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By John Pring Disability News Service 26th April 2018
The Department for Work and Pensions appears to have admitted failing to show vital documents that linked its “fitness for work” assessment with the deaths of benefit claimants to an independent expert it hired to review the test.
Dr Paul Litchfield published the final two independent reviews of the work capability assessment (WCA) in December 2013 and November 2014, but neither of his reviews mentioned key documents that linked the WCA and the deaths of claimants.
The existence of the documents was only revealed publicly by Disability News Service (DNS) in the years after Litchfield’s final report was published.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has previously admitted possessing all these documents, including letters written by two coroners and a number of secret internal reviews into deaths linked to its WCA regime.
Litchfield declined to say this week whether he was shown these documents, but DWP said that it provided information to his review “on request” and that “any evidence used was referenced in the review”.
This suggests that the documents were not shared with Litchfield, as he made no mention of them in his reports.
The DWP statement adds to steadily mounting evidence that ministers and senior civil servants failed for years in their duty to address major flaws in the WCA, and then covered up their failure to do so.
Neither of Litchfield’s reviews mentioned the coroners’ letters, which followed the deaths of two men with mental health conditions in 2010 and 2013 and each warned of further such deaths if changes were not made to the WCA.
The call for evidence for Litchfield’s second review was issued on 10 June 2014, just five months after coroner Mary Hassell had written to DWP following an inquest into the death of Michael O’Sullivan, who had had significant, long-term mental health problems.
Hassell had told DWP that the trigger for his suicide had been the conclusion by civil servants that he was fit for work, and she said that neither DWP nor the Atos doctor who had assessed him had asked his GP, psychologist or psychiatrist for information about his mental health.
Hassell told DWP that it needed to take action “to prevent further deaths” like Michael O’Sullivan’s.
But despite that urgent call, Litchfield’s second review failed to mention Hassell’s letter, and a similar letter sent to DWP by another coroner in 2010 following the suicide of Stephen Carré.
Litchfield’s two reviews also failed to mention the secret internal reports, known at the time as peer reviews.
Peer reviews – now known as internal process reviews – must be carried out by civil servants into every death “where suicide is associated with DWP activity”.
One of the aims of the reviews is to “determine whether local and national standards have been followed or need to be revised/improved”, so DWP would find it hard to explain why they would not be shown to the independent experts commissioned to review the WCA.
DWP has admitted that at least seven peer reviews written in 2012 mentioned the WCA, and there are almost certainly many more that were written by the time Litchfield wrote his final report in late 2014.
Professor Malcolm Harrington, the independent expert who carried out the first three reviews of the WCA in 2010, 2011 and 2012, has already told DNS that he believes he was shown neither the first coroner’s letter (the second letter had not yet been written by the time he completed his third review) nor any WCA-related peer reviews.
He told DNS in December 2016: “I have NO recollection of seeing any of the reviews you mention.
“Maybe my brain is failing, but such damning indictments of the system – if seen – should have triggered a response from me. It didn’t.”
When approached the previous year about the 2010 coroner’s letter, he had told DNS: “If I had known about that coroner’s report, I would have said that this was something else we need to look at.
“I am a doctor, I know about coroner’s reports. Coroner’s reports are something that you don’t ignore.”
Now DNS has asked the same questions of Litchfield, who is BT’s chief medical officer.
DNS has asked him if DWP showed him the two coroners’ letters and any peer reviews that mentioned the WCA while he was working on his two reviews, and if they did, why he failed to mention them in his reports.
This week, more than three weeks after DNS put the questions to him, a BT spokesman said Dr Litchfield had declined to comment.
A DWP spokeswoman failed to confirm if the department showed all the WCA-related peer reviews and the two coroner’s letters to Dr Litchfield but appeared to suggest that it did not.
She said in a statement: “This was an independent review, and DWP provided information alongside other stakeholders – on request.
“Any evidence used was referenced in the review.”
DNS asked last night, after receiving her statement, if DWP was suggesting that Litchfield should have requested to see documents that he would not have known existed.
She had not responded by noon today (Thursday)
Posted by jeffrey davies on 27 April 2018
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October 2018 is the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), as used by successive UK governments to restrict access to the out-of-work long-term sickness and disability benefit known as the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).
The most radical reform in British welfare policy since the 1942 Beveridge Report was promoted as offering opportunity and releasing the potential of chronically sick and disabled people. It has been described ever since by politicians and civil servants as “supporting” those in receipt of long-term benefits for chronic illness and disability to return to work, regardless of any clinical diagnosis or prognosis which is completely disregarded by the WCA, rendering the assessment both meaningless and dangerous.
