jeffs post
On Wednesday two very highly paid civil servants £185,000 a year Richard Heaton, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Justice and £190,000 a year Michael Spurr, Chief Executive, HM Prison and Probation Service will appear before MPs to explain their latest botch up - the privatisation failure of parts of the probation service.
I hope MPs on the Commons Public Accounts Committee will not only be briefed by the excellent National Audit Office report and investigation into the failure of Community Rehabilitation Companies - the fancy name for profit making companies like Sodexo and Seetec.
They should also read the coruscating report by Dame Glenys Stacey HM Chief Inspector of Probation and Peter Clarke HM Chief Inspector of Prisons last June on the performance of these companies and their failure to either help ex offenders go straight or protect the public from child abusers and perpetrators of domestic violence.
This sorry tale goes back to 2015 when Chris Grayling ( he of the current Virgin rail privatisation botch ups) was Justice Secretary and thought it a brilliant idea to privatise swathes of the probation service for prisoners serving 12 months or more who were at low risk of self harm.
Michael SpurrMichael Spurr, Chief Executive of the Prisons and Probation Service. Image credit: Channel4
From the very beginning they bungled it. They planned to give the 21 companies £3.7 billion until 2022 to handle and help large numbers of prisoners. The companies planned for this but Whitehall had overestimated the number of low risk ex offenders leaving prison and underestimated the number of high risk ex offenders who are still being helped by the publicly run probation service. As a result the companies would only get £2.1 billion.
So of course now the companies are in deep trouble facing losses of £443m by 2022. So what do these top civil servants do. They give them more of your cash to help them with their profit margins.
They have had a £42m bail out for dealing with fewer offenders in 2016 and another £22m to keep the companies going while the ministry kindly re-negotiates their contracts to deal with fewer ex prisoners.
It has now agreed to pay another £278m up to 2022 but has changed the terms of contract so the private firms will get even less money if any of the released prisoners re-offend.
Now if you read the inspectors' report on the performance of these companies, this is a sick joke. The inspectors think their provision is so bad and useless that they might as well not exist.
They said: “Clearly there is more time for resettlement work with these prisoners, but CRCs are making little difference to their prospects on release. We found them no better served than their more transient fellow prisoners were some eight months ago. The overall picture was bleak. If Through the Gate services were removed tomorrow, in our view the impact on the resettlement of prisoners would be negligible. "
But not only are they useless but they could be a menace to society. They were so bad at rehabilitating prisoners - they spent their time sitting at desks writing up reports on the computers - rather than helping them face to face. Some prisoners left to become homeless with little chance of getting a job.
But more seriously they let out child abusers, violent individuals who had beaten up their partners and drug addicts putting their victims at risk by having no proper supervision or rehabilitation plans.
In my view this £300m would be better spent funding refuges for victims of domestic violence ( in desperate short supply) or linking it back to the publicly run service.
You are paying for these companies to prey on the taxpayer without delivering any decent result and also allow released criminals to prey on their victims by their failure to rehabilitate them. No doubt the two highly paid civil servants will distance themselves from their failed policy when they appear before MPs on Wednesday
Posted by jeffrey davies on 13 January 2018
jeffs post
By John Pring Disability New Service 11th January 2018
The minister for disabled people has refused to apologise for misleading MPs about a court of appeal judgment that was highly critical of her new boss, Esther McVey, just a day after her appointment as the new work and pensions secretary.
Sarah Newton was responding to a Commons debate on the Independent Living Fund (ILF), less than 24 hours after McVey’s surprise appointment as the replacement for David Gauke in this week’s ministerial reshuffle.
McVey played a crucial role in the fund’s closure – one of the cuts and reforms that has most angered disabled people over the last eight years – as minister for disabled people between September 2012 and October 2013.
And in November 2013, a month after she was promoted to the role of employment minister, three court of appeal judges delivered a damning judgment about the decision she had taken in December 2012 to close the fund.
