Over 8,000 people demonstrated for disability rights outside Westminster on 11 May, making the Hardest Hit march the biggest disability rights protest in decades. Joy Macready reportsMany protesters had to overcome travel restrictions to attend the protest – a group from a Cambridge care home was forced to stagger their journey times, after discovering that the train could only accommodate two wheelchair users per journey.
This demonstration was crucial because disabled people will be hardest hit by proposed cuts in benefits and services, with them and their families losing an estimated £9bn of support over the next four years.
The recent changes in benefits are demeaning to disabled people. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) moved all claimants on Incapacity Benefit to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) in February. In order to get ESA, claimants are forced to undergo stringent but often completely inaccurate medical tests.
Atos Healthcare, who the DWP recently awarded a three-year contract extension worth over £300 million, is profiting from claimants’ misery. The company delivers medical advice and assessment services to support the welfare reform agenda, but has come under fire for its ability to assess claimants. Its track record is not inspiring: it recently walked away from a 10-year contract (the lowest bidder) to run a primary care trust (PCT) in Tower Hamlets in just over three years because of its poor performance.
Around 1.5 million people are due to be forced through these Work Capability Assessment (WCA) tests. The company has been criticised by a number of charities as providing “flawed” and “inadequate” assessments, where doctors report incorrectly what the claimant has said about their own conditions and…pay more attention to the computer. To date, over a third of people who made a claim for ESA and were found “fit to work” at assessment have appealed, with the original decision overturned in almost four in 10 cases.
Despite these damning statistics, Atos Healthcare is hitting its targets in terms of forcing people off ESA. So far there have been 48,000 forced back into work after having been diagnosed with a long-term illness or disability.
Disability activists have staged a number of protests outside Atos’ headquarters in London and offices around the country and organised a week action against Atos Healthcare and the DWP. The fight for a more compassionate medical assessment is also a fight for the abolition of Atos’s mechanised methods – for the return to a quality medical service, publicly run, and not for profit.
