Ever since the days of Jo Moore who infamously emailed on the day of 9/11 that “today is a good day to bury bad news”, governments thereafter have tended to follow her advice. Hence on the day when Prince George’s arrival was announced to the world, the government cunningly buried the bad news (for them) […]
Posts Tagged ‘ATOS’
Atos: Minister finally agrees to meeting
Jul 20th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.It’s taken long enough, like 6 months, to coax the Minister responsible for Atos under IDS, Mark Hoban, finally to come round to receiving a delegation from those with deep and lengthy experience of Atos/DWP procedures over WCA. But it look as though he is now prepared to see us soon after Parliament returns on […]
Share:
ATOS and government treatment of disabled people
Jul 12th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Research published in March by the think-tank Demos and by the disability charity Scope, which my hon. Friend Mr Bain mentioned earlier, revealed that by 2017-18, 3.7 million disabled people will collectively lose £28 billion as a result of the Government’s cumulative benefit changes. If Scope and Demos can do a cumulative impact assessment, why cannot the […]
Share:
Support George Rolph: on hunger strike having had his disability benefits denied
Jun 5th, 2013 by Jon Lansman.Today, George Rolph is in day 16 of his hunger strike, which he is doing for others going through what he has had to endure, whilst also trying to get the general public to wake up to what is happening to the most vulnerable people in the United Kingdom, a country which once cared for […]
Share:
Judges overturn ATOS work capability assessment
May 26th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Three cheers for the courts and mental health activists, none for the politicians and the Department of Work & Pensions. This week three judges ruled – as we all knew, but it required the courts to make it the law of the land – that the Government’s prescriptors, regulations and guidelines used to assess whether […]
Share:
Persecuting the poor on an industrial scale is the only card the Tories have left
Apr 16th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.First they hired Atos, the French IT firm, to hack down the recipients of Incapacity Benefit by up to 70% – regardless of the human consequences for those with serious disability. Then Jobcentre staff confirmed that it is widespread practice to set targets for removing benefits, though the DWP spin uses the much more delicate language […]
Share:
Atos: flaws in the Government’s case exposed
Apr 15th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Several recent events have further highlighted the fault lines in government policy and practice over the Atos work assessments: 1 The debate which I initiated in the House on 21 March finally revealed, when the stand-in junior minister Esther McVey finally got around to it after all the padded guff, that the reason the minister […]
Share:
What did disabled people do to deserve this?
Mar 28th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The scale of what is about to hit the disabled is without precedent since the 1930s, and to rub salt in the wound they will be hammered on the same day that 14,000 millionaires in Britain get a tax break worth an average £2,000 a week to each of them (a rise in their income […]
Share:
See you in the chamber! Ministers snub Atos campaigners’ delegation
Mar 15th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.This week something happened which is without precedent in my 40 years of parliamentary experience. On an issue of acute public importance where there had already been a parliamentary debate revealing a total cross-party consensus solidly opposed to government policy, a departmental minister then refused to see a delegation to discuss the matter further and […]
Share:
Programme for action over Atos
Mar 5th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.I am extremely grateful for the huge number of persons and organisations who have written to me both before and after the debate in the House on Atos on 17 January. If this campaign succeeds, and I believe it will, it will be entirely due to the determined and unceasing efforts of so many dedicated activists to […]
