed 15 points to keep her ESA award. According to Deborah, “the report said she could get on and off the couch and she was not in pain, and it said I had no problems putting on my coat myself – but I didn’t have a coat with me. The assessment referred to my depression and other illnesses with the exception of fibromyalgia – but they feel that I’m fit for work. It referred to my incontinence, and she (the doctor) acknowledged that, but said that I can still go out. It seems that in the report they put down the things they wanted to put. The doctor’s report also says ‘she was well enough that she made it here’ and I feel she glossed over and downplayed everything.”

Though initially confused about the contradictory letter, Deborah said that when a follow-up letter did not arrive within a few days, she then sent back a copy of the assessment form as part of an appeal, indicating where she disagreed with the doctor’s assessment. The DWP sent a letter back saying that it had read her challenge, but that it agreed with the ATOS decision. It told her to apply for jobseeker’s allowance (JSA). She has been back to her GP to get medical certificates saying that she cannot attend work-related programmes or work because of her health, and an NHS psychologist is also liaising with her GP ahead of the appeal. Meanwhile, Deborah is having to deal with letters from the council about her stopped housing benefits.

While it at least appears as if she has got past the reconsideration stages and lodged an appeal successfully, she has no idea when it might be heard and has been left stranded with no support while she waits.

According to the latest tribunal statistics, there has been a drop of 92% in employment and support allowance (ESA) appeals and a 93% drop in Jobseekers Allowance (JSA) appeals in April to June 2014 compared to the same period last year. A new system of mandatory reconsiderations before appeals was introduced by the DWP for ESA and JSA at the end of October 2013. Figures have yet to be published by the DWP to show how many reconsiderations result in a change of decision.

We do of course need to know much much more about the people who don’t get as far as an appeal. Precisely how many people are left destitute or dead because they’ve abandoned – or been abandoned by – the system at this most tortuous stage?

The benefits support worker: The £6.31 minimum wage is not enough to live on

Returning to the work being done at King’s Church in Catford this week,  I talked to Andy, who is a  paid support worker. This church in South-East London sees social action and reaching out to the community as a priority.

He reports that since the most recent changes in welfare benefits, most of his work has involved giving benefits advice. “The changes might not affect everyone, but they have hit most of the group we work with particularly hard. Some of them are from very disadvantaged backgrounds. There’s been a demise in manual work, and the £6.31 minimum hourly rate is not enough to live on, even with housing benefit – and that’s if they’re lucky enough to work.”  London, for those on minimum wage or no wage is not a city where you can live with dignity. This minimum wage is of course set far below the new London Living Wage rate of £8.80 an hour that employers can opt to sign up to.

As for schemes such as Universal Jobmatch – which claims to match jobseekers with vacancies – Andy says he has “never known anyone from that scheme who’s had even a reply (about a vacancy) through it”. He says he challenged someone from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)  on this. “I was then told they were very fussy about people’s CVs.”

Sanctioning people on benefits has a detrimental impact on them, he says: “If jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) is stopped, housing benefit is automatically stopped, and they often need support to get their housing benefit reinstated.”

One of Andy’s key roles is to act as an advocate at tribunals for people who are challenging Atos (one of the private companies administering fit-for-work tests) decisions to refuse them employment and support allowance (ESA) – the higher rate of benefit that takes into account their inability to work because of ill health. Andy tells me he only represents people at tribunal if he’s convinced they’re not fit for work. “If people don’t get enough points, they don’t get the benefits and they don’t have the confidence to take matters forwards themselves. You have to feel you deserve it.”

The issue for many of those he comes across it that they lack the self-esteem to take on the system themselves. He adds: “I think there’s a section of society that has low self-confidence, and often have mental health issues without a formal diagnosis.”

His success rate at tribunal is very high. He hasn’t taken anyone there who hasn’t ended up with a minimum of 15 points, and some of them score higher than this. These are people who have scored “maybe nothing or a few points in the Atos assessment”.  It goes without saying that he thinks the Atos assessment process is obviously not working.

