AGAA4
Yes DAR they sometimes override medical submissions but on the claimants behalf. Some doctors will state the claimant is fit for work when they clearly aren't and they get their benefits.
To call the DWP staff Nazis is just unbelievable.
You only need to look on online disability forums and even MN and GN threads to realise that the disability benefit assessment system is not fit for purpose.
Take PIP claims for example. The assessment does not actually consider the extent of disability itself, but rather the effect it has on a range of activities in daily living (personal care, cooking, general day to day living tasks( and mobility (the degree to which the condition affects your ability to generally move around and walk certain distances). Most conventional medical evidence won’t give the assessor much of an idea of how the claimant manages from day to day, because it’s a straightforward description of the condition, so it’s easy for assessors to dismiss medical evidence in favour of their own opinion as to the degree to which the claimant is affected.
The assessor doesn’t make the decision as to the benefit award. Their report goes to the case manager at DWP, who looks at all the evidence the claimant has supplied. But the case manager has no medical training so will always go with what the assessor has said.
You may think, OK, all well and good. But then you have to factor in that assessors are not doctors, they are recruited from NHS and other sources and tend to be nurses, physios, paramedics and other HCPs. They are trained in disability recognition for a few days by the assessment provider and then unleashed on the claimants as ‘disability analysts’. Most have no specialist knowledge of the conditions they are assessing, beyond this training. So you end up with claimants who have, for example, complex neurological conditions who supply specialist medical reports from consultants involved with their treatment being overruled by the opinions of paramedics and physiotherapist, nurses and the like. The unfitness for purpose is perfectly illustrated by the number of claimants who are successful at tribunal and the number of times the DWP have been reprimanded for the poor quality of their decision making.
Similarly with the work capability assessment for ESA. The assessors are recruited and trained in the same way, and provide the assessment reports on which a claimants’ fitness to even look for work is decided through similar procedures.
This is no way to treat vulnerable people, and although I wouldn’t agree with the description of DWP staff as Nazis, I well remember a campaign launched by the Cameron/Clegg coalition to discredit disabled claimants. At one stage it involved posters in JobCentre Plus which were utterly dehumanising to disabled claimants. One was depicting disabled claimants as bots in a space invaders game and they were ‘picked off’ one by one implying the savings made as they were denied benefits. This caused an outcry and was compared with similar posters in Nazi Germany era, depicting sick and disabled people as ‘Useless Eaters’ in preparation for what they were about to do. DWP were forced to remove the posters and apologise for the deep offence they caused.
