Roger has written to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain
Duncan Smith, to protest about the suffering the policy of mandatory
reconsideration of ESA claims is already causing in his constituency of
Birmingham Hall Green.
Roger wrote to the Minister about the case of one of his constituents,
who was told that her ESA was being stopped despite the fact that she suffers
from a life-threatening heart condition as well as kidney failure. After her
ESA was stopped, she was unable to afford to make the journey from Birmingham
to attend her appointments at a London hospital.
Happily, the result of the reconsideration (which took nearly two
months) was that the original decision should be overturned, and the
constituent’s ESA reinstated. The original Atos assessment awarded her just 6
points, but at the reconsideration she was found to actually qualify for 15
points. Roger has called on the Department for Work and Pensions to investigate
how Atos got this assessment so badly wrong, as he is extremely concerned that
similar grossly incorrect assessments are being carried out on a wide scale.
Roger is also concerned about DWP’s refusal to set a time limit for how
long mandatory reconsideration may take. This means that people are left in
limbo, with no money with which to buy food or travel to hospital appointments
for weeks or even months. This issue has been raised many times by a number of
Members of Parliament, but DWP has consistently refused to set itself standards
on this.
In his letter to DWP, Roger wrote: “While my constituent’s ESA has now
been reinstated, it is not the case that no damage has been done. There is an
extra cost to the taxpayer, who had to pay Atos to carry out an assessment
which was so incompetent that it had to be redone, again at taxpayer expense. Much
more importantly, there is the human cost to my constituent and others like
her. She is seriously ill, and has a right to state support because she is too
unwell to work. Yet she has been caused an enormous amount of extra stress and
worry, as well as having to miss crucial hospital appointments. As she wrote to
me, ‘Every day is a struggle but this has made everything that little bit more
difficult.’”
Roger concluded his letter to DWP with: “Has a cost-benefit assessment
been carried out of the savings to the taxpayer of the mandatory
reconsideration policy? I am extremely sceptical about the likelihood that that,
after factoring in the cost of the Atos assessment and the mandatory
reconsideration, this policy will have saved the taxpayer any money at all.
Even if it does, it is at the expense of vulnerable and seriously ill people
such as my constituent, whose health can only be made worse by the added stress
of having their only source of income snatched away while your Department takes
months to overturn a hopelessly flawed Atos assessment.”
