health | ukwatch.net

Welfare Reform Act to force sick and vulnerable into work

tim — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:05:25 +0000

The draconian measures laid out in the Welfare Reform Act 2007 are now being implemented in Britain by the Labour government of Prime Minster Gordon Brown. The Act represents a wide-ranging attack on millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people who rely on Incapacity Benefit (IB). Recipients of the benefit are deemed unable to work due to poor physical or mental health.

Under the new legislation, their entitlement to financial support is being replaced with new, conditional Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). From November, those registering for the first time as too sick or unable to work will only be entitled to ESA, whereby payments are determined by national insurance contributions, and are subject to means testing. All existing IB claimants will then be transferred to the ESA.

The main aim is to force people into work under threat of poverty. The government has stated it intends to cut the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants by 20,000 each year.

Attacks on welfare have been a central plank of Labour’s policies since coming to power in 1997. Unemployment benefit has been restricted and Lone Parent Benefit reduced.

The government has stated that 2.4 million people currently receive Incapacity Benefit and that up to one million should not be entitled to it. This figure is actually a distortion as statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that only 1.4 million of the 2.4 million unable to work due to illness actually receive any additional payment. The rest receive standard national insurance credits only.

Since the measures were first mooted in 2006, a campaign based on demonising Incapacity Benefit claimants has swung into operation. This has been fuelled by incessant media scare stories about Incapacity Benefit “scroungers”, “spongers” and “cheats” who claim the benefit “fraudulently” instead of working.

According to recently published research, the number of cases of Incapacity Benefit “fraud” is so low it is almost impossible to measure accurately. It is estimated to account for less than 0.3 percent of total Incapacity Benefit payments.

The tabloid press would have us believe that recipients of “generous” Incapacity Benefit live a life of luxury. But those who are on the benefit are among the poorest people in society. Basic Incapacity Benefit payment ranges from £63.75 on the “short-term lower late” to £84.50 on the “long-term higher rate.” Research conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2004 found that claimants on Incapacity Benefit and or Disability Living Allowance/Income Support met only 28 percent of the costs of people with low-medium needs, 30 percent of the costs of people with intermittent/fluctuating needs, 35 percent of the costs of deaf people and people with visual impairments and 50 percent of the costs of people with high-medium support needs.

On April 4, the Daily Express ran a sensationalist headline “Outrage At £8.5m A Week For Jobless Junkies And Winos,” claiming that “Taxpayers are forking out £8.5million a week in benefits to support jobless drink and drug addicts.”

The article cited statistics from the DWP revealing that 51,410 people whose medical record included a diagnosis of alcoholism received long-term Incapacity Benefits. The figures also showed that a further 49,890 on Incapacity Benefit were drug addicts.

That so many people, including young people, are victims of alcoholism and drug addiction is a societal problem—not only an issue of dependency, which constitutes a genuine illness that causes untold suffering. The turn to alcohol and drugs is exacerbated by the steady erosion of stable job opportunities, the decline of many industries, and decreasing access to quality education, health care, and to drug treatment programmes.

Most of those in receipt of Incapacity Benefit reside in inner city areas in London, the North-West, the North-East, Scotland and Wales. Many of these workers would have previously been in secure, relatively stable jobs in industries like mining, steel and shipbuilding. Over the past 25 years these jobs have been decimated, with millions forced into lives of poverty and the attendant problems such as debt and ill health.

Currently claimants have to pass a rigorous “personal capability assessment” (PCA) in order to quality for IB. A new “work capability assessment” is to target all Incapacity Benefit claimants, with only the terminally ill excluded from the requirement.

Under the remit to “focus on what people can do, not what they can not,” a distinction will be drawn between “being eligible for benefit and being capable for work.” If it is found that the claimant is capable of doing some sort of work, they can receive benefit only on the condition that they retrain and look for work. The penalty for not doing so will be the loss of benefit.

Under the new rules, eligibility for benefit will be decided on a DWP doctor’s evidence and “capability for work” could be assessed by other unspecified “health professionals”.

At present, the severely mentally impaired are exempt from being assessed. Under the new measures, these claimants are required to be assessed and have to agree to look for work in order to qualify for ESA. They are also obliged to attend courses to improve “employability.” They will also be compelled to “manage their health” in work and undertake therapy for their mental health problems.

