UK: Psychological tyranny prescribed by the DWP: preventable harm is government policy, 2018, Stewart

Andy

Retired committee member
ALLOWING PREVENTABLE HARM
The former DWP Chief Medical Officer, Mansel Aylward, moved from the DWP in 2005 to the then named UnumProvident Centre for Psychosocial and Disability Research at Cardiff University, with funding by the American corporate giant who sponsored the new research centre with £1.6 million. Together with Gordon Waddell, Aylward produced discredited ‘policy based’ research4 in the 2005 DWP commissioned report: The Scientific and Conceptual Basis of Incapacity Benefits5 which supported the DWP’s planned course of action to demolish the welfare state.

DWP Ministers insisted that they were helping chronically sick and disabled people to take responsibility for their own financial future by searching for employment. In reality, various reforms to social welfare policies allowed preventable harm by the State to creep into disabled people’s lives. The flawed Waddell and Aylward biopsychosocial (BPS) model of assessment1 was used by the DWP to justify the use of the WCA, and the excessive use of sanctions against ESA claimants are known to cause identified preventable harm, including starvation, for those least able to protest.6
https://bjgp.org/content/68/677/579
 
Access to medical history is not available to the private contractor who conducts the WCA, and the DWP administrators who allocate the ESA admitted to Professor Malcolm Harrington as long ago as 2010 that they don’t understand the medical paperwork provided by claimants to support their ESA applications.2 These DWP ‘Decision Makers’ confirmed that they disregard all medical evidence and simply confirm the findings of the WCA, which is described as a ‘non-medical functional assessment’.3
I find this quite interesting. I always wondered how it can be that the assessor disregarded all the medical reports, just like that, as if it wasn't time- and energy- and money-consuming for all parties, and instead already knew it's psychosomatic. I already felt it must be institutional. That's in Germany though, and here no one admits that it's policy. But now I understand.

I don't know where it was, but someone pointed out that the DWP is a company. The German DRV writes on their homepage: "Information about the company" and "company profile". (But it's not a GmbH like other agencies.)
https://www.deutsche-rentenversiche...rnehmen/infos_zum_unternehmen_index_node.html

I am wondering if I'd get a reply if I made a FOI-request about this: Are there official instructions about the dismissal of medical reports?
 
Something along the lines of medical reports are always reviewed before a decision is made.

In practice only relevant medical reports are reviewed, and all medical reports not completed by one of the DWPs client companies, within 3 months, are not relevant. The DWP ignored a report, done for them, by an ATOS doctor, that was only 6 months old, in favour of one done by a paramedic who didn't even seem to know what diabetes was, let alone ME or aspergers. To save some money, or hit a target. They don't care about what's right, what's fair, only what they can get away with.

So whatever they say the way it's actually done seems obvious.
 

DWP Ministers insisted that they were helping chronically sick and disabled people to take responsibility for their own financial future by searching for employment.

Geez, at least try to phrase it a bit differently than "work will set you to take responsibility for your own financial future".

This reeks of "the only disability is a bad attitude" inspiration porn. Spoken like a person who has only ever experienced privilege.
 
A different viewpoint in the comments section:

Psychological tyranny prescribed by the DWP - and a dose of operational catastrophe
  • Steve New, Associate Professor in Operations Management, Said Business School, University of Oxford
Mo Stewart1 offers a strident analysis of welfare reform, and the Work Capability Assessment. Like many critics, she focuses on the ideological basis of the reforms, and usefully points to the political threads which led to what must be acknowledged as a tragic failure. These points have been made frequently and powerfully, but ineffectually; this horrible story continues ten years on. What makes the 'system' so deaf?

One part of an answer is that the ESA/WCA debacle was not just an ethical and ideological failure. The simple machinery of the system - evolved between the DWP and its contractor, Atos - could never have been anything but a disaster. The design of the process, for example, breached all good practice regarding information feedback, smooth flow of workload, user-consultation, prototyping, and the attempted separation of back- and front-office activity. The policy may have been terrible, but it was the operational execution that caused much of the misery. Indeed, even some well-intentioned changes to the system introduced after the Harrington reviews made the actual functioning of the system worse. We must engage with ideology and policy, but the difficulty is that public servants are not equipped to respond or even to hear this criticism: they will say their job is to execute the wishes of their political masters. Public anger can be deflected by the technocrats as 'politics' and not their concern. But we must also hold public servants and outsourcing companies to account on technocratic terms. We need a discourse in which we can highlight the failures caused by a lack of good process thinking. This need not distract from bigger arguments about policy, but it may ameliorate the worse consequences of poor implementation.

We must campaign for such contracts to yield more operational information into the public domain; for greater involvement of independent experts (on operations, not just policy) in the running of contracts, and increased resources for the National Audit Office. We must also be prepared sometimes to engage with the detail of systems we consider to be fundamentally wrong-headed.

Reference
1. Stewart M. Psychological tyranny pre

https://bjgp.org/content/68/677/579/tab-e-letters
 
She added: “Obviously the overwhelming reason to do this is moral, but it is also in the economic interests of the government.

“Each suicide is estimated to cost £1.7 million, so a compassionate welfare system makes sense at every level.”

She said she believed the figures would now be “significantly higher” three years on.
This puzzles me. Who estimated that figure, and on what basis was it arrived at?

Once someones commited suicide then, after the costs of getting someone to confirm they are probably dead, and the cost of setting fire to them, where does the other £1,699,000 go?
 
From that article:
Although only one in 15 adults (6.7 per cent) in the general population had ever made a suicide attempt, that rose to 43.2 per cent for ESA claimants, and as high as 47.1 per cent for female ESA claimants.

They also show that two-thirds of ESA claimants (66 per cent) had thought of taking their own life at some point, compared to 20.6 per cent in the overall adult population.
Even if you grant that this outcome was not what they intended, then at the very least the BPS advocates have proven beyond any doubt to be incompetent, callous, and utter cowards at facing up to the result of their rampant megalomania.

At this point they should be required to show extraordinarily good cause why they should not be immediately dismissed from all positions of authority, with no possibility of being allowed anywhere near one again.

:mad::mad::mad:
 
This puzzles me. Who estimated that figure, and on what basis was it arrived at?

Once someones commited suicide then, after the costs of getting someone to confirm they are probably dead, and the cost of setting fire to them, where does the other £1,699,000 go?

Probably from actuarial estimates of a full productive adult life. I've seen some estimates that such a life is worth something like $6-7M on aggregate, based on how much people contribute economically, through work and taxes and so on. It's more about lost opportunity than actual expenses. Although on that last point suicide is less expensive than lifelong chronic illness so we're even more expensive than that.
 
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