campaign against welfare cuts and poverty
- Thread starter Blagsta
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butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Afaic, there is no coverage of this on the broadcast media: BBC News Channel, Sky, yet the BBC will report every single negative policy/utterance from the Coalition about benefits, etc.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
It's already had a big piece on the BBC news channel.
That's why I posted the link at gone 3 in the morning - before it disappeared in a tide of trivia.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
DWP have said they are dumping Atos and expect G4S, Serco, A4E and Capita to bid for the WCA brutalizer program. Now Atos have come out and said they're giving it up as they can't take the shit anymore. Still they've had their 30 pieces of silver in the millions they've raked in.
As the bishops are bashing the coalition and DEFRA hidden report links welfare reform to poverty is this the end of IDS ideology?
FT paywall link.
As the bishops are bashing the coalition and DEFRA hidden report links welfare reform to poverty is this the end of IDS ideology?
FT paywall link.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5abc8d36-9a28-11e3-8232-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2ttuKIhdX
Outsource group seeks exit from UK £500m benefits contract after death threats
By Gill Plimmer
©Alamy
Persistent death threats against staff who decide whether sick and disabled people are eligible for benefits have forced the private company employing them to seek an early exit from a £500m government contract.
With opposition Labour MPs also stepping up criticism, Atos Healthcare said the political environment had become untenable and that it was no longer fair to employees to leave them vulnerable to attack.
“It is becoming incredibly difficult for our staff; it’s pretty unpleasant,” people close to the company said.
About 163 incidents of the public assaulting or abusing staff were recorded each month last year, Atos said.
At protests outside 45 Atos offices this week, names of individual doctors were chanted, while many of the 2,000 staff employed to carry out the work had received death threats both in person or on Facebook and Twitter, as well as bullying at the company’s assessment centres.
Examples on Facebook include: “murdering scumbags . . . won’t be smiling when we come to hang you bastards”. Another says: “Know anyone who works for Atos? Kill them.”
The French IT company has been in discussions with the Department for Work and Pensions with a view to exiting the deal since October last year, because it views the tests as “outdated”.
“In its current form it is not working for claimants, for DWP or for Atos Healthcare,” Atos said. “For several months now we have been endeavouring to agree an early exit from the contract, which is due to expire in August 2015.”
“Despite these ongoing discussions, we will not walk away from a front-line service. Our total focus remains on delivering the services we are contracted to provide in a professional and compassionate way, until a new service begins.”
Atos has become a lightning rod for discontent over the coalitions’s welfare reforms, which aim to shift more people off social security benefits and into work.
For the past three years, the company has been under fire for its handling of work capability tests, which assess whether people are well enough to apply for jobs.
A third of its decisions were overturned on appeal, amid allegations that people with terminal cancer or other serious illnesses had been denied benefits as a result of its assessments.
Last July, the DWP told Atos to improve the quality of written reports provided to the department.
Atos said it had improved processes and that appeal court judges had said its reports were the reason for a successful appeal in fewer than 1 per cent of cases.
A National Audit Office report also warned there were “dangers” in viewing high numbers of appeals as a measure of the quality of medical assessment work undertaken by Atos.
“An appeal may be successful because the information available to the tribunal was not known at the time of the original assessment,” the NAO said.
“In addition, a decision made by the Department on benefit entitlement will draw on other sources of information as well as the medical assessment.”
Atos has been the sole provider of work capability tests since 1998, when the then Labour government first handed the job to the private sector.
It won a competition under the last Labour administration to continue providing the assessments for five years from 2005, which was then extended until August 2014. The company earns revenues of £110m a year from the contract.
The DWP said it would not comment on specifics of commercially sensitive issues. “We announced [last] summer we will be bringing in additional provision to deliver Work Capability Assessments with the aim of increasing delivery capacity and reducing waiting times,” it added.
Despite the furore, Atos was awarded a fresh deal last year to carry out tests for the new personal independence payment (Pip), with the aim of reducing the projected cost of the benefit by 20 per cent by 2015-16. It replaces the disability living allowance and determines whether people are entitled to extra money to help cope with disability – such as cars, equipment or nursing.
Atos’s £400m Pip contracts over five years cover the southeast and north of the country, accounting for about 75 per cent of disability living allowance claimants. Capita, a rival outsourcing company, has the remainder.
Private providers likely to be in the frame for the next work capability contract include G4S, Serco, A4E and Capita.
According to an NAO report on the government’s four biggest suppliers, Atos earned £700m in revenues from the public sector in the UK in 2012, of £7.2bn sales worldwide. The company made an average net profit margin of about 2 per cent over the past decade, rising to 3 per cent in 2012.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Just the other week an Atos shill was extolling the virtues of their WCA and all the happy clients/customers/claimants/stock that go through it to the *EDIT* Public Administration Select Committee.. Yet in the article it states..