In order to speed up the number of claimants denied benefit payments, doctors and “care teams” will be directly involved in ensuring that their patients are removed from IB and forced into employment. The Welfare Reform Act follows proposals made in 2005 to allow “employment advisors” from Job Centres to be based in doctors’ surgeries. The pilot schemes began in 2006 in six areas of the UK.

“A revolution in our welfare state”

The Conservative Party has proposed its own assault on Incapacity Benefit. In January, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Chris Grayling announced what he termed “revolutionary” welfare proposals.

Under a Tory government, anyone who failed a “work capability” test would automatically lose their entitlement to Incapacity Benefit. They would then be placed on Job Seekers Allowance, immediately resulting in a welfare payment cut of £20 a week.

The plans also specify that those on IB with the “potential to work” would be referred to “welfare to work” providers. These would include private-sector companies.

In preparation for their welfare announcement, the Tories studied welfare systems in a number of countries, and were particularly praiseworthy of measures taken in the American state of Wisconsin, which had cut the number of people on benefit rolls by 82 percent in three years.

Grayling said of the proposals, “For Britain such an approach marks a revolution in our welfare state. It marks an end to a situation where the receipt of incapacity benefit is an unconditional entitlement. In the future, it will carry with it the responsibility to do everything that you can to get back into work and help lift yourself out of the poverty trap that the benefit can represent for so many people.”

The response from the government was merely to complain that the Tory proposal would cost too much to implement. Peter Hain, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said, “The Conservative proposals could cost an extra £3 billion to £4 billion on top of planned spending in this area.”

Labour and the Tories agree that public spending must be slashed in order to make the British economy more competitive with its European and world rivals. When the initial bill was first proposed in 2006, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions John Hutton said the welfare state “must help UK companies succeed in the global economy.”

As well as forcing IB claimants into work, the government is also targeting 300,000 more lone parents and one million additional older workers, including those over retirement age.

Welfare and health provision and the private sector

A critical element in slashing access to benefits such as IB is to facilitate the privatisation of both welfare and employment service. Over the past decade, the private sector has been utilised to step up attacks on the welfare state and to profit from providing services.

A prime example is Atos Healthcare, a subsidiary of a French-based computer firm, which employs 50,000 people worldwide and has annual revenues of 5.4 billion euros. The new Employment and Support Allowance medical assessment system is to be run by Atos Healthcare.

Atos Healthcare was awarded a £500 million seven-year contract by the DWP in 2005 to provide medical advice and assessment services. These include Incapacity Benefit, Disability Living Allowance, and Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefits.

Employees of the company were recruited to be on the technical working groups which drew up the new harsher, Work Capability Assessment. The increased cost of examinations is expected to be in the region of £200 million up to August 2015.

The company also plays a direct role in the provision of medical services. Then known as Atos Origin, the firm won an £8 million contract to operate the first privately run walk-in NHS clinic for local residents and commuters near Manchester’s Piccadilly railway station in 2005.

In January this year, Atos won a 10-year contract to run St Paul’s Way Medical Centre in Tower Hamlets, East London. The former state-run surgery was one of the first to be taken over by a private company. The Tower Hamlets takeover prompted a demonstration by dozens of doctors, nurses and local residents. One doctor who has worked in the area since 1983 told the BBC, “This practice is in one of the poorest areas in the country. There is overcrowding, poverty and a lot of people who are having difficulties with English. There is a huge amount of ill health. The residents are very angry that their health care is going to be sold for profit rather than for personal care.”

In London alone, the government has identified a further 150 GP surgeries that could be taken over and run by private firms.

Snouts in the Trough... but not yet

Ellie Keen — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:03:18 +0000

Since the partial exclusion of health care from the liberalisation of services brought about by the EU’s notorious directive of 2005, we have been waiting with some trepidation for the European Commission to make its next move.

To this writer – and I hope also to his readers – a functioning, efficient, equitably funded and affordable system of health care is the absolute fundamental of a civilised society.

Others look at health care through different eyes, of course.

Here is a multi-billion pound industry the widespread public ownership of which means one less well-swilled trough into which piggy can stick his snout.