The three judges unanimously overturned an earlier ruling by the high court and found that her decision to close the fund was unlawful, and that she had breached the Equality Act’s public sector equality duty.
She was heavily criticised by the judges, with one saying there was no evidence that she had “directed her mind to the need to advance equality of opportunity”.
He added: “Nor is there evidence she considered the proposals having due regard to the need to minimise the particular disadvantages from which ILF users and other disabled persons suffer or the need to encourage such persons to live independently and to participate in public life and other activities.”
The judges were also highly critical of DWP officials, with one saying there was a tendency for officials “to tell the Minister what they thought she would want to hear”, although he added that he was convinced that McVey “was sufficiently aware of the very real adverse consequences which closing the fund would have on the lives of many of the more severely disabled”.
The government, through McVey’s replacement, Mike Penning, later went ahead with the closure after reconsidering the decision, this time paying proper attention to DWP’s legal obligations.
DWP also defeated a second legal attempt by a disabled campaigner to overturn the closure.
But despite the judges’ criticism of her new boss and the finding that the closure had been unlawful, Newton told fellow MPs in Westminster Hall this week that the government’s decision to close ILF “was challenged in a judicial review, and throughout the process the DWP won on all points”.
Newton added: “It was judged that the consultation was fair and that it had paid due regard and proper attention to the public sector equality duty.”
A DWP spokeswoman told Disability News Service that Newton had been aware of the court of appeal’s decision.
But she said: “As the debate focussed on the effect on claimants following closure of the ILF along with forthcoming changes coming into effect in devolved administrations, the minister did not intend to discuss the different legal proceedings in any depth but responded to challenges in the debate as required.”
She added: “The preparation for the ILF debate was carried out well before the reshuffle, and the minister had no prior knowledge of its outcome.”
She had failed to say by noon today (Thursday) whether Newton would apologise for misleading MPs about the court of appeal’s ruling and its severe criticism of McVey.
Tuesday’s debate had been secured by the Welsh Labour MP Ian Lucas, and was focused on the decision of the Welsh government to start devolving funding – paid by the UK government following the ILF closure in 2015 – to local authorities in Wales, without ring-fencing it for former ILF-users.
The funding had previously been used in Wales to set up the Welsh independent living grant (WILG).
Lucas paid tribute to his constituent, Nathan Lee Davies, a former ILF-user who has campaigned against the Welsh government’s decision to scrap WILG and begin devolving the funding later this year.
Last September, Davies handed in a petition of hundreds of signatures that called on the Welsh government to reverse this decision.
Davies has been told that without WILG his own care package would be reduced from 86.5 hours to just 31 hours a week.
Lucas told fellow MPs: “As a result of support from the fund, Nathan has been able not only to live in the community but, as the ILF intended, to contribute in a really positive way to the community in which he lives, notwithstanding his disability and the challenges that he faces.
“The difficulty is that doubt about the future of the fund in Wales is now causing Nathan great worry.
“Devolution of funding to local councils when their budgets are under great pressure means that there is no guarantee that the levels of funding will be maintained, even if an individual recipient’s condition deteriorates.”
He said he would now discuss the future of the fund in Wales with his own party – including Welsh ministers – because he was “not convinced that the evidence from what has happened in England [where funding has been devolved for nearly three years] supports devolution to local authorities as a good way forward”.
SNP’s Patricia Gibson urged Newton to learn lessons from Scotland, where the Scottish government has set up its own Independent Living Fund Scotland.
Marsha de Cordova, Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, said that “extensive cuts to local government funding” had led to many disabled people being “restricted or limited in the lives they could lead”.
She said: “We would all agree that it is fundamental that disabled people’s independence should not be dependent on the level of funding or eligibility criteria set by an individual local authority.
“Distribution of funding should also be based on need; therefore, there should be some sort of universal policy for how that is done.”
