Atos Work Capability Assessments

Debate between Austin Mitchell and Meg Hillier

Thursday 17th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Austin Mitchell (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

The number of MPs who want to speak today and the passion that has been shown are testimony to the fact that the system has not worked, is not working and ought to be scrapped. I hope that the Minister is listening, because that is clearly a strong concern on both sides of the House.

The key weakness of the system is the perfunctory, mechanical, inhuman and rushed process of assessment. I have to point out to the Minister that as the system has been handed to the private sector, the more perfunctory the process of assessment, the greater the profit made by Atos and the assessors.

[Meg Hillier]

Other Members have raised the issue that Atos is a private company. I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that it would be helpful if the Minister could reveal the profit margin, as this is public money being spent by a private company, which one would expect to make a profit. Would it not also be useful if the Minister could tell us whether there has been any change in the profit in the years for which Atos has been doing the assessments?

[Austin Mitchell]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. That was one of my concerns as a member of the Public Accounts Committee and it was to have been part of my passionate penultimate ringing declaration when I intended to ask the Government to tell us how much profit has been made, but I can now omit that from my speech.

The system is perfunctory and totally inadequate. I will not repeat the cases that have come to my surgery after the assessment—that has been done brilliantly by some of my colleagues—but it is clear that the assessment fails patients with mental health conditions, particularly schizophrenia, which are very difficult to assess and treat. It fails when conditions are intermittent and emerge one day only to fade away the next. It fails on degenerative conditions, too. The system of assessment does not take into account any of its own inadequacies in those areas.

In the Public Accounts Committee, I was able to voice a suspicion that there was a quota for the number of disabled people that should be shaken out in what appears to be an enormous attempt to do that rather than to provide them with the support and help that they need and with encouragement to go back to work. The process is more concerned with shaking them off benefit than with treating their cases properly. We were assured by Atos and the Department that there was no quota, but I think we can guarantee that any medical assessor for Atos who finds that the total or a high proportion of the number of people he is examining are not fit for work will not advance his career in assessment, his career in Atos or his contact with the Department. Inevitably, there are those pressures on the assessors.

As our Committee was told, 38% of the cases that go to appeal—I advise all my cases to go to appeal—are successful in reversing the verdict. That demonstrates its inadequacy and the enormous cost in the reassessment process at appeal, a cost that is not taken into account in the Government’s estimates of the savings produced by the system. Those reassessments are usually done with the help of the patient’s own doctor, so I do not see why their doctor’s view cannot be invoked and used at an earlier stage in the process. After all, the Government are giving more power to the doctors and claiming that they represent the patients. The doctors know the long-term conditions—they are treating the patient—so why are their views not taken into account by Atos at the start?

Our PAC report on the system was pretty damning—one of the most damning we have done. Our concerns included the rate of profit, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) has mentioned. The Minister should tell us the rate of profit made by Atos and what efforts the Department is making to reduce that and to ensure a more efficient service and more efficient assessment processes. We were concerned, too, that this is a monopoly contract with no great risk to Atos. The monopoly is continuously reinstated and Atos is put back in power. Monopoly processes go slack, and if such tasks are going to go to the private sector—I do not think that they should—the companies should be subject to competition and to more regular reviews. The weakness of the assessment system shows that Atos is not working effectively. There should not be a long-term monopoly in this area.

If the Minister reads Twitter at all, as I do avidly—normally to see people abuse me—he will see the widespread concerns about people’s treatment by Atos. If he listens to this debate, he will hear the same. If he listens to the disablement groups, he will hear the same. Instead of backing an inhumane system and refusing to change it or tighten the terms and conditions under which Atos operates, it is time that the Minister showed some concern and changed the system.