g4s
Brook House is operated privately by G4S on behalf of the Home Office [Image: BBC].
The only question here is why G4S was given a contract to run an immigration centre in the first place.
Shall we consider some of the firms other recent disasters?
The biggie that everyone remembers was the Olympic security debacle in 2012.
There was the fraud investigation over tagging contracts.
G4S has been fined more than 100 times since 2010 for breaching contracts for prisons it runs.
Labour dropped G4S from providing security at its annual conference over human rights concerns.
G4S was stripped of its contract to run a scandal-hit youth prison.
The company even has a cheesy sub-Bon Jovi theme song.
Now this:
G4S has suspended nine members of staff from an immigration removal centre near Gatwick Airport, following a BBC Panorama undercover investigation.
The programme says it has covert footage recorded at Brook House showing officers “mocking, abusing and assaulting” people being held there.
It says it has seen “widespread self-harm and attempted suicides” in the centre, and that drug use is “rife”.
G4S said it is aware of the claims and “immediately” began an investigation.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 02 September 2017
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This excellent Canary article goes on to say that Valerie Grant’s stepson reportedly shouted: “It is just being swept under the carpet. One agency blames another agency and they can get away with it,” after Coroner Andrew Haigh commented: “There were a number of agencies involved, but nobody took a lead. I do have concerns about the lack of support, but I don’t think there’s any one agency that I can write to, to try to remedy this.”
It seems the stepson had it exactly right.
Mr Haigh has previously said the issue of whether there was an increase in suicides due to benefit cuts was worth exploring – but the DWP has steadfastly refused to consider any kind of investigation. It simply parrots the same line about there being many and complex reasons for people to take their own life.
This Site’s response has always been to ask what the triggering factor was.
In this case it seems obvious. Don’t you think?
A mother took her own life after the government took away nearly all her disabled son’s benefits and support, a coroner has ruled.
BBC News reported that 73-year-old Valerie Grant of Great Bridgeford, Staffordshire, “walked in front of a train” and died in April 2017.
Prior to this, her severely autistic son had lost a job placement as a bin man, was not entitled to support via a day care centre, had been turned down for accommodation, had lost his Disability Living Allowance (DLA) payments, and was refused a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Grant had reportedly told mental health workers: “What have I got to do? Top myself to get help for my son?”
Posted by jeffrey davies on 02 September 2017
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jeffs posts
oh dear
Poundland said it had signed a deal with the DWP to take jobseekers on work experience on condition that it was voluntary [Image: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters].
Poundland seems to be turning into a serial abuser of jobseekers.
It is now five years since Cait Reilly (remember her?) took the DWP to court for forcing her to stack shelves at one of the discount retail chain’s stores. It was forced labour, not voluntary, the company paid her nothing (she only received benefit money) and pocketed all the profits.
In May 2013, This Writer worked out that companies using jobseekers in this way were making profits of almost £1 billion per year – and were being funded by the taxpayer to do it. The public purse lost more than £16 million in the 2012-13 financial year.
And they’re still doing it.
Because nobody has ever bothered to stop them.
Poundland has been criticised for employing jobseekers, without pay, for up to two months under a deal with the government.
Several of those who have worked on the scheme told the Guardian they had worked up to 30 hours a week for at least three weeks stacking shelves in Poundland. They were told that the work experience was voluntary but one said: “I had no say in it really.”
It’s not clear how many jobseekers have been used by Poundland under the scheme as the government said it did not collect information centrally and the work experience was managed locally by jobcentres across the country. However, one store in Bolton has taken on 21 placements since last August, according to information provided in response to a freedom of information request by the Boycott Workfare pressure group.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 31 August 2017
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jeffs posts
Has anybody pointed out that the number of deaths in the UK’s benefit system has risen, year on year, along with the number of sanctions applied to claimants?
The ever-relevant Frances Ryan, writing in The Guardian, makes excellent points about the continuing devastation wreaked by a benefit system that focuses on penalising, rather than helping, the vulnerable.
