In this important paper Kaliya Franklin carefully analyses how it is government policy that has undermined the objectivity of the medical assessments used by the private medical firm Atos. While Atos have been the primarily been blamed for the high numbers of successful appeals against their assessments, Kaliya explains that the real cause of the problem probably lies in the system used by the DWP to manage its contract with Atos.
There seems to be no evidence that the norms themselves are based on any empirical evidence as to the real impact of disability on someone’s ability to work. The very low success rate in helping disabled people to find work suggests that these targets were artificially imposed by the DWP and serve only to save money by cutting the incomes of the poorest. Moreover, the process of setting norms and managing to those norms, further corrupts the assessment process and seems likely to have undermined its objectivity.
Today this is a grave problem within the use of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) process which is used to restrict access to the Employment Support Allowance and to assign people to either the ‘Support Group’ or ‘Work Related Activity Group’. Furthermore this norm-based methodology will damage any system of assessment in the future