Newton insisted that the decision to close the fund was “driven by a clear case for reform, rather than any desire to cut costs” and that ILF had become “increasingly outdated” because choice and control was now “far more available in mainstream provision than it was at the time when people thought we needed an Independent Living Fund”.
She argued that the Care Act 2014, brought in under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, had “brought in consistency in eligibility and in quality of care”, and that transferring ILF funding to local authorities was “very much part of the government’s thinking on supporting the principles of localism”.
She said councils would have access to £9.25 billion more in social care funding over the next three years, and that “with this additional funding, local authorities have the ability to meet the needs that have been clearly set out there and to meet the responsibilities set out in the Care Act”.
But she also claimed that the former ILF funding had been “certainly transferred in the full expectation that its recipients would have their funding maintained”.
Former ILF-users in England are likely to find that claim surprising, as there have been many reports of individual ILF-users who have had their support slashed following the fund’s closure, including that of Luke Davey, who lost a high-profile legal bid last September to reverse a drastic cut to his support package.
And research by Newton’s own department found that some former ILF-recipients experienced a loss of support, a greater reliance on unpaid care and an “adverse” impact on their physical and mental health after its closure.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 12 January 2018
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under the Torys deaths are up The Mental Health Act (MHA) allows for the detention of people with a mental health disorder for their own safety or that of others – but tragically, for some that detention does not lead to their safety.
The Phenomenon
Those deaths are recorded as a specific category in the “Coroners Statistics” published by the government, along with other ‘deaths in State Detention’.
As you’d expect, those statistics make bleak reading – but bleaker still is that those statistics reveal a dramatic rise in the number of deaths of people detained under the MHA in England and Wales since the Tories re-entered government.
The number has more than tripled since 2011:
mha deaths.png
More shocking still is that numbers were fairly flat for the first four of the six years covered by the statistics – then climbed rapidly over the last two years recorded:
MHA deaths line.png
The context
According to Full Fact, the majority of detentions under the MHA follow someone being admitted to hospital. An increased numbers of deaths could, in part, be related to an increased number of detentions – and detentions have risen, but not by anything like the death toll.
MHA detentions increased by 47% over the ten-year period from 2005/6:
MH deten.png
The vast majority of that growth – 24% just since 2012 – has been under the Tories, but a 47% increase in detentions does not explain the tripling of deaths – so the rate of deaths per thousand admissions has also increased: if you are detained under the MHA, there is a greater likelihood that you will die in detention.
Causes?
It’s clear from the statistics that England and Wales have not only seen a serious increase in the number of people detained, but also serious increase in the percentage of those people detained who die in detention.
An examination of the impact of Tory government on mental health care within the NHS reveals at least seven likely contributing factors:
5,162 overnight mental health beds have closed since June 2010, cutting 1.8million bed spaces per year from the NHS’s mental health services
There are 5,240 fewer Mental Health Nurses employed in the NHS today than there were in May 2010. The CQC judges that the number of mental health nurses has declined by 12% since 2010
The percentage and number of mental health patients on the care programme approach who were followed up within seven days of discharge from psychiatric care have fallen to their lowest annual levels since 2010
Detentions under the Mental Health Act have risen by 24% since 2012, evidence that only the most immediate and intensive needs are admitted to the mental health ward
The overall mortality rate for patients with a mental health condition has grown since 2010
Mental Health bed occupancy regularly exceeds the 85% recommended level, and anecdotal evidence has been gather that on occasion there are no beds available (sources here, here and here).
“Out of area” placements for mental health patients have grown by a half in two years. BMA say this requires a 4-6-hour journey, placing additional stresses on both patients and families and removing patients from their support networks
The NHS is collapsing because of reduced funding increases and huge cuts in social care. The Tories have paid lip service to ‘parity of esteem’ for mental health care – at the same time as imposing the cuts outlined above.
Yet still Jeremy Hunt chose to boast about the Tories’ ‘achievements’ in both the NHS and mental health – triggering serious public humiliations from an NHS doctor, various Twitter users and actor Ralf Little.