But, two years after This Writer forced the government to admit that nearly 100,000 sickness benefit claimants died between January 2011 and February 2014, it seemed worthwhile to compare the number of deaths per year with the number of sanctions.
Fair warning: This is only using the figures for ESA.
In 2011, the number of people on ESA who were adversely sanctioned totalled 4,462 – 33 per cent of the 13,490 who died that year.
In 2012, there were 12,710 adverse sanctions – 64 per cent of the 19,940 who died that year.
And in 2013, there were 22,560 adverse sanctions – 82 per cent of the 27,370 who died that year.
I know.
It’s not enough evidence to demonstrate a link between sanction and death.
But it is enough to warrant further investigation.
Shall we have another Freedom of Information request?
More than 70,000 people on the out-of-work sickness benefit (employment and support allowance) ESA had their benefits stopped between December 2012 and December 2016. More than 5,000 had them stopped for at least six months. That’s wheelchair users and people with learning difficulties left with bare cupboards and cold homes.
The vast majority of recent ESA sanctions – more than 90% since December 2015 – have been a punishment for people failing to take part in “work-related activity”: anything from skills training or drawing up a CV to community work placements. Disabled people going through the system repeatedly report this can mean being sanctioned for not going to a meeting despite being in too much pain to get out of bed.
This is not a coincidence but, rather, reflective of a political culture that has fetishised getting disabled people into work at any cost.
It’s the same thinking that from April resulted in many people on ESA permanently losing £30 a weekunder the guise that it would give them an “incentive to work”.
Two years ago, there were warnings sanctions were unfair, excessively punitive, and causing destitution. Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has found there is no evidence sanctions actually work. Yet barely any modification has been made. In July, the Department for Work and Pensions announced that people with mental health conditions who have their jobseeker’s allowance sanctioned will now be eligible for immediate access to hardship payments – as if not leaving a young mum with depression without food for two weeks is vast progress.
Social policy reform based on the premise of removing the money people need in order to live is always shameful. But to do this to disabled people – who are receiving benefits because they are not well enough to work – is a stain on the national conscience.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 30 August 2017
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jeffs posts
Ministers have spent almost £40m in an “appalling” attempt to stop sick and disabled people receiving the financial help they are entitled to, The Independent can reveal.
Freedom of Information requests have exposed how taxpayers’ money has been spent on futile legal battles to prevent vulnerable people receiving help.
The hit to the public purse could also be far higher than the new data suggests because it is still unclear how much more the state spends running courts where sanctions are challenged.
The vast majority of appeals were lost by the Government last year, making the expense appear unnecessary. Early indications now show the problem is becoming even worse in 2017, with a 77 per cent rise in money spent trying to stop people from getting Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) payments.
Critics claim the situation has arisen because fitness to work assessments are deeply flawed, leading to incorrect decisions which need to be fought.
Senior Labour MP Frank Field, who worked as David Cameron’s poverty tsar, said: “What’s appalling is that the [Government] is prepared to spend £39m of taxpayers’ money against people who are desperately fighting off destitution.”
New figures show that in 2016 the Government spent £22m processing claimants’ initial appeals against sanctions – a stage most people must pass through before they reach a tribunal.
It emerged earlier this year that government officials are given targets to reject four out of five initial appeals – known as mandatory reconsiderations – for some disability benefits.
Further data obtained by The Independent under Freedom of Information law shows the Government then spent a further £17m fighting cases in the courts that were not settled at the initial appeal stage, bringing the total appeals process cost to £39m last year.
In the same period the Government lost 62 per cent of the tribunal cases in which it was attempting to sanction a claimant’s ESA – which supports people when impairments prevent them working.
They also lost 65 per cent of the cases in the latter half of 2016, the most recent period for which figures are available, relating to the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), a longer-term benefit.
But the defeats suffered by government lawyers are not persuading ministers of the need to change tack, with the figures actually pointing to a more costly appeals process in 2017.