In reality, the adoption of the WCA in October 2008 introduced the greatest government enforced human suffering in the history of social security funding, as chronically ill people who are too ill to work are being, quite literally, killed by the State with an average of 90 people per month dying after being refused access to ESA and found “fit for work”.
It is surely cause for serious concern to learn that the government’s own mental health technical working group, as used by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in 2006 and 2007 to help to design the WCA, were then disregarded when advising the DWP that the WCA should be abandoned as it would create preventable harm, especially for those with a mental health problem.
As exposed by the Disability News Service: “Ministers and civil servants were “ruthless” and “reckless” in forcing through their new “fitness for work” test and refusing to abandon it, even after they were told of the harm it was causing…”
Perhaps of greater concern is that the 2005 DWP commissioned research “The Scientific and Conceptual Basis for Incapacity Benefits” by the former DWP Chief Medical Officer Mansel Aylward and former orthopaedic surgeon Gordon Waddell, as used by the DWP to justify the adoption of the WCA, has been totally discredited and has failed all academic scrutiny.
This DWP commissioned research funded by corporate America was used to justify the language of shirkers and scroungers in the relentless political attack on the sick and disabled community by adopting the Waddell and Aylward biopsychosocial (BPS) model of assessment for the WCA, and has been discredited by academic excellence.
Co-written with colleagues, Shakespeare’s paper concluded that the Waddell and Aylward BPS model demonstrated “no coherent theory or evidence behind this model” and revealed a “cavalier approach to scientific evidence”. That’s as damning a critique of one academic’s work by another that I have ever seen.
More commissioned research appeared in 2007 by the former banker David Freud. The ‘Freud report’ emphatically suggested that one million sick and disabled people should be removed from the then 2.68 million people claiming Incapacity Benefit, which was the disability benefit replaced in 2008 with the adoption of the ESA.
Justified by sweeping generalities such as “work is good for you”, when citing 2006 DWP commissioned research that presented very little evidence other than sweeping generalisations, Freud recommended the reduction of one million claimants whilst disregarding the health implications having later admitted in a 2008 interview that “I didn’t know anything about welfare at all when I started”.
Gently introduced by the New Labour government in 2008, it was the Coalition government who added to the burden of chronically ill and disabled people by manufacturing evidence for their official reports, and adding unnecessary austerity measures to the ongoing welfare reforms in 2010.
The DWP totally disregarding all detailed evidence of the preventable harm to public mental health created by the fatally flawed WCA, as independent academic research identified the WCA as being directly linked to an additional five hundred and ninety suicides in a three year period to this imposed ideological tyranny as NHS statistics identified 50% of ESA claimants having attempted suicide.
“[…] In total, across England as a whole, the WCA disability reassessment process during this
(3 year) period was associated with an additional 590 suicides, 279,000 additional cases of
self-reported mental health problems and the prescribing of an additional 725,000
antidepressant items.
“In particular the reviews indicated that the (WCA) process was impersonal and mechanistic
and did not adequately capture the impact of chronic health conditions…
“Given that doctors and other health professionals have professional and statutory duties to
protect and promote the health of patients and the public, our evidence that this process is
potentially harming the recipients of these assessments raises major ethical issues for
those involved…
“Our study provides evidence that the policy in England of reassessing the eligibility of benefit
recipients using the WCA may have unintended but serious consequences for population mental
health, and there is a danger that these adverse effects outweigh any benefits that may or may
not arise from moving people off disability benefits…”
‘First do no harm’: are disability assessments associated with adverse
trends in mental health? A longitudinal ecological study.
B.Barr, D Taylor-Robinson, D Stuckler, R Loopstra, A Reeves, M Whitehead
Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health
Volume 70, Issue 4, November 2015
Using the Waddell and Aylward totally discredited biopsychosocial (BPS) model of assessment for the WCA, that disregards diagnosis and prognosis, leading to the inevitable death of thousands of chronically ill people, the DWP were very confident that their American influenced welfare reforms would be successful, not least because the British press had been silenced and would not report the influence of corporate America with the British welfare reforms.
Instead, the British press were successfully used to demonise those too ill to work, as the planned destruction of the British welfare state increased. Sick and disabled people were stigmatised by the dangerous commentary, and prosecuted disability hate crimes increased by 213% during the Coalition government’s term in office.
The latest DWP Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Esther McVey MP, recently gave evidence to the Social Security Committee of the Scottish government, demonstrating that no details of claimant suffering and distress were of interest.
Mo Stewart, Independent Disability Studies Researcher.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author only. Originally titled: “Crime Without Punishment When Killed By The State”.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 26 April 2018
