Mental Health: Assessment

Debate between Ged Killen and Angela Crawley

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Angela Crawley]

I agree that there are issues with the service and the process.

[Ged Killen (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. She will have seen, as I have, the number of people who visit constituency surgeries after having had an initial assessment for a physical health problem but then ending up with a mental health issue as a result of how they were treated and having their support incorrectly withdrawn. Does she agree that that needs to be looked at very seriously?

[Angela Crawley]

I wholeheartedly agree, and that is the point of this debate. If the system worked well and we did not have any complaints about it, we would not be here today, but the fact is that the system is not working as it should, nor as it was probably intended to work in its initial design or concept. It is simply not working in practice. If we were to amend that system and make it work better, we would probably spend less time going through administrative appeals and mandatory reconsiderations, which should incentivise the Government to get it right the first time.

Returning to my earlier point, it is my staff who deal with constituents’ cases every day, and I would like to say thank you to each and every one of them. Rhona, Josh, David, John, Mary-Jane, Carmen and, of course, Georgia—I have quite a few staff and think I have covered them all—work hard every day to have those cases overturned, because they can see the constituent before them and can see that person who is crying out for help and needs support.

Perhaps the assessors are just not getting that full picture of someone, and perhaps we are being unfair to all the staff who work at DWP, but there is a flaw in the process, which I will turn to now. The assessments are carried out by contractors of Maximus and Atos according to guidelines set by the Department for Work and Pensions. I know there have been changes and adaptations, but ultimately they are still not working. Turning to the administrative process administered by DWP, those assessment reports are then filtered into descriptors set by the policies of this Government. I do not believe that the assessors are given the correct level of training or resources to deal with mental health issues. I have written to the Department about that on a number of occasions and I have been assured that assessors are getting adequate training, but if that is not the experience on the ground, there is obviously a flaw or an issue there.

I do not believe that the criteria for assessments give enough credence to the crippling effects that mental ill health can have on people’s lives. As the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) has outlined, that turns into a detrimental effect on people’s mental health, even if it did not start out that way. Indeed, many of my constituents complained that their mental health problems do not fit neatly into the assessment forms because the form is not designed to assess disability resulting from mental ill health, a point that the hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Andrea Jenkyns) also covered.

One of my constituents from Hamilton, whose daughter has bipolar disorder and was denied personal independence payments, said,

“we see mental health brought up everywhere—in adverts, in TV soaps—and the advice is to speak out. But if you tell the DWP, they ignore you and do nothing to help, they have fallen behind the times and are not keeping up to the standard.”

In the assessment reports, indicators of mental ill health bear little relation to the advice of mental health charities and are at best unhelpful for diagnosis. The assessors will make wide-reaching assertions based on outdated ideas of mental health and often irrelevant judgments on the person’s appearance: “Was the person rocking in a chair? Were they trembling? Were they sweating? What was the person wearing? Had they washed or were they wearing make-up?” That is institutional stereotyping of people suffering from poor mental health. The fact that someone turned out that day and made the effort, even if it perhaps took them hours and days to prepare themselves for that experience, only to then have it marked against them, seems arbitrary and frankly ridiculous.