The Government spent £1,166,459 trying to take benefits from ESA claimants between January and March 2016, and £2,069,849 in the same period this year – a 77 per cent rise.
Meanwhile, the proportion of cases where judges found that claimants were too ill to work also increased. In the first three months of last year judges decided in favour of claimants in 58 per cent of cases.
That figure rose to 70 per cent in the same period this year, suggesting the Government is denying payments to more people who are genuinely unfit to work.
The costs that have been exposed so far only refer to those incurred by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and do not include money spent by the Courts and Tribunals Service, which carry out the appeals.
Three-stage appeal process
1. Assessment
Both PIP and ESA claimants have to complete assessments after which the DWP determines whether an applicant will receive payments and what level of support they will get.
2. Mandatory reconsideration
If an applicant wants to challenge the decision made at their assessment they have to complete a mandatory reconsideration, in which the DWP will re-examine a claim.
3. Appeal
If the decision is not overturned at a mandatory reconsideration, a claimant can then take the DWP to an independent tribunal. There is usually both a doctor and a judge sitting on the panel who will reexamine the case.
Chair of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee Mr Field added: “We clearly need a new compact between the [Government] and claimants, otherwise this injustice will continue to act as a recruiting agent for food banks.”
Critics believe the Government’s system for assessing if people are eligible for benefits like ESA and PIP are at the root of the problem.
Currently assessments are contracted out to private firms Atos and Capita, which do not require employees performing the assessments to have relevant expertise in specific disabilities.
It has led to reports of cases where physiotherapists have assessed claimants with mental health problems.
One ex-civil servant who suffers from Parkinson’s told The Independent how he won his case to receive financial help through the appeals system only to be informed he will have to be reassessed next year – despite his illness being degenerative.
Jeffrey Sturt, 59, said his assessor was “hostile” and “spoke down” to him. The former civil servant said he thought “people would walk away from challenging decisions because they are aggressive”.
“Minimum overheads, maximum profits – that’s what they’re going for,” he added.
One woman who suffers up to 30 epileptic seizures a month, said the Government took her back to a tribunal twice after she won her appeal. Citizens Advice said it is seeing more cases such as this, where the DWP does not accept the judge’s decision.
During the period when she was waiting to hear the outcome, the 38-year-old woman’s illness became worse and the frequency of her fits increased due to stress. “You start panicking about it,” she said. “You think, ‘Have they forgotten about me?’”
She finally won her case after 18 months. She asked: “What was the point in that? How much money did they waste on me?”
In April it was reported that Atos and Capita had been paid £578m so far for assessing people for PIP since it launched in 2013. Their contracts were due to expire in December this year but have been extended to July 2019, according to the DWP.
Michelle Mitchell, chief executive at the MS Society, said: “These exorbitant costs point to a welfare system that clearly doesn’t make sense.
"We know that many people with MS aren’t getting accurate decisions the first time around.
"Being forced to go through the lengthy and stressful appeals process is a waste of time and money, and also harms people’s health.”
Ken Butler, who leads on benefits policy at Disability Rights UK, said inaccurate assessments too often denied disabled people justice until their independent tribunals.
“I think the problem is that things go wrong at the very start and then they’re hard to put right,” he said.
“If the assessments were better then you wouldn’t have the need for mandatory reconsiderations. The system now only functions really to put people off going any further – the whole process is quite lengthy and stressful.”
Chief executive of Citizens Advice Gillian Guy said: “Last year Citizens Advice helped people with almost 400,000 PIP issues, up 37 per cent on the previous 12 months.
Many come to us concerned that the outcome of their PIP assessment doesn’t accurately reflect the support needs they have because of their health issues.
The next steps can be time-consuming, distressing and even costly if people have to pay to gather additional evidence.”
Margaret Greenwood, shadow minister for employment and inequalities, said: “These figures are a clear demonstration that the current assessment process, which causes significant stress to ill and disabled people, is not fit for purpose.