And since this figurative individual (and my apologies to real pigs, whose treatment at the hands of the EU is even worse than our own) is the one dearest to the European Commission’s heart, it was only a matter of time before the Eurocrats sought to ensure that the weakly-worded, unconvincing health care exclusion found its way into the clinical waste bin of history.

So where is the Commission’s proposal on the liberalisation of health care services, which we were, in the end, promised for last November?

It was the European Parliament, which increasingly vies with it in its enthusiasm to do corporate capital’s bidding, which last May called on the Commission to reintroduce health services into the Services Directive.

In a report described even by social democrats as “a total catastrophe”, it was proposed that health care be robbed of its ‘privileged’ position as an essential service.

The Parliament wants to see an unrestricted patient mobility across the EU’s internal borders, which it is well aware would make publicly-owned and collectively-financed health care services untenable.

It wants the Commission to enable codification of European Court of Justice case law applying to the mobility of services.

This would ensure that internal market rules, the freedom to provide services and free movement all apply to health services, and that these principles are put beyond doubt.

In fact, the Commission’s work programme for 2007 already contained such a proposal, but the Parliament wanted action.

Its report was an attempt to cajole the Commission into smuggling health care services back into the Services Directive.

This would do nothing to address the real problems of Europe’s health care services, which to one degree or another reflect those of the NHS.

Patient mobility may have a role to play, but only if it forms part of a coordinated system of resource pooling based on principles of efficiency and, where appropriate, solidarity.

Collectively-funded health services which are free at point of care – such as almost all NHS treatment – are financed nationally and will remain so for any foreseeable future.

Patient mobility must not be allowed to undermine such services.

EU regulations on the coordination of social protection schemes already deal with many of the real problems arising from cross-border patient mobility, though they have clearly been found wanting when it comes to lining the pockets of private health care providers.

Supplying a high quality and efficient health care infrastructure where people live is, in any case, a much better way to avoid waiting lists for treatment.

Dutch left MEP Kartika Liotard, who initiated the amendment which led to the exclusion of health care from the Services Directive, says that “what we definitely do not need is another bogus ‘balanced compromise’ of the Service Directive type. We demand that health services and social services, in common with all public services and services of general interest, be excluded from internal market and competition rules. High quality health care for all is not a commodity, but a public good.”

Adding that her views had found support from MEPs across the political spectrum, she says that she was “shocked” to see the issue return.

“We fought extremely hard to keep health care services out of the scope of the services directive” says Liotard. “Health care is much too important to allow it to be exposed to unrestrained market forces.”

So does the delay to the European Commission proposal mean that Liotard’s arguments may have prevailed?

Only, unfortunately, in our dreams.

What the hold-up really means is that the Commission, along with all who support the top-down integration of Europe and its transformation into a paradise for corporate capital, are well aware that health care liberalisation will prove about as popular as toothache.

And while this unpopularity is not going to change, the liberalisers are prepared to wait until the most sweeping liberalising measure of all, the renamed European Constitution, is approved by all of the national parliaments and the only electorate which will be allowed to have its say, the Irish.

“EU member state citizens are not expecting still more liberalisation, and certainly not in health care,” Kartika Liotard explains. “The Commission is afraid that resistance to this will throw a spanner in the works when it comes to ratification of the reform treaty. The public would then for once find out the full extent of the EU plans, and perhaps they would also become more critical of the new ‘constitution’.” Far from welcoming the postponement, she describes it as “simply scandalous” and “evidence of a lack of political courage.”.

Heavy political pressure from the Commission has already ensured that after Ireland no other member state will hold a referendum on the reform treaty. “But,” Liotard says, “evidently there is still disquiet and a feeling that until the treaty is finally ratified any proposals which might prove controversial should remain out of sight. This is typical of this Europe: keep everyone sweet until the ink is dry on all of the signatures and then get on with unpopular, far-reaching measures which have long been planned.”

Steve McGiffen edits Spectrezine. This article was written for the Morning Star

Toxic Airlines

Ellie Keen — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:34:37 +0000

John Hoyte is a tall bluff 51 year old. A pilot all his working life Hoyte had begun to develop a mystery sickness in the years before he retired. He was working for a budget airline when he became ill; blurred vision, memory problems, depression. Worsening symptoms forced him to resign as he felt unable to fly safely. He began to fear that he had CJD or early dementia. Rumours about contaminated air on planes had existed in pilots’ circles for years, but it was not until he was invited to take part in tests at University College London that his illness was connected with this issue.

