Austerity with a class vengeance as benefit cuts bite

Most people were aware that the cuts would be harsh and affect the most vulnerable in society. But now religious figures around the country are joining with charities to point to deep privation amongst large numbers of families, long before the full range of cuts are implemented.

In Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield and Liverpool, many people are already experiencing cuts in benefits of £200 to £300 a year. James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool, has warned that many cities will suffer from “urban diabetes”, where blood pumps around the heart but fails to reach other parts of the body.

Thousands of families already rely on food banks to survive and numbers are growing fast. In Liverpool, for example, 6,000 families signed up for food parcels in the city in the last six months alone. Last year, 2011-12 food banks fed 128,687 people nationwide; in 2012-13 it is thought this could rise to nearly a quarter of a million.

The ending of universal benefits with the termination of child benefit for all  – a policy promoted by the ConDems but accepted by New Labour Mark II – is being disguised by the introduction of “universal credit”. Within this consolidation of benefits into one payment are severe reductions in what people can claim.

Housing benefit for private sector tenants is being capped and most social housing tenants will have to make a contribution to their council tax. Many families are already deep in debt. It has been left up to charities to try to help those faced with council bailiffs claiming back arrears. One local vicar Rev Paul Nicholson in Tottenham, north London, has set up a group called Taxpayers against Poverty. says that charging council tax to the poor will result in “debt destitution and forced migration”.

Then there is the “bedroom tax” through which the government plans to claw back £500m a year from the housing benefit bill. People in council homes who are said to be “under-occupying” will charged £11-£20 per week unless they move to a smaller home. The financial and psychological effects of such a deeply intrusive measure is of course not acknowledged by the government’s “impact assessment”.

In areas like Derby, the housing support budget is being cut by 83% per cent over the next two years. Local charities describe it as “catastrophic”. Homelessness is rising, particularly among vulnerable young people who will no longer quality for services. (Cameron has famously proclaimed that no one under 25 years of age will qualify for housing benefits of any kind.) In 2012-13, five out of ten homelessness services had their funding cut.

The most vulnerable people in the firing line are the disabled. Building on the policies of the previous Labour government, people with disabilities are being subjected to horrendous tests by Atos. Last week former Labour Minister Michael Meacher said that 3,500 have died during the assessment process itself and another 7,100 died after being judged to be entitled to unconditional support because they are too ill or disabled to work.

Chief executive of Citizens Advice, Gillian Guy, has said Atos has given grounds for concern: “Last quarter, Citizens Advice bureaux had more than 100,000 inquiries about Employment and Support Allowance – a rise of 76%. More than 21,000 were appeals against decisions based on Atos assessments, mistakes that are subsequently overturned and have cost the taxpayer £60m over the past year.”

For many all the future holds is thus a spiral of deepening poverty and debt. The failure to increase benefits in line with inflation means there is a massive transfer of wealth going on. Cuts in benefits to reduce the budget deficit are essentially the price paid to the bankers to help pay for the financial crisis they created. This is austerity with a class vengeance at the heart of it.

A corporate-driven market state has replaced the old welfare state. It will take a complete transfer of power to ordinary people before we can even think of a future better than the one the mainstream parties have laid out before our eyes. 

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

ATOS profits pile up while misery for disabled grows

At last, the big bucks to be made out of forcing disabled people through humiliating tests to cut their benefit are out in the open, thanks to detective work by a member of the Scottish parliament.

The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) has consistently refused to publish details of its contracts with French IT firm ATOS who are pushing two million people through benefit cut tests, claiming commercial confidentiality.

Nevertheless, Kevin Stewart, member of the Edinburgh parliament for Aberdeen, made a demand under freedom of information to see papers relating to the ATOS contract for Scotland and northern England.

A risk assessment document produced by ATOS arrived in his in box with the figures removed as usual. But by transferring it into a different text format – bingo, the truth popped out.

And so it transpires that if ATOS can push 15% more people than their target through the humiliating and meaningless tests, their profits will soar to £40m on a £207m contract. Even if they fall 15% below target they will still make £28m.