"The flawed Tory assessments are a damning indictment of this Government’s cruel social security reforms and seven wasted years of austerity.
"In addition to putting unnecessary pressure on people who need support, these assessments have created waste and expense with thousands overturned in the courts.”
A DWP spokesperson responded to the new findings by highlighting the low number of overturns as a proportion of all decisions made since 2013.
They said just 3 per cent of PIP decisions and 4 per cent of ESA decisions made at initial assessment had been overturned in that period.
Yet changes to the system make comparisons difficult.
“In the majority of successful appeals, decisions are overturned because people have submitted more oral or written evidence,” they said.
Posted by jeffrey davies [86.17.83.77] on 29 August 2017
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jeffs posts
It’s all over now, isn’t it? With Brexit in focus and the coalition government long out of office, it would be easy to believe the Tories’ brutal “welfare” policies were a thing of the past. The bedroom tax is old news. The once notorious “fit for work” tests are no longer set pieces in ministers’ press speeches. Benefit sanctions – for years, the epitome of post-crash “tough on welfare” posture – are a dated crisis.
Except, that’s what the Tories would like you to think. The language of disabled people “languishing” on sickness benefits may have quietened and enthusiasm for austerity – now an electoral risk – be spoken of less zealously, but the policies have gone nowhere. For proof, take a look at the official figures released this month showing the scale of benefit sanctions against disabled and chronically ill people since the Conservatives first introduced stricter measures. More than 70,000 people on the out-of-work sickness benefit (employment and support allowance) ESA had their benefits stopped between December 2012 and December 2016. More than 5,000 had them stopped for at least six months. That’s wheelchair users and people with learning difficulties left with bare cupboards and cold homes.
ESA sanctions are made for a fixed period of one, two or four weeks. But they carry on indefinitely if claimants are deemed not to follow jobcentre rules. The vast majority of recent ESA sanctions – more than 90% since December 2015 – have been a punishment for people failing to take part in “work-related activity”: anything from skills training or drawing up a CV to community work placements. Disabled people going through the system repeatedly report this can mean being sanctioned for not going to a meeting despite being in too much pain to get out of bed.
This is not a coincidence but, rather, reflective of a political culture that has fetishised getting disabled people into work at any cost. It’s the same thinking that from April resulted in many people on ESA permanently losing £30 a week under the guise that it would give them an “incentive to work”. Mid-recession, and on the brink of the biggest squeeze on workers’ living standards in decades, the drive to sanction disabled people too ill to work spoke to the birth of a wider narrative of suspicion around disability benefit claimants, actively propagated by large sections of the media and the political class.
How else could sanctioning have been allowed to continue? Two years ago, there were warnings sanctions were unfair, excessively punitive, and causing destitution. Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has found there is no evidence sanctions actually work. Yet barely any modification has been made. In July, the Department for Work and Pensions announced that people with mental health conditions who have their jobseeker’s allowance sanctioned will now be eligible for immediate access to hardship payments – as if not leaving a young mum with depression without food for two weeks is vast progress.
The headlines may fade but the misery doesn’t. In fact, it’s increasing. Early signs of the roll out of universal credit – the “all in one” benefit system – suggest the new benefit is adopting a particularly pernicious sanctioning culture. This month’s same government figures show the number of sanctions on people on UC are at an all-time monthly high, and since its launch in 2015, more than 100,000 UC claimants have been penalised. Meanwhile, with so many families facing sanctions and benefit delays, the Trussell Trust reported a record number of its food banks running out of food this summer.
Social policy reform based on the premise of removing the money people need in order to live is always shameful. But to do this to disabled people – who are receiving benefits because they are not well enough to work – is a stain on the national conscience. Theresa May and her ministers, by choosing to continue the heightened sanction regime, are as complicit as their predecessors who launched it. Five years on, the government is still starving disabled people. That this is now largely occurring under the radar makes it all the more disturbing.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 29 August 2017
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jeffs posts
This takedown has been on its way for a long time.