The tests were conducted by Doctor Sarah Mackenzie Ross, a clinical neuropsychologist. She conducted psychometric tests on Hoyte and 17 other pilots and found that, in addition to physical symptoms, they were suffering ‘alarming cognitive failures’, including: ‘being unable to retain, or confusing, numerical data and information provided by air traffic control regarding altitude and speed; completing tasks in the incorrect sequence; setting the wrong cleared level for the aircraft to climb or descend; and being unable to recall important matters such as whether the undercarriage has been raised or lowered.’ Independently, the pilots had blood and fat samples analysed. These showed exposure to toxic compounds including the organophosphate, tricresyl phosphate.

Evidence is emerging that the air supply on modern jet airliners is regularly contaminated with a cocktail of toxic chemicals. Due to the altitude planes fly at, crew and passengers need compressed air to breathe. This is supplied from the engines – unfiltered – and is sometimes still blended with pyrolised (heated) engine oils and hydraulic fluids. The engine oils contain the organophosphate, tricresyl phosphate (TCP), a powerful toxin. Illness caused by exposure to the chemical contaminants in cabin air has been dubbed Aerotoxic Syndrome.

John Hoyte has now set up the Aerotoxic Association to inform crews and passengers about the health hazards to which they are exposed, to provide support and advice to sufferers, and to campaign for official recognition of Aerotoxic Syndrome.

Pilots and aircrew who are regularly exposed may develop symptoms. Sometimes the contamination is strong enough to cause health damage with a single exposure. Corporate Watch spoke to one passenger who flew to Orlando, Florida on a charter flight aboard a Boeing 757, earlier this year. On the flight the family became quite ill and spent their holiday in bed with a mystery illness. They suffered breathing difficulties, exhaustion, cognitive problems and severe flu like symptoms. When the return flight was delayed the passenger was able to talk to around 40 other passengers who had been on the same outbound flight and found that most of them had suffered similar symptoms. The family were still incapacitated when they returned home and their GP was unable to identify any cause of the mystery illness. They complained to the airline and to the Health Protection Agency and discovered that their aeroplane had an ‘air valve bleed’ which could have contaminated the air supply.

Ex-pilot and aerotoxic sufferer Captain Susan Michaelis has investigated the extent of the problem by surveying pilots. She wrote to 350 BA 146 pilots, and received responses from 242: 86% had experienced contaminated air events; 57% experienced some aerotoxic symptoms; 27% reporting medium to long term symptoms and 8.5% had retired for medical reasons. Michaelis has also written the Aviation Contaminated Air Reference Manual an 844 page guide to the issue detailing numerous independent studies and over 1000 contaminated air events in the UK alone.

A Canadian scientist, Chris Van Netten, became interested in the issue and decided to conduct his own studies. He took swab samples from inside a number of airliners and tested them for tricresyl phosphate. In total 40 planes of different types have been tested in this way in Australia, the USA, UK and Europe. 34 tested positive for TCP.

Governments around the world appear to be deeply uninterested. The issue is currently under official investigation in the UK by the government appointed Committee on Toxicity (COT) and the House of Lords, Science and Technology Committee. Campaigners allege that both investigations are seriously flawed. Of twelve parties selected to give evidence to the House of lords investigation only one was an independent scientist and only one representative of air crews.

The Global Cabin Air Quality Executive (GCAQE), an international coalition of concerned unions, has written to the Committee of Toxicity to point out serious flaws in its evidence gathering. The COT has, for instance, only accepted as evidence one study of TCP contamination of an aeroplane, although they have been informed by campaigners of at least eight other independent studies which found evidence of contamination. The blood and tissue tests mentioned above have also been ignored and the committee has failed to follow up evidence provided by a number of independent scientists. The unions’ coalition has written to the COT secretariat, informing them of more than 20 crucial factual errors and limitations in their report. Each of these errors it represents, downplays or ignores the evidence for contaminated air and its dangers.

Captain Tristan Loraine of the GCAQE commented that, ‘the COT appear to be looking after industry interests rather than passenger and crew health and flight safety’. COT is expected to report back some time Autumn 2007.

See www.aerotoxic.org and www.toxicfreeairlines.com