The total value of ATOS UK-wide contracts is £400m. That suggests that they will make a profit of between £55m and £82m on the whole contract.

The ATOS profit of £82m alone would pay disability living allowance for more than 20,000 people a year. If you take the value of the whole contract, it could pay for 22,000 people for five years.

The government must be looking for a huge number of people to be forced off benefit, if the whole process is to be worthwhile. The DWP has always refused to put a figure on it, but campaigners believe the government wants to reduce by half the 3.2 million who currently receive the benefit.

So that’s the cost-benefit-risk analysis – which shows there is absolutely no risk at all for greedy ATOS. But what about the actual real-life costs:

More than 40% of appeals against ATOS rulings succeed, and when you look only at those who appealed with help from the Citizens Advice Bureau, that rises to a staggering 70%.

The decisions being made are beyond belief:

Aaron Moon lost his leg when a soldier in Afghanistan. He only just survived a massive number of injuries. Some days he can’t get his prosthetic limb on because it’ so painful. He’s deemed fit for work.

Colin Traynor was deemed fit for work. He had never been able to get a job because of his frequent epileptic seizures. His appeal was upheld, but by that time Colin had died from a massive seizure – his parents say his condition was exacerbated by stress.

From Facebook posts we find a man who this week is in hospital having treatment on his injured spine – and next week he will hear whether his appeal has been successful.

Another woman posts that she had her eighth heart attack on the way from the test centre to the taxi rank. During the test the doctor said the blood pressure machine must be broken, because “you look fine”. The women got home from hospital 10 days later to find she had been deemed fit for work and her benefits stopped.

Last year, 1,100 people who failed the test never managed to get a job because they died.

Remember it was a Labour government that replaced incapacity benefit and income support for new claimants with Employment Support Allowance in 2008. And Labour will continue the attack on welfare if it wins the next election.

Communities need to unite to defend people from these cruel tests. But the truth is that even a universal boycott – people refusing to go, DWP staff refusing to implement the decisions – will not prevent the government from forging ahead, though action on this issue by benefits and health professionals is long overdue.

We need to make a political change, to a democratic society where every citizen is supported to make the best of their life, to contribute what they can, and everyone receives enough of society’s shared resources to live well. Removing the power of vulture corporations like ATOS to profit from misery would be a crucial step towards this.

Penny Cole

Paralympics success a stark contrast to benefit cuts

Grossly offensive as well as totally hypocritical sums up the presence of David Cameron and George Osborne at the London Paralympics at a time when many people with disabilities are fighting to maintain their meagre benefits.

Osborne was roundly booed when it was announced he was to present a medal. Cameron had a mixed reception. Former prime minister Gordon Brown was cheered, though I don’t know why because it was his government that first targeted the disabled for benefit cuts.

And while the cabinet was being reshuffled in something akin to rearranging of deckchairs on the Titanic, even more cuts in benefits were leaking out.

Sick and disabled claimants could lose 70% of their weekly employment support allowance (ESA) if they refuse to take part in work-related activities, according to plans drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions. At present claimants can be “fined” a maximum of £28.15 a week if they are deemed to break their agreement.

The most vulnerable are those placed in the “work-related activity group” by the private firm and Paralympics sponsor Atos, whose HQ was besieged by protesters last week. Official figures show there are 340,000 in this group, of whom over 11,000 have been fined in the last year.

Campaigners immediately attacked the latest assault on the disabled, with Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind, warning that the planned sanctions “risks devastating their mental health".

While Atos is naturally enough in the firing line for their crude “work capability assessments” (WCA) which have resulted in, for example, terminally ill people being assessed as fit for work, the firm is effectively the messenger for all the major political parties.

That much is reinforced today by two Labour MPs, Tom Greatrex and Stephen Timms, the shadow employment minister. In an article that previews a debate in Parliament on the WCA, they defend the system, only querying its effectiveness. They are concerned that too many successful appeals show that the system isn’t working. They write:

“Most people agree that we need to focus not on what disabled people can’t do but what they can do. That’s why the idea of a WCA is one most people support, and it’s why Labour introduced it in Government. It’s important that sickness benefit claimants be assessed to demonstrate whether or not they can work.”  