According to the United Nations, the Conservative Party’s treatment of people with disabilities has been a “human catastrophe”.
Dealing with the Tory government, which denies any ill-treatment at all, despite the mountain of evidence, is “the most challenging exercise” in the history of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
And the UK media has been complicit in the Tory cover-up, as Bernadette Meaden explains in the Ekklesia article quoted below. Read:
For over seven years, disabled people in the UK have endured an onslaught from government which has caused immense suffering, and which some have not survived.
It should, in a decent country, have been a national scandal, with outrage sufficient to cause a complete change of course.
The fact that this hasn’t happened is an indictment of our society and our media… Apart from some very honourable exceptions, our media, and particularly our national public service broadcaster, has really failed us.
In Geneva the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities had no such reticence. One Committee member echoed the experience of all who have critically engaged with our government on these issues when he said that dealing with it was ‘the most challenging exercise in the history of the Committee’.
But unlike most of the British media, the Committee was undeterred. Chairperson Theresia Degener said that government policies and cuts have led to a ‘human catastrophe’ for disabled people in the UK. The government was unceremoniously told by vice-chair Coomaravel Pyaneandee that, as a matter of fact, it’s not a world leader in disability issues, but ‘disabled people’s organisations…are in fact the world leaders in your country.’
How the government will respond remains to be seen. But one thing is certain – there is no longer any excuse for any of our media to be complicit in maintaining the government’s illusions, or ignoring the truth of a human catastrophe.
Source: Ekklesia | A human catastrophe for disabled people, a scandal for our country
Labour’s Debbie Abrahams has already responded:
Shamefully for this government, Britain is the first and so far only country to be investigated by the UN for breaching the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Even worse, they chose to ignore the recommendations from the UN CRPD report, evading their responsibility towards disabled people in our country.
The UN’s report showed that the austerity policies brought in by the government in 2010 to reduce public spending, such as the destructive bedroom tax and the damaging cuts to social security and social care budgets are infringing on the rights of disabled people.
The report confirmed what Labour has been warning all along; despite Theresa May’s warm words on the steps of Downing Street, promising a fair deal for all in our society, this Conservative government has consistently failing sick and disabled people. And what do they do in response? They dismissed the report and refused to take action.
It is disappointing, but not all that surprising, to see the government continue to dodge their responsibilities. It is a slap in the face to deaf and disabled peoples’ organisations who have been campaigning tirelessly to bring to light the human rights violations disabled people across the country experience daily.
This week, once again we saw the British government obfuscate and dodge key questions from the committee covering all articles in the convention. The UK was repeatedly told by the committee that it was not a global leader on disability rights and the Chair stated that cuts to social protection in Britain were “a human catastrophe” visited on disabled people.
Britain’s human rights watchdog stated that the examination by the UN had seen a “disconnect” between the government’s replies and the “lived experiences of disabled people”.
In conclusion, the Rapporteur stated that he could “provide a long list of examples where UK doesn’t live up to the Convention, but the time does not allow” and the committee was “deeply concerned about the lack of recognition of the findings and recommendations of the conducted inquiry”.
Once again the government has failed to listen to deaf and disabled people or act on the warnings that I and many others have repeatedly made about the impact of their policies on disabled people. Deaf and disabled people are tired of broken promises, they desperately need to be treated with respect and dignity not plunged into poverty or worse.
Our approach is different. Labour has committed to scrapping current disability health assessments, replacing them with a holistic, person-centred approach, based on principles of dignity and inclusion. We will also build on the previous Labour government’s commitment to disabled people in 2009 as signatories to the UN CRPD and incorporate the UN CRPD fully into UK law – a move rejected by the government delegation in Geneva this week.
We believe, like the NHS, our social security system is based on principles of inclusion, support and security for all. This assures us of our dignity, should we fall on hard times or become incapacitated. Nine-tenths of disabilities are acquired – it could happen to anyone of us. I don’t want people who have paid into the system all their life to be made to feel worthless and dehumanised by a state that should be there to support them. We will continue to promote equality of opportunity for all in our society.
