I broke this story in 2016: G4S are employing Cognitive Behavioural Therapists to deliver “get to work therapy”.

The following excerpts are from Ipswich Unemployed Action:

“We are saving the taxpayer £120 million a year in benefit savings.” Sean Williams – Welfare to Work, Managing Director, G4S.

“Carillon’s collapse, which involved the farce of having fire-engines on standby today in Oxfordshire in case the company could not deliver school meals for one of their many outsourced contracts, has not stopped the government from continuing their policy of giving large sums of money to private companies to deliver ‘services’.

The problems of Universal Credit have tended to obscure other aspects of the government’s welfare policy.

One of the most outrageous sides is this, which we have previously posted on.

It is part of the Work and Health Programme, rolling out this year.

Service Providers for the Work and Health programme

It will be run by five service providers across six regions in England and Wales. The successful providers were:

• Shaw Trust (Central England and Home Counties)
• Reed in Partnership (North East)
• Ingeus (North West)
• Pluss (Southern)
• Remploy (Wales)

In 2015 the Guardian published this letter signed by more than 400 psychologists, counsellors and academics signed an open letter  protesting against chancellor George Osborne’s plans, laid out in the latest budget, to embed psychological therapy in a coercive back-to-work agenda. (I wrote about this in 2015, here: Psychologists Against Austerity: mental health experts issue a rallying call against coalition policies.)

The linkage of social security benefits to the receipt of “state therapy”, as announced in the chancellor’s latest budget, this is totally unacceptable. “Get to work therapy” is manifestly not therapy at all. With the ominous news that Maximus (the US company replacing Atos to do work capability assessments) will also be managing the new national Fit for Work programme, it is time for the field’s key professional organisations to wake up to these malign developments, and unequivocally denounce such so-called “therapy” as damaging and professionally unethical.

More generally, the wider reality of a society thrown completely off balance by the emotional toxicity of neoliberal thinking is affecting Britain in profound ways, the distressing effects of which are often most visible in the therapist’s consulting room. This letter sounds the starting-bell for a broadly based campaign of organisations and professionals against the damage that neoliberalism is doing to the nation’s mental health. For now, we call on all the parties in this election – and particularly Labour – to make it clear that they will urgently review such anti-therapeutic practices, and appropriately refashion their much-trumpeted commitment to mental health if and when they enter government.

To remind us of this Kitty S jones wrote last year:

A major concern that many of us have raised is regarding consent to participation, as, if benefit conditionality is attached to what ought to be a voluntary engagement, that undermines the fundamental principles of the right to physical and mental care. Such an approach would reduce psychologists to simply acting as agents of state control, enforcing compliance and conformity. That is not therapy: it’s psychopolitics and policy-making founded on a blunt behaviourism, which is pro-status quo, imbued with Conservative values and prejudices. It’s an approach that does nothing whatsoever to improve public life or meet people’s needs.

Kitty noted that: 

The highly controversial security company G4S are currently advertising for Cognitive Behavioural Therapists to deliver “return-to-work” advise in Surrey, Sussex and Kent.

This is yet another lucrative opportunity for private companies to radically reduce essential provision for those that really need support, nonetheless, costing the public purse far more to administer than such an arrangement could possibly save, despite the government’s dogged determination to rip every single penny from sick and disabled people and drive them into low paid, insecure jobs.

Yes, G4S is a player in the delivery of the “new Work and Health Programme 2017 – 2020/21. Commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, the programme is intended to assist people who are long term unemployed or who have disabilities and health conditions into work.”

You can read the rest of the post in full here.

Other related posts:

Workfare coercion in the UK: an assault on persons with disabilities and their human rights – Anne-Laure Donskoy

The power of positive thinking is really political gaslighting

The new Work and Health Programme: government plan social experiments to “nudge” sick and disabled people into work

Rogue company Unum’s profiteering hand in the government’s work, health and disability green paper

Nudging conformity and benefit sanctions: a state experiment in behaviour modification

The connection between Universal Credit, ordeals and experiments in electrocuting laboratory rats

IAPT is value-laden, non-prefigurative, non-dialogic, antidemocratic and reflects a political agenda

G4S are employing Cognitive Behavioural Therapists to deliver “get to work therapy”