Cuts in police resources – some of those detained under the MHA are held by police – and the inability of cut and over-stretched social services to manage people in the community – contribute to a desperately bad situation.
The statistics above are desperately bad, but the human cost they represent is a tragedy and a scandal – and they make a travesty of the Tories’ claims of ‘esteem’ and the Health Secretary’s ill-advised attempts to boast.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 11 January 2018
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SNP MP Drew Hendry has said the UK government is wilfully failing terminally ill people. His comments follow a letter from a Department of Work and Pensions Minister (see below) who denied that terminally ill people are adversely impacted by Universal Credit (UC).
Drew Hendry MP has raised the plight of terminally ill claimants several times in Parliament, and twice at Prime Minister’s Questions. He told the Prime Minster that terminally ill claimants in his constituency are dying before getting their universal credit sorted out.
Drew Hendry MP said: “It really is an outrage that the Tories continue to ignore the systematic failings of their UC plans. People are dying waiting for their claims. Many others are being robbed of peace and dignity in their final weeks because of a failing system.
“Despite clear evidence to the contrary, the minister claims that the system is working for the terminally ill. His claims speak volumes – it is nothing short of wilful neglect by this Government. The Tories are failing the terminally ill.
“Changes around implicit consent now mean that a terminally ill person has to self-certify they are terminally ill – the Government has cruelly stripped them of their right not to know that information.
“They then have to go further and leave a message on their UC journal detailing that they consent to a named person from a named organisation to call on their behalf to discuss a specific issue. Yet again having to ‘self-certify’ as terminally ill.
“Nothing can possibly justify putting anyone through this – especially when someone else can do it on their behalf. To make matters worse, the government didn’t have to create this barrier, when under ESA the adviser could undertake all of this on their behalf.
“Claims by the Minister that there is formal process have proved useless. Advisors at the CAB Macmillan Partnership tell me there is no evidence that there is a formal process between UC and PIP claims – instead it is a lottery.
“I’m challenging the UK Government to finally sort this disgraceful mess out, to remove the conditions, and clarify to his own Department how terminally ill people can avoid this heart-breaking situation.
“The minister must now provide written guidance on how a DS1500 case is processed and must now set out clearly whether or not he will bring to an end the heartless requirement for people across the UK, who do not want to know they are dying to ‘self-certify’ that they only have months to live on Universal credit.”
Letter from DWP Minister for Employment, Damian Hinds MP:
Dear Drew,
As you may know, your query to the prime Minister during Prime Minister’s Questions on 6 December about Universal Credit has been forwarded to this Department. I am replying as the responsible Minister.
I would like to begin by saying that our approach is, and always has been, that we must ensure that terminally ill claimants are treated sensitively and with empathy at all times.
For Universal Credit claimants who have a terminal illness, the DS1500 form is how they supply the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) with evidence of their condition.
As you may be aware, a GP or healthcare professional will issue the DS1500 form to either the claimant or their representative. This form can then be provided to the Department as evidence of the claimant’s condition, either for a new claim or for an existing claim.
We check our systems as a matter of course to see whether we already hold a DS1500 submitted for another claim. This is the same process under Employment and Support Allowance, and if a DS1599 is already held, we reuse it for the Universal Credit claim.
Receipt of this information ensures that the claimant receives immediate access to DWP support, including an additional £318.78 per month in their Universal Credit entitlement, payable from day one of their claim.
I can also address your concerns about third parties being able to apply for Universal Credit on behalf of a terminally ill claimant and regarding implicit consent. We do not need to change the consent rules in Universal Credit to support these claimants, as we can already accept information directly from claimant representatives, such as form claimant appointees and third party organisation representing the claimant.
In addition, we make all of our Work Coaches and relevant staff aware during their training that claimants may not know about their prognosis or condition. Therefore, they are aware that they should not record or refer to the nature or detail of the illness on the full service journal or in discussions, unless requested by the claimant.