The government must now act upon the concluding observations which will come from the committee and on the recommendations of last year’s report. For too long disabled people have been excluded from society, it’s time that changed.
Posted by jeffrey davies [86.17.83.77] on 27 August 2017
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its called fraudulent but then
The Canary has provided a handy copy-and-keep list of the top Tory election donors, and it’s a real rogues’ gallery. Check out these creeps:
The Tories’ top donors included:
JCB Service – £1.5m. It’s owned by Anthony Bamford, who was not only named in the Panama Papers, but who operates JCB out of tax haven Bermuda.
John C Armitage – £1.1m. Armitage is the founder of Egerton Capital, a hedge fund that enables [xml] tax avoidance for investors.
John Griffin – £1.03m. Griffin and his private hire firm Addison Lee were caught up in a lobbying scandal in 2012.
Mark J. C. Bamford – £750,000. The younger brother of Anthony Bamford, owner of JBC Service, he was caught up in a row over a JCB subsidiary, JCB research, which, while only worth £27,000, was the biggest Tory donor in the run-up to the 2010 general election.
Andrew E Law – £525,000. Law is a hedge fund owner [paywall] whose firm Caxton Associates is registered in the US tax avoidance state of Delaware.
David J Rowland – £312,500. The Canary conducted a major investigation into Rowland in 2016, and described his offshore tax affairs as “mind blowing”.
Lord Michael Ashcroft – £500,000. Ashcroft has been involved in several tax avoidance scandals. He also co-authored the book at the centre of the David Cameron ‘Pig gate’ scandal.
Other Tory donors [pdf p3-5] during the election period included:
Sir Henry and Lady Keswick – £150,000. Keswick’s company Jardine Matheson was linked to tax avoidance via Luxembourg and has numerous subsidiaries in tax haven Bermuda.
Charles ‘Julian’ Cazalet – £10,000. Cazalet is a non-executive director of NHS private provider Deltex Medical Group.
Malcolm Healey – £100,000. Healey was fined by HMRC in 2015 for making £8.6m [pdf] by using a tax avoidance scheme.
Bruce Hardy McLain – £100,000. McLain’s private investment firm CVC Capital Partners is currently embroiled in a £5m bribery and tax avoidance scandal involving Formula One.
Ayman and Sawsan Asfari – £100,000. Ayman is currently under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office. He also runs oil company Petrofac, which avoids tax via Jersey.
Rainy City Investments – £100,000. Owned by Peter and Fred Done, who were fined £800,000 by the Serious Fraud Office over money laundering allegations.
Investors in Private Capital Ltd – £150,000. Co-owned by James ‘Jamie’ Reuben, family friend of George Osborne, it paid no UK corporation tax in 2014 [pdf p13], despite a turnover [pdf p17] of £35m
Posted by jeffrey davies [86.17.83.77] on 27 August 2017
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a and e
Leaked proposals from three areas have already revealed plans including downgrading or closing A&Es [Image: Chris Radburn/PA].
Shame on The Guardian for accusing the NHS of hiding planned service cuts.
The health service is run by the minority Conservative government and must do what it is told.
Its spokesperson is right to say it must work within its budget. As for the information it releases – that’s up to the Tories.
So let’s be honest – it’s not the NHS hiding the facts; it is the Conservative Party. Again.
The NHS has been accused of keeping the public in the dark about controversial plans to plug a £250m funding gap by rationing services.
The crowdfunded campaign group 38 Degrees submitted freedom of information (FOI) requests to the government, NHS leaders as well as trusts and clinical commissioning groups in the 13 areas affected but all except two refused to release details of planned changes.
Leaked proposals from three areas have already revealed plans including downgrading or closing A&Es and extending waiting times for operations, and 38 Degrees says the public is entitled to know what else is in store.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 27 August 2017