Wading through government, DWP and corporate outsourcing bullshit.
Wading through government, DWP and corporate outsourcing bullshit.
Last edited:
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Good article. Explains these shitstains in power perfectly.
There was another story my g/f mentioned a while back re. performance of different WP contractors.
Some were actually very good at helping long-term unemployed re-skill and find sustainable employment; the majority were just fascist sanction generators.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
I can agree with that. The one I'm lumped with, Ingeus, has outsourced me to a long time local training provider, Tell. They don't train any more. They just wait for crumbs from the £150m 'taxpayer handout' Ingeus get. The good ones scrape the 5-12% success rate. Seriously.. £5bn for a 12% outcome. Insanity.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Bedroom Tax Report.
Raquel Rolnik Report of the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a
component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on the right to non-discrimination in this context,
http://direitoamoradia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/A_HRC_25_54_Add.2_ENG.pdf
Addendum
Mission to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Raquel Rolnik Report of the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a
component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on the right to non-discrimination in this context,
http://direitoamoradia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/A_HRC_25_54_Add.2_ENG.pdf
Addendum
Mission to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
While they use workfare and remove all mention of it on their FB page. DWP are wrong, but, RNIB profit from MWA.
chainsawjob
Kipping in the dunes
Commons select Committee inquiry into ESA
http://www.parliament.uk/business/c...and-pensions-committee/news/esa-wca-inq-2014/
I'm not sure how I'd be able to put it across, but the WCA is particularly crap for measuring how mental health and fluctuating conditons affect ability to work, in fact I don't think any sort of test can really capture this full stop, a lot of symptoms are nigh on impossible to quantify. The questions as they stand on the ESA50 are largely utter nonsense.
Does anyone have any experience of submitting to this sort of thing, does it achieve anything? And surely it's all been told to them before, like that long report recently (Spartacus? Broken of Britain?) with lots of first person accounts of people's experiences?
(and can someone remind me how you post links with a shorter name like 'link here' instead of putting in the whole thing - thanks)
http://www.parliament.uk/business/c...and-pensions-committee/news/esa-wca-inq-2014/
I'm not sure how I'd be able to put it across, but the WCA is particularly crap for measuring how mental health and fluctuating conditons affect ability to work, in fact I don't think any sort of test can really capture this full stop, a lot of symptoms are nigh on impossible to quantify. The questions as they stand on the ESA50 are largely utter nonsense.
Does anyone have any experience of submitting to this sort of thing, does it achieve anything? And surely it's all been told to them before, like that long report recently (Spartacus? Broken of Britain?) with lots of first person accounts of people's experiences?
(and can someone remind me how you post links with a shorter name like 'link here' instead of putting in the whole thing - thanks)
Minnie_the_Minx
someinenhhanding menbag and me ah bollox
Bet they'll still get paid in full up to original date though!
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Pretty much when you made your post. I'm no fan of the bbc coverage of cuts, but you've got to give them more than an hour, esp when the thing had only been released that morning.
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
And Today certainly did a piece on it.
fair enough, but a few years ago it would have led the bulletins through the whole day.
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
as much as i would agree about media bias in reporting on welfare, it's also the case that 24-hour rolling news means the nature of the stories that lead bulletins has changed greatly as well.
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
benefit cap appeal rejected http://www.11kbw.com/knowledge-events/case/court-of-appeal-rejects-benefit-cap-challenge
bedroom tax appeal rejected http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26288112
bedroom tax appeal rejected http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26288112
http://www.southwales-eveningpost.c...tory-20644155-detail/story.html#ixzz2thjfvqwX
Removing phones from job centres?, when you can be sanctioned for not making the correct number of applications, not connected....
Removing phones from job centres?, when you can be sanctioned for not making the correct number of applications, not connected....
Where they tell you to phone an office to find out if they, the person you are asking at the desk, can take a payment for a budgeting loan.
Or where if you have a question about a benefit decision you are told to ring the office as they can't deal with it themselves.
Or, as i saw one person, when i was last in the place, trying to sort out how he was to attend his WP/similar course having been removed by te adviser running it for being angry. The guy seemed genuinely contrite and just wanted a resolution. The desk staff were no use and pointed him, repeatedly, to the phones.
Are these people to just send emails now? This is fucking insane?
Have you seen a white rabbit Mr Smith?
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Sign up and post this around to scare the shit out of the main opposition party at the moment. Yes that other quite large party.. Labour. Not saying where this campaign came from but it's not difficult to guess.
Labour, Put your money where your mouth is. it won't cost you £3 membership to have a say either
Labour, Put your money where your mouth is. it won't cost you £3 membership to have a say either
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