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Labour believes we should call time on ATOS

Posted by Kate Green, MP for Stretford and Urmston, at 13:00, Fri 18 October 2013:

Unfortunately, I’ve spent the past week off sick. Having slipped a disc in my back, I’ve been unable to walk more than a few steps. I certainly couldn’t have sprinted across parliament to get into the lobbies in time to vote!

Thanks to everyone for the get well messages that have been sent to me. I really hope to be back on my feet soon.

Being at home means I’ve had to follow what’s been going on in parliament from my own sitting room, and read up the detail of debates in Hansard, the Official Report of proceedings that’s published each day.

It also meant I missed Prime Minister’s questions this week. Normally I wouldn’t mind too much. It’s a shouting match, the Prime Minister never gives a straight answer, and it just winds me up.

But I was very sorry not to have been in the chamber this week when Dennis Skinner told the harrowing story of his constituent, a farmer and butcher who was dying of cancer, who was turned down for benefit following an assessment by ATOS, and waited more than a year hoping his case would be reviewed.

He died before the decision could be reversed.

Sadly, this is far from an uncommon story. In 2011, more than 10,000 people died within three months of an ATOS assessment, who’d been found fit for work. Of course, in some cases, the death may have been nothing to do with the condition they were assessed for. And maybe the position has improved since then. But we don’t know, because the government’s decided to stop tracking the figures.

I met some of my constituents recently who’d experienced the assessment process. They had no faith in it at all. They felt the system was trying to catch them out. They described the difficulties they experienced getting to the assessment centre, a complicated and exhausting journey across town, a long walk across the car park, then because they’d finally made it to the appointment, this was treated as evidence they were fit to work.

They said the ATOS assessor who interviewed them knew nothing about their condition. Those with mental health problems felt they were particularly poorly understood.

They said ATOS was wedded to a tick box approach, the assessors often don’t have expertise in the condition they’re assessing, and too many decisions are wrong and unfair.

Labour believes we should call time on ATOS. If they can’t run the process properly and fairly, the government should sack them and appoint a company that can.

But that doesn’t mean the government is let off the hook. That’s where the real responsibility lies. Despite three independent reviews of the work capability assessment process, and a fourth one now underway, the system simply isn’t working as it should.

(And let’s not forget the only reason the government held these reviews is because Labour’s legislation required it to do so. Does anyone really think Conservative ministers would have chosen to hold them if they could have been avoided?)

I believe it was right for Labour to introduce a work capability assessment process that looked at what people could do, not what they couldn’t, and that aimed to get more people who could be working off benefits and into work . But it’s clear that under the coalition government, the process is badly broken. That’s why I think we need a root and branch review now to design a system that really works.

We need to think how we can we develop an assessment process that looks at people’s real lives, at what they would really need to be able to do to hold down a job, and what support they’d need to do it.

We need to make sure the assessment process is an intrinsic part of the way people are referred to the Work Programme (also performing disastrously, with an 88% failure rate for people on out of work disability benefits). Right now, the two are totally disconnected, time is wasted when people are referred into the programme, or they are simply written off by Work Programme providers.

We need to do more with employers. Why do disabled people fare so much worse when they are in work, why do they earn less, why are they less likely to be promoted, and why do they struggle to get jobs for which they’re well qualified?

And why have the numbers receiving Access to Work support (which helps meet extra costs in the workplace) fallen from 37290 in 2009/10 to 31400 in 2012/13?

Ministers talk tough on claimants, but they won’t take the actions that would really help people get into work. Labour knows we have to fix problems right across the system, to make it fit for purpose, to enable those who can work to work, and to properly look after those who can’t.

That is the way to bring the benefits bill down, and to keep it down. That’s how we’ll be fair to everyone.