They do not reject the basis of the Atos contract – which is worth £100m a year – but want the tests “improved” and made more competent. But disability campaigners rightly reject this approach, which Labour adopted to appease the right-wing media’s obsession with “benefit scroungers”.

And so it continues under the present regime. The Black Triangle Campaign, which exposes and opposes defamation of the disabled, is currently locked in a war of words with Robert Devereux, the permanent secretary at the DWP.

At issue are remarks made by Terry Moran, the department’s chief operating officer. In July he told hundreds of civil servants that fraudulent disability claimants should have their photographs pinned to "every lamp-post in the streets where they live" to shame them.

Devereux has defended the remarks and rejected accusations that Moran had broken the civil service code with overtly political remarks. John McArdle, a founder member of the Black Triangle Campaign, accused Moran of playing “playing fast and loose with disabled people’s lives”.

The spirit and success of the Paralympics, with packed venues, stands in stark contrast to the “scrounger” rhetoric put out by ministers and the tabloids alongside the continuing assault on benefits. Cameron and company ought to be told their presence at the Games is not wanted.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Profiting from the sick and disabled

Disabled people and their supporters taking part in today’s nationwide action against the company enforcing government benefit cuts have asked doctors and nurses organisations to end their relationship with Atos Healthcare.

The global corporation which operates in over 40 countries was brought in by the New Labour government and was then awarded a £300 million three-year contract extension by the ConDems, with clear instructions to reduce claimant numbers.

A new benefit, employment support allowance (ESA), has replaced incapacity benefit and every claimant is being assessed by Atos. Thousands have been disqualified from claiming ESA by Atos staff.

The government claims that figures show that the "vast majority" of claimants for ESA are fit for work. But four out of 10 of those who appealed against the decision by Atos to deny them benefits are successful on appeal, a process that costs the taxpayer £50m a year.

The open letter says: “Since 1995, when medical assessments for incapacity benefit were privatised and taken out of public services, standards have steadily declined. But Atos has brought this to a new low. While none of the work tests deserve to be called a ‘medical’ as they have no basis in patient welfare, since Atos started carrying out the ESA tests in 2008, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people with severe illness and disability being assessed as fit for work and denied benefits.”

Campaigners told the British Medical Journal and Royal College of Nursing: "We are outraged that Atos is profiting from denying those of us who are sick or disabled, the benefits we need to survive and maintain our level of health.”

The letter adds: “A Channel 4 News report in 27 July 2011 acknowledged what thousands have been saying: it interviewed the heartbroken partner of a critically ill man whom Atos denied his entitlement on grounds that he was ‘fit for work’ – he died less than three months later. How many more people have died following such cruel and callous treatment?”

In August, the it was reported that 12 Atos doctors are under investigation by the General Medical Council for improper conduct. The Royal College of Psychiatrists and many others have strongly criticised the devastating effect the Atos exam and cuts have had on patients.

GP Margaret McCartney, writing in the British Medical Journal, has questioned the ethics of doctors performing assessments without access to patients’ medical records, and the lack of specialist knowledge of physiotherapists and general nurses employed by Atos.

Earlier this year, Atos, whose staff assess around 11,000 benefit claimants a week, was severely criticised by Parliament’s work and pensions select committee after it found that many people had "not received the level of service from Atos which they can reasonably expect".

The open letter insists that doctors’ and nurses’ ethics are being “corrupted” by Atos’ offers of higher salaries and daytime reduced work hours, adding: “Claimants rightly fear that most Atos assessors are uncaring and prejudiced – they work to targets which have nothing to do with patients’ individual health needs or with the realities of the job market which sick and disabled people are being thrown into.

“The stress of the Atos examinations has hastened deaths and caused a number of people to commit suicide. For many others, it is exacerbating their already fragile health condition.” Atos has taken action to shut down websites which have attacked the company.

The Labour government introduced work capability assessments in 2008 when it replaced incapacity benefit and income support for new claimants with ESA. The Coalition government has accelerated the changes – with the support of Labour, naturally.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor