Category: Welfare “reforms”

If even the DWP isn’t Disability Confident, how will a million disabled people get jobs? – Bernadette Meaden

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Nobody would expect a person who suffers blackouts to drive a bus or bin waggon once they had thought through the potentially devastating consequences. But political, cultural, psychological and financial coercion is being used to force sick and disabled people to work – the government continues to cut welfare, which was calculated originally to cover only the costs of meeting basic needs.

Cruel sanctions and strict, inflexible, often unreasonable behavioural conditions are being imposed on lifeline benefit receipt, adversely affecting some of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens; unemployed and disabled people are being stigmatised by the government and the media – all of this is done with an utterly callous disregard of a person’s capacity to work, and importantly, the availabilty of appropriate and suitable employment opportunities, and this can often have tragic consequences.

Modern employment practices, which have an increasingly strong focus on attendance micromanagement, present yet another barrier for disabled people who want to work.

The following is taken from an excellent article which was posted on Bernadette Meaden’s blog, on January 16, 2016.

The numbers of disabled people in ‘absolute poverty’ (unable to meet their basic needs) has risen steeply following welfare reforms. Yet in his most recent party conference speech Iain Duncan Smith said to disabled people, “We won’t lift you out of poverty by simply transferring taxpayers’ money to you. With our help, you’ll work your way out of poverty.”

The recent case  of a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) employee sacked for taking time off for illness illustrates a truth that the government does not acknowledge. Modern employment practices often appear to be incompatible with its aim of getting sick and disabled people off disability benefits and into work.

In this particular case it was reported that after working at the DWP for thirty four years, Ms Powell, who has a disability, fell foul of its sickness absence procedure, whereby formal action is taken against employees after eight days absence, or four spells of absence within a 12-month period.

‘Health problems meant that Ms Powell was frequently off sick. As some of her absences were related to a disability, her trigger point was adjusted from the usual eight to 12 days. However, Ms Powell later went over her allotted 12 days’ absence by a few days, and she was dismissed.’

A year earlier, a DWP whistleblower had revealed :

“Attendance management continues to get more draconian and sackings have become a regular occurrence: a recent guideline instructed managers to consider dismissal for staff off work for longer than 28 days regardless of the reason.”

So despite its own Disability Confident campaign, which calls on employers to “help improve employment opportunities for disabled people and retain disabled people and those with long term health conditions in your business”, the DWP itself seems unable to provide employment for people who may have long or frequent spells of illness. This would suggest that if you have, say, a long term fluctuating health condition, or a disability that requires frequent hospital appointments, you will find it very difficult to keep a job at the DWP.

Of course the DWP is not alone in this. We know that in some workplaces the pressure to attend even when very ill is overwhelming. At the Sports Direct warehouse, for instance, it was reported that over a two year period, 76 calls for an ambulance had been made, with 36 cases classed as ‘life-threatening’ including strokes, convulsions and breathing problems. One woman gave birth in the toilets, and employees said they were too frightened to take time off when they were ill, in case they lost their job. The employment agency that supplied staff to the warehouse had a ‘six strikes and you’re out’ policy, where a strike could include being off sick, or taking ‘excessive or long toilet breaks’. Very few people with a long term health condition would find it possible to keep their job in these circumstances. 

The reality is that in a fiercely competitive economy and austerity-driven government departments, there is very little room for anyone who has a long term health problem. Perhaps somebody in the government should do a little experiment. Try applying for jobs and declaring a long-term illness or disability which may require regular absences. See how easy it is to get a job.

You can read the rest of Bernadette’s excellent article here.

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

The UN Inquiry into the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the UK – Commons Briefing

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The House of Commons Library have issued a research briefing, published on Wednesday January 13, 2016, regarding the UN Inquiry into the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the UK:

“The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is conducting an inquiry into the impact of the UK Government’s policies on people with disabilities in relation to their human rights obligations. This briefing paper provides information on the Committee, details of the inquiry and an overview of the Government’s policies in relation to people with disabilities.

The inquiry is being conducted under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which the UK has been a signatory since 2007. The Optional Protocol allows the UN Committee to investigate a State Party if they have received reliable evidence of ‘grave and systematic violations of the Convention’.

Investigations by the Committee are confidential, and the process, extent and scope of this inquiry are unknown. However, it is believed the inquiry will consider policies introduced by the Coalition Government since 2010 in relation to welfare and social security benefits, and in particular their compatibility with Articles 19 and 28: the rights of persons with disabilities to live independently and to enjoy an adequate standard of living.

The UK is the first country to be investigated by the UN in relation to this Convention.

This paper gives some background to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Convention, as well as providing an overview of what we know about the UN inquiry. It then outlines a selection of policies introduced under the Coalition Government which have had an impact on people with a disability covering housing, education, welfare, justice, healthcare and employment.

The UN Committee report, along with the UK Government’s response, is not expected to be published until 2017.”

You can read the briefing in full here –The UN Inquiry into the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the UK

It’s also worth reading the two submissions to the inquiry from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, summarised by the UK Administrative Justice Institute and linked on here – Evidence of the impact of welfare reforms on disabled people

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Many thanks to Samuel Miller for flagging this up and for all of his outstanding work.

Social Security

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gret deceit
I always worry when David Cameron or Iain Duncan Smith use sentences like: “We will embark on an all out assault on poverty”, because what they actually mean, as past and recent history informs us, is an all out state assault on the poor and further attacks on our social security provision.

Benefits were originally carefully calculated to meet only basic needs. Welfare was designed to provide the minimal amount for food, fuel and shelter to ensure that those unable to provide for themselves didn’t fall into absolute poverty. The amount was based on “the amount the law says you need to live on.” This has been steadily eroded by the welfare “reforms” – cuts.  The severe and punitive welfare sanctions have normalised the idea of people having no welfare support at all, pushing the normative, moral, ethical and rational boundaries of ordinary people steadily, incrementally, in the same way that all tyrants do when they want to take away public rights and freedoms.

The Tories have a plain intent to completely dismantle the welfare state, step by step, using justification narratives that stigmatise and scapegoat the poorest people in order to harden public attitudes, diminishing empathy for the poor, and above all, to get their own way. All of this comes down to nothing more than traditional Tory prejudices towards poor people and their “small state” ideology.

People need welfare support when they become too old to work, lose their job, become injured at work, become disabled through illness or are disabled and can’t find suitable employment. All of these circumstances arise through no fault of th people experiencing these difficulties, and such difficulties may happen to anyone, including you, your children, grandchildren, other relatives and friends. Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the greatest welfare expenditure includes in-work benefits and pensions.

We have ALL contributed to paying for social security, and our parents, grandparents and great grandparents fought for our right to it, as part of our post-war settlement. It isn’t the government’s to take away.

It’s ours, and a measure of how decent, compassionate, civilised, developed and democratic we are as a society.

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Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

Consultation as government seek to limit disabled people’s eligibility for Personal Independence Payment

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The government is considering ways of reducing eligibility criteria for the daily living component of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) by narrowing definitions of aids and appliances. Other suggestions for cuts include:

  • Targeting resources through a lump sum payment for claimants who meet or exceed the eligibility point threshold for the daily living component but score all of their points from aids and appliances. The value of this lump sum could be less than the cumulative value of the equivalent monthly payments. It could be discretionary and could be restricted, for example through the use of vouchers. It would not act as a passport to any other benefit or benefit premia and would not exempt claimants from the benefit cap.
  • A monthly payment below the equivalent weekly rate for claimants who meet or exceed the eligibility point threshold for the daily living component, at either rate, but score all of their points from aids and appliances. Again, this payment would not act as a passport to any other benefit or benefit premia and would not exempt claimants from the benefit cap.
  • A new condition of entitlement that claimants must score some points from a descriptor that does not relate to aids and appliances.

The government are conducting a consultation and invite views from all interested parties, especially disabled people and disability organisations.

The Department for Work and Pensions reviewed a sample of 105 cases of people who had scored all, or the majority, of their points for PIP due to aids and appliances, in order to assess the extent to which the award may reflect extra costs.

So, the review of just 105 claims has led the government to conclude that PIP doesn’t currently fulfil the original policy intent, which was to cut costs and “target” the benefit to “those with the greatest need.”

That basically meant a narrowing of eligibility criteria for people formerly claiming Disability Living Allowance, previously, increasing the number of reassessments required, and limiting the number of successful claims. Prior to the introduction of PIP, Esther McVey stated that of the initial 560,000 claimants to be reassessed by October 2015, 330,000 of these are targeted to either lose their benefit altogether or see their payments reduced.

I’m just wondering where the ever-reductive quest for the ever-shrinking category of “those with the greatest need” will end.

The PIP assessment currently examines an individual’s ability to complete ten daily living activities and two mobility activities. Regular reviews were also introduced by the last government to ensure that claimants continue to receive the “right level of support.”

The government now say that the proportion of people awarded the daily living component of PIP, who scored all of their points because they need aids and appliances, has more that tripled, from 11 per cent in April 2014 to 35 per cent in 2015.

This increase has largely been driven by a significant and sustained rise in relation to activities one, four, five and six: preparing food, washing and bathing, dressing and undressing, and managing incontinence and toileting. Around three-quarters of those who score all of their points through needing aids and appliances score the minimum number of daily living points needed to qualify for the standard rate of the daily living component.

The government claim that evidence presented to the review suggested that in some instances points were being awarded “… because claimants chose to use aids and appliances, rather than needed them.”  And noted that in many cases “ these were non-specialised items of very low cost.”

However, it’s very difficult to justify cutting support for people who require aids to meet fundamental needs such as preparing food, dressing, basic and essential personal care and managing incontinence.

The government also say:

“The results of the review suggest that significant numbers of people who are likely to have low or minimal additional costs are being awarded the daily living component of the benefit solely because they may benefit from aids and appliances across a number of the activities, despite the relatively low point score awarded for them.

In addition to this, recent judicial decisions, based on the current legislation, have broadened the scope of aids and appliances to include articles, such as beds and chairs, which are unlikely to be a reliable indicator of extra costs.

These developments are inconsistent with the original policy intent of awarding the benefit to claimants with the greatest need. We have therefore decided to consult on how aids and appliances are taken into account when determining entitlement to the daily living component.”

 

The consultation will run from 10 December 2015 until 29 January 2016.

You can access the consultation document here

Sick and disabled mother told her benefit is cut on the day she died

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A mother who was battling a serious and debilitating lung condition was told that she no longer qualified for benefits on the day she died from her illness.

Dawn Amos, 67, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a collection of progressive lung diseases which cause severe breathing difficulties, and increases susceptibility to infections such as pneumonia.

The illness left Dawn with difficulty breathing, she was unable to walk for long periods of time, and she was left struggling to dress herself and unable to manage daily tasks independently.

She received attendance allowance from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to help with the extra costs of her essential personal care for six months, before being reassessed.

Her heartbroken husband Mick Amos, 64, discovered a letter sent from the DWP two days after his wife’s death.

It was a notification that Mrs Amos’s allowance was being withdrawn, based on her “treatment, medication, symptoms and test results.”

The letter had been sent out on November 27, the day that Mr Amos had taken the extremely difficult and very distressing decision to turn off Dawn’s life support machine.

COPD is an incurable, chronic and progressive illness.

Mr Amos said: “It’s disgusting and heartbreaking. We had to turn her machine off.

“How ill do you have to be?

“On the day she died I came downstairs and she couldn’t breathe properly so I phoned the ambulance, who said if she gets worse call us back.

“As soon as I got off the phone she collapsed and I was on the phone again.

“She had stopped breathing and I was doing CPR while I was on the phone to the ambulance.”

Dawn was taken to Broomfield Hospital, where she was put on a life support machine.

Mr Amos and Dawn’s daughter, Karina Mann, agreed to turn off the machine the same day.

Karina, 42, said that her mother had received attendance allowance for six months before they [the DWP] asked to reassess her.

She said: “Obviously she was ill enough for the benefit because we had to watch her die.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Work and Pensions said:

“Our thoughts are with the family of Mrs Amos. The decision was based on evidence which included the opinion of Mrs Amos’ own GP.”

Clearly, the “evidence” was wrong. Again.

However, doctors are not actually permitted to give their medical opinion to the DWP. They are provided with a strictly limited “factual” government form to complete. Such restrictions on qualititative information and medical opinion apply to ALL government forms provided to GPs for the purpose of assessing the “evidence” of patient eligibility for all disability benefits, including Employment Support Allowance. The government informs GPs that:

“Decisions on benefit entitlement are made by non medical decision makers. Decision makers will use your report and will seek the advice of an experienced healthcare professional trained in disability assessment to review and interpret the report where needed.”

The Personal Independence Payment (PIP) form instructs GPs to:

“Please write down facts rather than opinion. We require an objective report – please only include information about symptoms that are recorded in the patient’s records and information about disabling effects that you or another healthcare professional have directly observed.

Please complete all sections as fully as possible but write “not known” if appropriate.  “Not known” can be helpful.”

Members of the General Practitioners Committee (GPC) have voiced concern that patients with long term conditions might be periodically “harrassed” by the Department for Work and Pensions  under the current assessment regime. Dr John Canning, chair of the GPC’s Professional Fees and Regulation Committee and a GP in Middlesbrough voiced concern about patients having to continually “prove” they deserve state support.

The government have persistently ignored the many evidence-based concerns raised by professionals, academic researchers, campaigners and opposition MPs that their austerity policies and anti-welfarism are having an extremely harmful effect, most often on our poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

 

Conservative governments are bad for your health

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proper Blond 

Context: the politics of blame

Increasing employment and pushing ill and disabled people into work are key elements of the UK Government’s public health and welfare “reform” agendas. The arguments presented for this approach are primarily economic and particularly, moralistic. The reasoning presented is not founded on biological, psychological or sociological evidence. The government maintains that work is the most effective way to improve the wellbeing of individuals, their families and their communities. There is a perception that unemployment is harmful to physical and mental health, so the corollary has been assumed – that work is beneficial for health. 

However, that does not necessarily follow, and to claim that it does is distinctly unscientific and irrational. As the Conservatives themselves have often pointed out in less appropriate circumstances in order to avoid democratic accountability and responsibility, there is a difference between an association and a causal relationship.

There is a clear ideological context from which the welfare “reforms” proceeded, and the politically-directed media campaigns that have purposefully stigmatised and outgrouped unemployed people demonstrates quite clearly that reducing welfare support is not about a politically calculated extension of social inclusion and social justice policies, Conservative bonhomie, or overall concern for the wellbeing of welfare recipients and people who are disabled.

The government are attempting to entrench neoliberal ideology in our culture by co opting GPs, social workers and other professionals as agents of the state. The idea that “work is a health outcome” has been embedded in policies such as the Orwellian renaming of sick notes (now “fit notes”), which are designed to explore what work a person who is absent from work because of illness may undertake.  However, the government intend a much more far-reaching outcome than simply attempting to reduce the sick “role” and recovery time. The government’s “behavioural change” agenda has become a centrally-orchestrated programme for governance. The provision of public goods and crucial support, from housing and discretionary housing payments to employment benefits and disability support is becoming increasingly conditional. 

Political rhetoric, aimed at perpetuating an extremely divisive and intentionally misleading “strivers and skivers” dichotomy is designed to undermine public support for the welfare state and the other gains of our post-war settlement – the NHS, legal aid and social housing for example – also betrays the lack of coherence, rationality and empirical support for the Conservative’s “reforms.” Furthermore, the extremely targeted, class-contingent and punitive nature of the Conservative austerity programme indicates that the welfare “reforms” were founded on traditional Tory prejudices, rather than on any genuine causal relationship based on empirical evidence and social or economic necessity.

This explains why the government have persistently ignored the many evidence-based concerns raised by academic researchers, campaigners and opposition MPs that their austerity policies are having an extremely harmful effect, most often on our poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

The Conservatives are ideologically bound to notions of a small state, minimal levels of political responsibility and intervention, minimal levels of government spending, the heavy promotion and administration of privatisation, competition, fiscal austerity, deregulation and free trade in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy, all of which are the central strands of the neoliberal hegemony. Conservative ideology runs counter to any notion that all citizens must be treated fairly, which also means that they must be given equal economic opportunities and provided with a adequate minimum standard of living. Neoliberal ideology is incompatible with a human rights-based society.

Democracy exists partly to ensure that the powerful are accountable to the public, and particularly to our most vulnerable citizens. This government have blocked that crucial exchange, and show disdain for human rights, the welfare state and the NHS, all of which provides ordinary people and the most vulnerable citizens basic protection from those in power.

Conservatives despise human rights and rights-based social provision. They absurdly claim that welfare provision causes vulnerability, and a “culture of dependency,” despite the fact that there is absolutely no empirical evidence to support this view. History has consistently taught us otherwise. The Conservative’s policies are expressions of contempt for the lessons and empirical evidence from over a century of social history and administration.

Tory rhetoric is designed to have us believe there would be no poor people if the welfare state didn’t somehow “create” them. If the Conservatives must insist on peddling the myth of meritocracy, then surely they must also concede that whilst a neoliberal system has a few beneficiaries, it also creates situations of insolvency and poverty for many others. That is what a system based on competitive individualism is about: it creates a few “winners” and a lot of others lose.

Conservative cuts are based on nothing more than the ridiculous myth that poverty is somehow a lifestyle choice or a moral failing which people can be punished or starved out of. The new Tory neoliberal “paternalists” really seem to believe that if they make life for poor people insufferable, they will simply be “incentivised” to choose to be wealthier. It’s a thinly disguised revamp of the ill-conceived 1834 Poor Law deterrence principle of “less eligibility” – that was supposedly aimed at “making work pay” too. But it didn’t. It’s not possible to frighten and punish people out of poverty. Only a Conservative government would claim to be making work pay by cutting welfare down to the bare bones, rather than increasing wages. The welfare cuts have actually had the effect of driving down wages too.

Of course, by framing the issue of poverty in terms of personal responsibility and morality, the Conservatives have stifled debate and restricted public discussion in the hope that people won’t recognise the wider structural inequalities and economic failings, for which this government are solely responsible.

Debbie Abrahams said: “The Conservatives point the finger at sick and disabled people for the rise in spending. They are still shamelessly spinning their tired “shirkers” and “strivers” narrative, designed to whip up public support for cuts to the most vulnerable. But this divisive rhetoric can no longer conceal the fact their economic strategy has failed. It is the government’s failure that has led to rising social security costs. 

As we saw at the Autumn Statement (2016), borrowing is up, growth is down, deficit targets have been hopelessly missed and wages have flat-lined. At the same time, the government has refused to tackle the driving forces behind increased social security spending, from low pay to high housing costs. Instead, the government is slashing support to those who need it most, exacerbating the financial strain so many are facing this Christmas, and failing its own targets in the process.   

[…] Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggested that we need to be building 80,000 affordable homes a year to meet demand and keep the current spend on housing benefit stable. This government managed a pathetic 30,000 homes last year. It is this refusal to build enough homes that keeps the housing benefit bill growing. People are left struggling to find somewhere affordable to live, and the state is forced to subsidise the sky-high rents charged by private landlords 

We could also look at tax credits, which currently make up more than £20bn a year in the spending under the cap. Tax credits top up working people’s pay where it is insufficient. Wages today are lower than they were in 2008, and won’t even return to the levels of 2008 until 2021. A record six million workers are paid less than the living wage. This is why tax credit costs have risen – because the government has had to increase the amount spent on topping wages up. 

Labour founded the welfare state to give pensioners and disabled people dignity, to prevent homelessness, children going hungry, and to cover for periods of unemployment or ill-health. It was never designed to be spending tens of billions substituting for low-wage employers or subsidising rip-off landlords.”

Economic productivity is the new health outcome

The claim that “work is good for you” is allegedly based on “scientific evidence” that people in work tend to be healthier than those claiming unemployment and sickness benefits. However, to draw the conclusion that “employment is good for you” from the data is an example of inferring causality inappropriately, from what is only an association. Yet it is being used to prop up Conservative justifications for dismantling the welfare state.

Unemployment has been linked to increased rates of sickness, disability and mental health problems, and to decreased life expectancy. The claim has also been made that it results in an increased use of medication, medical services, and higher hospital admission rates. However, surely it makes much more sense to say that sickness, disability and mental health problems, the use of medication, medical services, and higher hospital admission rates all cause unemployment, rather than the converse. This government seem to have a major problem accepting the fact that sometimes, people really are simply too ill to work.

Most people who are too ill to work are obviously not as healthy as those who can work. That is hardly controversial. However, that doesn’t mean that work itself is good for your health, it just means those who don’t work tend to have worse health than those who do. People don’t work because they have poor health.

Linking ill health with “worklessness” is an ideological preference which ignores other variables. It is much more likely that the “reforms”, which have reduced welfare provision to inadequate levels – leaving people all too often unable to meet their basic needs – is bad for health, rather than being out of work. 

But the Conservatives have used this “evidence” of an association between poor health and unemployment to make an inference based on a “causal link” that hasn’t actually been empirically verified. Iain Duncan Smith has made the claim, for example, that “work is good for you.” He has even claimed that work can make people’s health problems “better.” But that isn’t very likely to be true. It’s akin to claiming that chatting and exercise is a cure for multiple sclerosis, lupus, blindness or cancer. Or that a work coach on prescription will cure rheumatoid arthritis, a disc prolapse or schizophrenia.

This is why I visit my doctor when I am ill, and not Iain Duncan Smith or the government.

The claim that work is good for your health is simply a part of Tory justification narratives for cutting support for sick and disabled people, and hounding people who need to claim benefits. Yet this axiom informs current UK policy towards increased benefit conditionality, harsh sanctions, compulsory work experience and the “workfare” or “work-for-benefits” thinking which the Conservatives favour. However, this is an approach that can never work, unless, of course, the aim is to completely dismantle the welfare state. Oh, hang on…

The biopsychosocial model

The biopsychosocial model (BPS) of ill health is not without controversy, although many see it as more pragmatic or humanistic than the medical model of illness, which came to be regarded as reductionist and deterministic. The biopsychosocial model is the conceptual status quo of contemporary psychiatry, and many believe that it has played an important role in combatting psychiatric dogmatism.

The biological component of the model is based on a traditional allopathic (bio-medical) approach to health. The social part of the model investigates how different social factors such as socioeconomic status, culture and poverty impact on health. The psychological component of the biopsychosocial model looks for potential psychological causes for a health problem such as lack of self-control, emotional turmoil, and negative thinking.

Of course a major criticism is that the BPS model has been used to disingenuously trivialise and euphemise serious physical illnesses, implying either a psychosomatic basis or reducing symptoms to nothing more than a presentation of malingering tactics. This ploy has been exploited by medical insurance companies (infamously by Unum Provident in the USA) and government welfare departments keen to limit or deny access to medical, social care and social security payments, and to manufacture ideologically determined outcomes that are not at all in the best interests of patients, invalidating diagnoses, people’s experience and accounts, and the existence of serious medical conditions. (See also: Getting rich on disability denial, and  A Tale of two Models by Debbie Jolly.)

Unum was involved in advising the government on making the devastating cuts to disabled people’s support in the UK’s controversial Welfare Reform Bill. (See also: The influence of the private insurance industry on the UK welfare reforms.)

This is a government that tends to emphasise citizen responsibilities over rights, moralising and psychologizing social problems, whilst quietly editing out government responsibilities and democratic obligations towards citizens.

For example, poverty, which is caused by political decisions affecting socioeconomic outcomes, is described by the Conservatives, using elaborate victim-blame narratives, and this is particularly objectionable at a time when inequality has never been greater in the UK.

Poverty may only be properly seen in a structural context, including account of the exclusion and oppression experienced by those living in poverty, the global neoliberal order, the gender order, the disability, racial, sexual and other orders which frame social life and precipitate poverty in complex and diverse ways. It’s down to policy-makers to address the structural origins of poverty, not the poor, who are currently regarded as the “collateral damage” – casualities – of politically imposed structural constraints.

Conservative governments are unhealthy

The effects of loss of income on people who can’t work because of illness is a confounding factor, too. How is it possible to isolate the devastating impacts of the Conservative “reforms” and the steady dismantling of the welfare state on unemployed people from the misleading generalisation that unemployment is bad for health? Surely if the Conservatives genuinely believed their own claims, they would be more inclined to increase rather than radically decrease provision and support for unemployed people.

Of course, not all work is beneficial. The review that led to the widespread folk tale that work is good for you is based on research involving people who had common and minor illnesses, and fulfilling, secure jobs. That doesn’t reflect the experiences of many people.

Not all jobs are rewarding and positive experiences, and some work can cause serious risks to health.

Doctor Frank Scheer, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says:

“There is strong evidence that shift work is related to a number of serious health conditions, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity.

These differences we’re seeing can’t just be explained by lifestyle or socioeconomic status.”

Shift work and poor quality working environments and employment conditions are also linked to stomach problems and ulcers, hypertension, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, chronic infections, diabetes, general health complaints, all-cause mortality and an increased risk of accidents or injury. Long working hours are equally linked with a detrimental impact on health, according to medical research – see: The impact of overtime and long work hours on occupational injuries and illnesses: new evidence from the United States.

There is a growing and potentially corrosive problem of low paid, poor quality, precarious and temporary work which threatens levels of social inclusion and, ultimately, the health of the workforce.

Research shows unambiguously that the psychosocial quality of bad jobs is worse than unemployment. Peter Butterworth examined the mental health implications of those moving from unemployment into employment and found that:

“Those who moved into optimal jobs showed significant improvement in mental health compared to those who remained unemployed. Those respondents who moved into poor-quality jobs showed a significant worsening in their mental health compared to those who remained unemployed.”

Overall, unemployed respondents had poorer mental health than those who were employed. However the mental health of those who were unemployed was comparable or superior to those in jobs of the poorest psychosocial quality. (See: The psychosocial quality of work determines whether employment has benefits for mental health: results from a longitudinal national household panel survey.)

More recently, in a letter to the Guardian, the UK’s leading bodies representing psychologists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and counsellors called on the Government “to immediately suspend the benefits sanctions system. It fails to get people back to work and damages their mental health.

Findings from the National Audit Office (NAO) show limited evidence that the sanctions system actually works, or is cost effective.

But, even more worrying, we see evidence from NHS Health Scotland, the Centre for Welfare Conditionality hosted by the University of York, and others, which links sanctions to destitution, disempowerment, and increased rates of mental health problems. This is also emphasised in the recent Public Accounts Committee report, which states that the unexplained variations in the use of benefits sanctions are unacceptable and must be addressed.”

The impact of poverty on health

The largest study of poverty conducted in the UK has laid out the dire extent of British material deprivation – and seriously undercut the government’s claim to be lifting people out of poverty through work.

The Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE) project details how, over recent years, the percentage of households living below society’s minimum standard of living has increased from 14% to 33% – despite the fact that the economy has increased in size over the same period. The study found that low wages are a central cause of widespread deprivation. For many people, full-time work is not enough to lift them out of poverty; almost half of the working poor work 40 hours a week or more. And one in six adults in paid work (17%) is poor, suffering low income and unable to afford basic necessities.

Commenting on the study’s findings, Professor Jonathan Bradshaw of the University of York said they showed many parents who work full time still have to make huge sacrifices to try and protect their children from deprivation.

“We already know from DWP data that the majority of children with incomes below the the relative income poverty threshold have a working parent. The PSE survey shows that the majority of deprived children, those lacking two or more socially perceived necessities, and very deprived children (lacking five or more socially perceived necessities) have a working parent.

We found that 65% of the deprived and 58% of the very deprived children had a working parent, and 50% of the deprived and 35% of the very deprived had at least one parent working full-time. Child poverty is not being driven by skivers, but is the consequence of strivers working for low earnings while in-work benefits are being dissipated by government austerity measures.”

Responding to the findings, Clare Bambra, a professor at Durham University, said that the research was a shameful picture of “the devastating and far-reaching human costs of inequality and poverty in the UK today.”

She said:

“It’s shameful for a rich country like ours to be tolerating such levels of poverty especially amongst our children and young people. The mantra that work sets people free from poverty has been shown to be a grand old lie.

We will be living with the long term consequences of this social neglect for decades to come – there are clear links between poverty and reduced life expectancy and higher rates of ill health, especially concentrated in deprived areas and the north.

These findings show us the true cost of austerity.”

Public health experts from Durham University have denounced the impact of Margaret Thatcher’s policies on the wellbeing of the British public in a comprehensive study which examines social inequality in the 1980s.

The study, which looked at over 70 existing research papers, concludes that as a result of unnecessary unemployment, welfare cuts and damaging housing policies, the former prime minister’s legacy includes the unnecessary and unjust premature death of many British citizens, together with a substantial and continuing burden of suffering and loss of wellbeing.

The research shows that there was a massive increase in income inequality under Baroness Thatcher – the richest 0.01 per cent of society had 28 times the mean national average income in 1978 but 70 times the average in 1990, and UK poverty rates went up from 6.7 per cent in 1975 to 12 per cent in 1985.

Baroness Thatcher’s governments wilfully engineered an economic catastrophe across large parts of Britain by dismantling traditional industries such as coal and steel in order to undermine the power of working class organisations, say the researchers. They suggest this ultimately fed through into growing regional disparities in health standards and life expectancy, as well as greatly increased inequalities between the richest and poorest in society.

Professor Clare Bambra from the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University, co-author of the research report, commented:

“Our paper shows the importance of politics and of the decisions of governments and politicians in driving health inequalities and population health. Advancements in public health will be limited if governments continue to pursue neoliberal economic policies – such as the current welfare state cuts being carried out under the guise of austerity.”

Thatcher’s policies  have been condemned for causing “unjust premature deaths.” Cameron’s policies are even more class-contingent and cruel.

I think there is a growing body of empirical evidence which indicates clearly that Conservative governments are much worse for public health, prosperity and wellbeing than unemployment.

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Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

I don’t make any money from my work. I am disabled because of illness and have a very limited income. The budget didn’t do me any favours at all.

But you can help by making a donation to help me continue to research and write informative, insightful and independent articles, and to provide support to others. The smallest amount is much appreciated – thank you.

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Welfare sanctions can’t possibly “incentivise” people to work

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Maslow

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs

A summary

The Conservative-led welfare “reforms” had the stated aim of ensuring that benefit claimants – who have been stigmatised and inaccurately redefined as economic free-riders –are entitled to a minimum income provided that they uphold responsibilities, which entail being pushed into any available work. Conditionality for social security has been around as long as the welfare state. Eligibility criteria have always been an intrinsic part of the benefits system. For example, to qualify for jobseekers’ allowance, a person has to be out of work, able to work, and seeking employment.

But in recent years welfare conditionality has become conflated with severe financial penalities (sanctions), and has mutated into an ever more stringent, complex, demanding set of often arbitrary requirements, involving frequent and rigid jobcentre appointments, meeting job application targets, providing evidence of job searches and mandatory participation in workfare schemes. The emphasis of welfare provision has shifted from providing support for people seeking employment to increasing conditionality of conduct, enforcing particular patterns of behaviour and monitoring compliance.  In short, welfare has become a hostile environment, designed specifically to deter claims for support.

Sanctions are “penalties that reduce or terminate welfare benefits in cases where claimants are deemed to be out of compliance with  requirements.” They are, in many respects, the neoliberal-paternalist tool of discipline par excellence – the threat that puts a big stick behind coercive welfare programme rules and “incentivises” citizen compliance with a heavily monitoring and supervisory administration. The Conservatives have broadened the scope of behaviours that are subject to sanction, and have widened the application to include previously protected social groups, such as sick and disabled people and lone parents.

There is plenty of evidence that sanctions don’t help people to find work, and that the punitive application of severe financial penalities is having a detrimental and sometimes catastrophic impact on people’s lives. We can see from a growing body of research how sanctions are not working in the way the government claim they intended.

Sanctions, under which people lose benefit payments for between four weeks and three years for “non-compliance”, have come under fire for being unfair, punitive, failing to increase job prospects, and causing hunger, debt and ill-health among jobseekers. And sometimes, causing death.

I’ve always felt that it is self evident – common sense – that if people are already claiming financial assistance which was designed to meet only very basic needs, such as provision for food, fuel and shelter, then imposing further financial penalities would simply reduce those people to a struggle for basic survival, which will inevitably demotivate them and stifle their potential.

However, the current government demand an empirical rigour from those presenting criticism of their policy, yet they curiously fail in meeting the same exacting standards that they demand of others. Often, the claim that “no causal link has been established” is used as a way of ensuring that established correlative relationships, (which often do imply causality,) are not investigated further. Qualitative evidence – case studies, for example – is very often rather undemocratically dismissed as “anecdotal,” which of course stifles further opportunities for research and inquiry.

The Conservative shift in emphasis from structural to psychological explanations of poverty has far-reaching consequences. The partisan reconceptualision of poverty makes it much harder to define and very difficult to measure. Such a conceptual change disconnects poverty from more than a century of detailed empirical and theoretical research, and we are witnessing an increasingly experimental approach to policy-making, aimed at changing the behaviour of individuals, without their consent.

This approach isolates citizens from the broader structural political, economic, sociocultural and reciprocal contexts that invariably influence and shape an individuals’s experiences, meanings, motivations, behaviours and attitudes, causing a problematic duality between context and cognition. It also places unfair and unreasonable responsibility on citizens for circumstances which lie outside of their control, such as the socioeconomic consequences of political decision-making.

I want to discuss two further considerations to add to the growing criticism of the extended use of sanctioning, which are related to why sanctions don’t work. One is that imposing such severe financial penalities on people who need social security support to meet their basic needs cannot possibly bring about positive “behaviour change” or “incentivise” people to find employment, as claimed. This is because of the evidenced and documented broad-ranging negative impacts of financial insecurity and deprivation – particularly food poverty – on human physical health, motivation, behaviour and mental states.

The second related consideration is that “behavioural theories” on which the government rests the case for extending and increasing benefit sanctions are simply inadequate and flawed, having been imported from a limited behavioural economics model (otherwise known as nudge” and libertarian paternalism) which is itself ideologically premised.

I also explored in depth how sanctions and workfare arose from and were justified by nudge theory, which is now institutionalised and deeply embedded in Conservative policy-making. Sanctions entail the manipulation of a specific theoretical cognitive bias called loss aversion.

At best, the new “behavioural theories” are merely theoretical  propositions, at a broadly experimental stage, and therefore profoundly limited in terms of scope and academic rigour, as a mechanism of explanation, and in terms of capacity for generating comprehensive, coherent accounts and understanding about human motivation and behaviour.

I reviewed research and explored existing empirical evidence regarding the negative impacts of food poverty on physical health, motivation and mental health. In particular, I focussed on the Minnesota Semistarvation Experiment and linked the study findings with Abraham Maslow’s central idea about cognitive priority, which is embedded in the iconic hierarchy of needs pyramid. Maslow’s central proposition is verified by empirical evidence from the Minnesota Experiment.

The Minnesota Experiment explored the physical impacts of hunger in depth, but also studied the effects on attitude, cognitive and social functioning and the behaviour patterns of those who have experienced semistarvation. The experiment highlighted a marked loss of ambition, self-discipline, motivation and willpower amongst the subjects once food deprivation commenced. There was a marked flattening of affect, and in the absence of other emotions, Doctor Ancel Keys observed the resignation and submission that hunger manifests.

The understanding that food deprivation dramatically alters emotions, motivation, personality and that nutrition directly and predictably affects the mind as well as the body is one of the legacies of the experiment.

The experiment highlighted very clearly that there’s a striking sense of immediacy and fixation that arises when there are barriers to fulfiling basic physical needs – human motivation is frozen to meet survival needs, which take precedence over all other needs. This is observed and reflected in both the researcher’s and the subject’s accounts throughout the study. If a person is starving, the desire to obtain food will trump all other goals and dominate the person’s thought processes.

In a nutshell, this means that if people can’t meet their basic survival needs, it is extremely unlikely that they will have either the capability or motivation to meet higher level psychosocial needs, including social obligations and responsibilities to seek work. Abraham Maslow’s humanist account of motivation also highlights the same connection between fundamental motives and immediate situational threats.

Ancel Keys published a full report about the experiment in 1950. It was a substantial two-volume work titled The Biology of Human Starvation. To this day, it remains the most comprehensive scientific examination of the physical and psychological effects of hunger.

Keys emphasised the dramatic effect that semistarvation has on motivation, mental attitude and personality, and he concluded that democracy and nation building would not be possible in a population that did not have access to sufficient food.

I also explored the link between deprivation and an increased risk of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and substance addiction. Poverty can act as both a causal factor (e.g. stress resulting from poverty triggering depression) and a consequence of mental illness (e.g. schizophrenic symptoms leading to decreased socioeconomic status and prospects).

Poverty is a significant risk factor in a wide range of psychological illnesses. Researchers recently reviewed evidence for the effects of socioeconomic status on three categories: schizophrenia, mood and anxiety disorders and substance abuse. Whilst not a comprehensive list of conditions associated with poverty, the issues raised in these three areas can be generalised, and have clear relevance for policy-makers.

The researchers concluded: “Fundamentally, poverty is an economic issue, not a psychological one. Understanding the psychological processes associated with poverty can improve the efficacy of economically focused reform, but is not a panacea. The proposals suggested here would supplement a focused economic strategy aimed at reducing poverty.” (Source: A review of psychological research into the causes and consequences of poverty – Ben Fell, Miles Hewstone, 2015.)

There is no evidence that keeping benefits at below subsistence level or imposing punitive sanctions “incentivises” people to work and research indicates it is likely to have the opposite effect. In 2010/2011 there 61,468 people were given 3 days emergency food and support by the Trussell Trust and this rose to 913,138 people in 2013-2014.

Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler, and Benjamin Olken re-analyzed data from seven randomized experiments evaluating cash programs in developing countries and found “no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.”

The phrase “welfare dependency” purposefully diverts us from political prejudice, discrimation via policies and disperses public sympathies towards the poorest citizens.

Conservative claims about welfare sanctions are incommensurable with reality, evidence, academic frameworks and commonly accepted wisdom. It’s inconceivable that this government have failed to comprehend that imposing punishment in the form of financial sanctions on people who already have very limited resources for meeting their basic survival needs is not only irrational, it is absurdly and spectacularly cruel.

Minnes

 The Minnesota semistarvation experiment

This is a summary of a much longer, detailed piece of research and review work about welfare sanctions. You can see the original here

Further study of the impact of food deprivation and starvation on psychological and cognitive deterioration: The Psychological Effects of Starvation in the Holocaust

Cognitive function deficits and demotivation associated with food deprivation and hypoglycaemia: Blood glucose influences memory and attention in young adults

Nutritional deficiencies and detrimental consequences for mental health: Nutrition and mental health

A comprehensive study of the detrimental impacts of food insecurity on the development, behaviour, mental health and wellbeing, learning, educational attainment, citizenship and physical health of children in America: Child Food Insecurity: The Economic Impact on our Nation

Comprehensive computerized assessment of cognitive sequelae of a complete 12-16 hour fast

The Minnesota food deprivation experiment also established a link between food insecurity and deprivation and later unhealthful eating practice, eating disorders and obesity: Journal of the American Dietetic Association

 

Cuts under Universal Credit are discriminatory and may be illegal

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The Labour Party released details of research last month, showing how new claimant families will get lower in-work benefit entitlements when tax credits are replaced by the Universal Credit benefit system.

Owen Smith, the shadow Work and Pensions secretary, said research commissioned from the House of Commons library shows that next year, thousands of working families will be at least £2,500 a year worse off as a result of the government’s cuts to Universal Credit.

Mr Smith MP, responding to Iain Duncan Smith’s recent claim on the Andrew Marr show that “nobody loses a penny” from cuts to Universal Credit, said:

Iain Duncan Smith is completely wrong to say nobody loses a penny from his cuts to in-work support.

 Cutting Universal Credit raises £100m for the government next year and that money has to come from somewhere.

What the Tories aren’t telling us is that the £100m – and a further £9.5 billion over the next five years – comes from the pockets of low- and middle-income families.

That means those currently on Universal Credit face losses of up to £2,400 come April.

Just like tax credit cuts, working families will be worse off next year and just like those cuts, Labour will fight them at every turn.

Earlier this month, analysis from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, (OBR) suggested the changes to universal credit announced in the July budget would save the Chancellor close to £3bn by 2019-20.

The Labour Party is taking advice from lawyers about the legality of the benefit cuts under universal credit. Owen Smith, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said it is discriminatory that a single mother working full-time on the minimum wage could be almost £3,000 worse off under universal credit than a mother in precisely the same circumstances on tax credits.

The challenge raises the possibility that the new welfare system could be challenged in court.

Although the Chancellor abandoned plans to cut tax credits affecting millions of working families, in his Autumn Statement, it was due to  pressure from the opposition, because the cuts were rejected by the House of Lords and a number of uneasy Tory backbenchers also raised concerns about the negative impact the cuts would have on working families.

Labour MPs have highlighted that claimants will be substantially worse of claiming Universal Credit, the  in-work benefit payments are much lower.

In his autumn statement speech, the Chancellor said: “The simplest thing to do is not to phase these changes in but to avoid them altogether.” But he added: “Tax credits are being phased out anyway as we introduce universal credit.”

The OBR’s analysis show that by 2021 the changes to Universal Credit will save the Treasury almost as much each year as the controversial tax credits policy would have done.

Mr Smith said:

Those lucky enough to stay on tax credits will be massively better off than those on universal credit … That disparity cannot be fair, it cannot be right and it may not even be legal, and we are seeking advice as to the legality of that move.

Mr Smith also confirmed that a Labour government would reverse cuts to benefits happening under Universal Credit. He said:

We will press for the same reversal for the victims of the universal credit heist that will hit precisely the same Tory and Labour constituents just before the next election.

He made the comments in a debate about the welfare cap, after the government sought approval for a motion that said the breach of Osborne’s own fiscal rules were justified because of the reversal of tax credit cuts.

Junior Work and Pensions minister, Shailesh Vara, has confirmed that on current forecasts the cap will not be met for three years.

Universal Credit is to be rolled out gradually, with about 500,000 people on the new benefit by next April. The government has insisted they will be compensated for lower payments through a special scheme called the flexible support fund.

However, Owen Smith said the only money on offer was a £69m grant for job centre managers to help people who are close to getting into work with costs such as bus fares and new clothing.

He said:

Even if it were permissible to use that money, it is in no way going to make up for the £100m shortfall next year, the £1.2bn shortfall the year after, and certainly not the £3bn shortfall in 2020. It is completely impossible and I fear it is also misleading to the public.

Mr Smith also queried the Chancellor’s absence from the House of Commons during the debate, saying he had “carelessly, ignominiously fallen into his own welfare trap” and “slipped on his own smirk”.

He said:

But inexplicably, he’s not here to account for it. Last spring he was quite definite that he should be. He said: ‘The charter makes clear what will happen if the welfare cap is breached. The chancellor must come to parliament, account for the failure of public expenditure control’”.

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WHY IS THE DWP FAILING TO PROVIDE PROPER EXPLANATIONS ALONGSIDE ITS LEGISLATION? LORDS TO ASK MINISTER

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The lack of Government transparency and accountability is something that has concerned me since 2012. As someone who has used the Freedom of Information Act frequently to try and push for greater transparency and democratic accountability, I can say that there is a deeply concerning gap between the justification narratives being presented by the government for their policies, rational and coherent explanations and the reality of the impact of those policies. My requests to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have not once been met with a coherent, rational response, and the DWP have also regularly refused to meet my requests for information.

Most recently I requested information about the DWP’s ethical guidelines, and was refused on the grounds that meeting the request would cost more than the £600 limit. Yet it’s reasonable to expect that ethical guidelines for any government department are placed in the public domain, and are accessible by service users.

samedifference1's avatarSame Difference

A press release:

The House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee will next week take oral evidence from the Lord Freud, Minister of State for Welfare Reform on the quality of information that the Department for Work and Pensions has provided in support of statutory instruments.

Since the general election the Committee has published three reports criticising DWP for failing to provide sufficient explanation alongside its Statutory Instruments to enable it to gain a clear understanding of the effect of the instrument under consideration. The Committee has therefore invited the Minister to attend and discuss how his department can do a better job in meeting the Committee’s information requirements.

The Evidence session will start at 12:00 on Tuesday 22 December in Committee Room 3A of the House of Lords

Lord Freud is the Minister for Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and as such may make…

View original post 74 more words

The Department for Work and Pensions don’t know what their ethical and safeguarding guidelines are but still claim they have some

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I have recently written quite extensively about problems with how the government conduct “research,” I’ve also highlighted the many official rebukes the Conservatives have faced because of their tendency to invent statistics to “verify” their ideologically-driven, value-laden “hypotheses.”

Who could ever forget the Department for Work and Pension’s fake testimonials from fake benefit claimants telling us all how fakely beneficial the fakesters had found having their fake lifeline benefits withdrawn for fake non-compliance, leading to fake improvements of behaviour, presumably after a bout of fake starvation and destitution.

The new Work and Health Programme, aimed at reducing the number of people claiming Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), is currently still at a research and trialing stage. Part of the experimental nudge element of this research entails enlisting GPs to “prescribe” job coaches, and to participate in constructing “a health and work passport to collate employment and health information.”  (See The new Work and Health Programme: the government plan social experiments to “nudge” sick and disabled people into work.)

This raised some serious ethical concerns for me, which I addressed in a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The most important part of the request was:

I should like to ask what ethical guidelines are in place regarding the use of behavioural theory on claimants. What guidelines are in place to protect claimants from any potential adverse effects of trials and experiments using methods aimed at changing behaviours of claimants? And what method of gaining claimant consent (to be used as a subject in trials and experiments ) is used by the Department and by job centres?

I did ask a further three brief and reasonable questions, citing a source of information – The Government Communication Service guide to communications and behaviour change – quoting from it and explaining the questions.

My request was refused.

The DWP response: 

I can confirm that we hold information falling within the description specified in your request. However, we estimate that the cost of complying with your request would exceed the appropriate limit for central Government, set by regulations at £600. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 3½ working days in determining whether the Department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting it.

Under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act the Department is not therefore obliged to comply with your request and we will not be processing it further.

images

Firstly, something as fundamentally important as safeguarding and ethical guidelines regarding government behavioural/psychological experimentation should actually be available for public access and scrutiny, not hidden away in a place that allegedly takes so much time, effort and money to locate.

Anyone would think those comments are simply an obstructive tactic, if the DWP can confirm that they have the information, then surely that reduces the cost and time spent retrieving and extracting it to comply with my request. Wouldn’t you think?

Someone who is earning £600 for 3½days work is on a very generous annual salary of around £45K. Unless this person is being paid to be intentionally incompetent and obstructive, their job skills suck, it has to be said. So do the logic and reasoning skills of the person who wrote that response.

I also know from experience that the DWP regularly respond only partially. They had the option of answering some of my request, at least. After all, they claim to have the information, seems a shame not to share some of it.

However, because the ethical considerations of government experiments and trials on people needing welfare support are so very important, I have pursued this request further by taking the option of simplifying it.

I wrote:

Dear DWP CAXTON HOUSE Communications,

You confirm that you have the information that I requested, but then claim that it would exceed the £600 limit to provide that
information which you state is because of the “estimated cost of one person spending 3½ working days in determining whether the Department holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting it.”

If you confirm you have the information, then surely that reduces the cost and time spent retrieving and extracting it to comply with my request.

I will however simplify my request. Most people would expect that ethical guidelines, safeguards and the important matter of client consent to participating in Government trials and experiments on people needing welfare support is something that the DWP would have to hand – easy to retrieve and very important information that one would expect to be in the public domain in any case. But I can’t find it.

I refer again to the The Government Communication Service guide to communications and behaviour change –
https://gcn.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-conte…

In particular, I refer to page 5: “Behavioural theory is a powerful
tool for the government communicator, but you don’t need to be an experienced social scientist to apply it successfully to your work.”

I should like to ask:

  • What ethical guidelines are in place regarding the use of behavioural theory on claimants?
  • What guidelines are in place to protect claimants from any potential adverse effects of trials and experiments using methods aimed at changing the behaviours of claimants?
  • And what method of gaining claimant consent (to be used as a subject in trials and experiments ) is used by the Department for Work and Pensions and by job centres?

Yours sincerely,

Susan Jones

Link to the request

Here is the FoI request and response in full: Use of behavioural theory to change behaviours of people claiming benefits.

Under Section 16 of the FoI Act the DWP should assist me in helping to narrow my request so that it may fall beneath the cost limit. I have narrowed my request and submitted a shorter, simplified version, focussing on the ethical issues only. It is reasonable to expect the DWP, whose remit includes face to face work with some of our most vulnerable citizens, to have ethical and safeguarding guidelines and consent forms to hand without having to pay someone hundreds of pounds for days of work to “find and retrieve” information that ought to be in the public domain anyway. 

In the event of that request being refused, I will be pursuing this further via the Internal Review Mechanism, and if need be, I shall be contacting the Information Commissioner’s Office.

gcs-guide-to-communications-and-behaviour-change1

I wonder if the response was influenced by this

Update

My second amended request has been refused. I have therefore asked for an Internal Review. I said:

Dear DWP CAXTON HOUSE Communications,

I refer to your first response: “Under section 16 of the Act we
should assist you in helping you narrow your request so that it may fall beneath the cost limit. It may help to reduce the number of questions by refocusing it to only a few elements of the presently broad request. We will consider a fresh any revised request however we cannot guarantee that any revised request will fall within the cost limit.”

I subsequently submitted a narrowed and focussed request in
response, with just 3 basic questions from the initial FOI request. You responded by refering to my original request, and completely ignored my amended and narrowed down, shorter request.

I am therefore making a formal complaint that you did not address the reduced, simplified and narrowed down request. I am asking for an internal review.

I wrote:

“I should like to ask what ethical guidelines are in place
regarding the use of behavioural theory on claimants.

What guidelines are in place to protect claimants from any
potential adverse effects of trials and experiments using methods aimed at changing the behaviours of claimants?

And what method of gaining claimant consent (to be used as a
subject in trials and experiments ) is used by the Department for Work and Pensions and by job centres?”

You have stated that you do have this information. As I have
considerably narrowed down the request to 3 very basic questions, the costs involved in retrieving and providing it ought to be quite minimal. It’s also a very reasonable request. The DWP works with some of our most vulnerable citizens. It is especially important that in light of the current experimental nature of behavioural theories, and the current trialing of the new government health and work programme, that there are ethical guidelines and safeguards in place to protect vulnerable clients, and also, that there is a mechanism for gaining informed consent from clients who are subjects of trials and experiments.

These are issues that researchers within the medical sciences and social sciences have to consider every day. Using behavioural modification (“behavioural change theory”) methods on citizens without their consent and without engaging their deliberative processes has enormous ethical implications.

The British Psychological Society , for example, has strict code of
conduct and human research ethics –
http://www.bps.org.uk/sites/default/file…

And I refer to the Helsinki Declaration regarding medical research – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles…

The Geneva Declaration – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaratio…

And the the Nuremberg code includes such principles as informed consent and absence of coercion; properly formulated scientific experimentation; and beneficence towards experiment participants – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_…

These are just a few examples of codes of ethics regarding human research.

There are a wide range of legal and Human Rights implications
connected with experimentation and research trials conducted on social groups and human subjects. My request for clarification that there are ethical guidelines, safeguards and protections for subjects and basic consent mechanisms in place and the details of what they are is therefore a very reasonable one.

Yours sincerely,

Susan Jones

Link to this

I also added that Section 16 of the FoI Act places a duty on public authorities to provide reasonable advice and assistance to applicants. I was not provided with “advice or assistance.” I was not asked if I prefer to narrow my request in an alternative way to reduce costs (this is a breach of the section 16 duty to advise and assist). Nonetheless I did narrow my request, and that was completely ignored, the second response I received was related entirely to the initial request. In fact it was exactly the same response. I also challenged the DWP’s estimate of the costs of meeting my request. The rest of the grounds for my request for an Internal Review may be viewed here.