If I can be of further assistance please do not hesitate to contact me.
Damian Hinds MP
Minister for Employment
Posted by jeffrey davies [82.9.81.48] on 07 January 2018
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jeffs post
More than one in eight ambulances taking patients to hospital on an emergency call this winter have had to wait more than 30 minutes to hand over to A&E staff [Image: Alamy Stock Photo].
This is good background to posts about the current NHS winter crisis.
Alongside the facts below, the article mentions action that has been taking by NHS England “such as cancelling operations, is helping to ease the problem but will not solve it”.
No indeed – in fact it is intended to ‘nudge’ patients towards the private sector. They can have their operation straight away if they can afford to pay for it. That would be a nice little earner for all those Tory MPs who have shares in the private money-grubbing pay-for-your-health scams.
And we are told: “Services that might help control demand – such as advice, health checks and smoking cessation programmes – are all being cut.” Because there’s no money in them?
Whenever we see information about the NHS, and the crisis in healthcare, we have to examine it critically.
Why are services being cut? Why are operations cancelled.
Under Tories, it’s never for the good of anybody’s health.
This is about profiting from illness. Always remember that.
This winter, the NHS finally ran out of road. Among the deluge of data revealing the depth of the current problems, three shocking figures stand out. So far, 23 out of 152 acute hospital trusts have declared black alerts – this means a wet week in January is a “serious incident” preventing them offering comprehensive care.
BBC analysis shows that, this winter, more than one in eight ambulances taking patients to hospital on an emergency call have had to wait more than 30 minutes to hand over to A&E staff. People who have had strokes are among them.
In the last week of 2017, bed occupancy averaged 91.7%, with virtually every trust in the country exceeding the widely accepted safe threshold of 85%.
The pressures are no less in general practice. So there is no safety valve, no reserve capacity, no underused resource. Old-style winter planning – such as opening extra wards – is largely redundant because hospitals need their entire capacity all year round. So in winter they have nothing left to give.
Posted by jeffrey davies [82.9.81.48] on 07 January 2018
reply | edit & publish | delete
jeffs post
More than one in eight ambulances taking patients to hospital on an emergency call this winter have had to wait more than 30 minutes to hand over to A&E staff [Image: Alamy Stock Photo].
This is good background to posts about the current NHS winter crisis.
Alongside the facts below, the article mentions action that has been taking by NHS England “such as cancelling operations, is helping to ease the problem but will not solve it”.
No indeed – in fact it is intended to ‘nudge’ patients towards the private sector. They can have their operation straight away if they can afford to pay for it. That would be a nice little earner for all those Tory MPs who have shares in the private money-grubbing pay-for-your-health scams.
And we are told: “Services that might help control demand – such as advice, health checks and smoking cessation programmes – are all being cut.” Because there’s no money in them?
Whenever we see information about the NHS, and the crisis in healthcare, we have to examine it critically.
Why are services being cut? Why are operations cancelled.
Under Tories, it’s never for the good of anybody’s health.
This is about profiting from illness. Always remember that.
This winter, the NHS finally ran out of road. Among the deluge of data revealing the depth of the current problems, three shocking figures stand out. So far, 23 out of 152 acute hospital trusts have declared black alerts – this means a wet week in January is a “serious incident” preventing them offering comprehensive care.
BBC analysis shows that, this winter, more than one in eight ambulances taking patients to hospital on an emergency call have had to wait more than 30 minutes to hand over to A&E staff. People who have had strokes are among them.
In the last week of 2017, bed occupancy averaged 91.7%, with virtually every trust in the country exceeding the widely accepted safe threshold of 85%.
The pressures are no less in general practice. So there is no safety valve, no reserve capacity, no underused resource. Old-style winter planning – such as opening extra wards – is largely redundant because hospitals need their entire capacity all year round. So in winter they have nothing left to give.
Posted by jeffrey davies [82.9.81.48] on 07 January 2018