In March this year it was announced that the £500 million contract with Atos, mired in accusations that the tests they applied were inhumane and crude, would end early. Judge Robert Martin, the departing head of the tribunal which hears appeals, was reported in the Guardian here as saying that the work capability assessment (WCA) process has undergone “virtual collapse”. In a confidential journal distributed to tribunal members, he said that this collapse was the biggest single factor in the decline in the numbers going to appeal.

He added in the article that the removal of funding under the legal aid scheme for advice and assistance on welfare rights matters, “compounded by continuing cutbacks in local authority spending on advice services has severely reduced the help and support available to claimants to pursue their legal rights in challenging benefits decisions”. Judge Martin says that if a supplier to replace Atos is found “presumably at a premium, the company will have to address the chronic shortages of healthcare professionals which has dogged Atos and which is exacerbated by the need for additional resources to deal concurrently with PIP (the personal independence payment introduced to replace disability living allowance over a three-year period beginning last October)”.

Given the difficulties facing those who want to challenge benefits decisions, the people who end up with Andy on their sides are the lucky ones. Andy is an expert and they’ll usually win their case. But there aren’t enough people around like him now – committed inviduals with the benefits know-how to successfully take on the DWP. Legal aid lawyers and welfare rights experts are a dying breed in the UK.

All the signs are there that the outlook for this most vulnerable group can only get worse. The majority of the spending cuts deemed crucial to the austerity narrative lie ahead and are set to bite even deeper into welfare spending. Chancellor George Osborne said in what the Guardian called a “grim New Year’s message” in January that the biggest chunk of savings of around £12bn will come from welfare in the two years after the election, with young people and those of working age most at risk from cuts.

Paying npower eats up most of my benefits, says sick Christine

If it weren’t for the food bank she’d be starving,  she tells me. A while back  she went without food for 11 days. Christine (not her real name) says she eventually collapsed in the home she lives in on her own. “I came to, got up, and made a cup of coffee.”

Her neighbour’s daughter told her about the food bank, and she went down to the Jobcentre to get a voucher. This time – only the second time she’s come to a food bank – she had to borrow the money for the fares and take two buses to get here. She’s 51, but life has not been kind to her in recent years and she looks much, much older. She says that four years ago she was “almost killed by an abusive partner”.

Like many food bank  clients who live on their own, her first thought is not for herself, but for her pets. She has quite a few cats. Luckily we’re able to find some cat food too. This relieves some of her anxiety.

Christine is a qualified silver service waitress. She says the doctor signed her off work about 10 years ago because of continuing problems with sciatica and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. She says that six months ago she was told to attend a medical screening in Croydon (most probably carried out by occupational health service providers Atos), and that following this she had been assessed as fit for work and her income support and disability living allowance were stopped. Why does she think she was assessed as fit for work? According to Christine, the person who carried out the screening had said she hadn’t asked to go to the toilet, and had also answered her mobile phone.

She appealed the decision to stop her benefits, but like many food bank clients she didn’t have enough cash to attend the appeal hearing and it went ahead without her.

After approaching the local council, Christine got help with filling out the forms for employment and support allowance (ESA), and she has now started receiving this.  She says the council did not give her help applying for Disability Living Allowance.  She gets £143.40 a fortnight in ESA.  But because she had such a long gap without benefits, she is on anything but an even keel. She says she currently has debts of £4,500.

She’s paying off the cost of buying a washing machine from BrightHouse – obviously paying a lot more than if she had paid cash. But her major challenge is her electricity bill. Her electricity is provided by npower, and she says they’re telling her she owes them more than £2,000.  She’s currently paying npower £12 a fortnight to cover arrears/debts,  “but the majority of my money is going on this emergency meter, and if I don’t have enough money for it I just sit in the dark”.

With her focus on feeding the meter, sometimes Christine isn’t  even eating. “I’ll put my cats first”. She can’t use the freezer, because of the expense of keeping it running and the risk of losing food if her electricity is cut off. She’s been told she can’t switch electricity companies until she’s paid off £500 of debt.

Why are we letting private companies manage the most vulnerable? As Jeremy Seabrook illustrates in his new book  Pauperland: A Short History of Poverty in Britain, “the richest societies in the world are still ready to impose punitive sanctions upon the least defended”. Anthropologists no longer need to head to the Amazon or Polynesia to examine a “savage society” when they could just get an airline ticket to Britain, he points out.