Begg: Jury still out on assessments

A leading disabled MP still has doubts about the effectiveness of the system for assessing people’s fitness for work, as Sunil Peck reports

It’s too early to say that there’s any improvement in the process that determines a disabled person’s capacity for work, an influential politician has told Disability Now.

In his second review of the Work Capability Assessment published at the end of 2011, Professor Malcolm Harrington concluded that the process was becoming more empathetic and fairer than it had been when his first review was published in 2010. He has also said that assessments will become fairer as more of his recommendations are introduced to the process.

But speaking to Disability Now, Dame Anne Begg, the disabled Labour chair of the  Work & Pensions Committee that scrutinises the Government’s welfare policies, said that she didn’t have enough statistical evidence to agree or disagree with Professor Harrington’s conclusions.

“As a constituency MP, the complaints I’m still occasion­ally getting tend to be from new claimants rather than those moving from Incapac­ity Benefit to Employment and Support Allowance.

“That’s not to say that people being migrated don’t go through worry and anxiety when they get their letters, but they seem to be handled more sensitiv­ely than new claimants.”

Professor Harrington has recommended that decision-makers be helped to make better-informed decisions about eligibility for Employ­ment and Support Allow­ance, a move, he says, that should reduce the number of people appealing against decisions.

But Dame Anne says it remains to be seen whether Professor Harrington’s thinking is well-founded.

“The fact that the tribunal service has recruited another 50 judges would suggest that there’s still a huge back­log in the tribunal system. But it’s still too early to say whether the high level of appeals will continue.

“Because the process of migrating people from Incapacity Benefit has taken so long, there are no comparable figures to find out whether the numbers putting in for appeal have dropped and whether those appeals have succeeded.”

Chris Grayling has blamed the previous Government for leaving behind a flawed system. Dame Anne accepts that the system was flawed, but says that the current Government should stop hiding behind that argument and address their own failings instead.

“What Labour had done was to try and slow it down, and I’d hoped that at some stage they wouldn’t have gone on with the migration until some of the glitches had been ironed out. What the Tories have done is not only continued Labour’s timetable, but accelerated the migration.”

Would Labour put the current process on hold in order to deal with the existing claims and appeals?

“If there’s a problem with the speed of the migration and more letters are going out than [the health­care provider] ATOS can do the Work Capability Assess­ment for, at some stage they are going to have to bring that to a halt. But the Government is not releasing those statistics so we don’t know whether that’s the case.”

Dame Anne says she will continue to try to get hold of such statistics so that it will become clearer what needs to be done to improve the system.

One significant step forward, she says, would be for the media to stop por­traying unemployed disabled people as scroungers.

“Even for people who have gone through the system and come out with the right assessment, it’s been quite traumatic. A lot of the media coverage means that people are going into these assess­ments already worried even though they might have quite profound disabilities.”