How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence

[Nick]

Well if they are listed as having mental health issues they could alert any of the services involved couldn't they?

Still we're getting away from that aren't we,very recently a medical practice in the Noth west urged patients not to ring the surgery but email,one patient emailed to say he had breathing difficulties,his email was never replied to but he was found dead five days later.

There will always be mistakes, but Smurfs usual OTT BS is what I'm arguing. 

[Scott777]

Well if they are listed as having mental health issues they could alert any of the services involved couldn't they?

Still we're getting away from that aren't we,very recently a medical practice in the Noth west urged patients not to ring the surgery but email,one patient emailed to say he had breathing difficulties,his email was never replied to but he was found dead five days later.

Certainly there are failures in public services across the board, but the question here is whether the DWP are responsible for people's health.  Maybe they did alert services, I don't know, but even if they did, would those services do anything?  It's they who have failed.  The man was previously sectioned, or something like that, then released.  He weighed about 4 stone when he died.

[cromwell]

Question:

Do you think the DWP have the resources to go out to peoples houses that fail to attend assessments to see if they are ok?

Well if they are listed as having mental health issues they could alert any of the services involved couldn't they?

Still we're getting away from that aren't we,very recently a medical practice in the Noth west urged patients not to ring the surgery but email,one patient emailed to say he had breathing difficulties,his email was never replied to but he was found dead five days later.

[Nick]

Have you ever been to an assessment Nick?

I have supporting someone with mental health issues and a learning disability.

I got talking to a couple he was in the construction game had massive heart attack,60 years old worked all his life and an assessment deemed him fit for work and stopped his benefits.

I've  seen other situations where people have been denied entitlement to things on the say so of people hardly trained until challenged by fully trained professionals.

And for the benefit of anyone interested this wasn't all down to the tories labour were as bad.

Question:

Do you think the DWP have the resources to go out to peoples houses that fail to attend assessments to see if they are ok?

[cromwell]

No they didn't, that's a lie. He failed to attend an assessment, that was the reason.

Have you ever been to an assessment Nick?

I have supporting someone with mental health issues and a learning disability.

I got talking to a couple he was in the construction game had massive heart attack,60 years old worked all his life and an assessment deemed him fit for work and stopped his benefits.

I've  seen other situations where people have been denied entitlement to things on the say so of people hardly trained until challenged by fully trained professionals.

And for the benefit of anyone interested this wasn't all down to the tories labour were as bad.

[Nick]

I am temporarily suspending further comment by me on the thread because the brown semi-solid substance has hit the fan today over the police confiscating the books before they could be delivered. (It is a rapidly evolving situation.)
I have been in telephone contact with the author.)
I doubt there will be any media/press comment.

You said you had already received your copy so how can it be confiscated before it's been delivered?

[Barry]

Probably contain libellous content. 

https://www.bigissue.com/news/activism/dwp-benefits-disabled-people-mps-book-the-department/

Or perhaps part of the drive to prevent publishing of disinformation, starting with the word "Violent".

[Scott777]

I am temporarily suspending further comment by me on the thread because the brown semi-solid substance has hit the fan today over the police confiscating the books before they could be delivered.

Probably contain libellous content.  

[papasmurf]

I am temporarily suspending further comment by me on the thread because the brown semi-solid substance has hit the fan today over the police confiscating the books before they could be delivered. (It is a rapidly evolving situation.)
I have been in telephone contact with the author.)
I doubt there will be any media/press comment.

[Nick]

It is if you are the DWP and don't think about wondering why someone with mental health issues might miss an appointment.

But if you're in a DWP team motivated to sanction payments and leap on what you see as an opportunity to notch up another scalp  . . . .

So now you know what people were thinking?

[Unlucky4Sum]

He missed a review, that is not unreasonable.

It is if you are the DWP and don't think about wondering why someone with mental health issues might miss an appointment.

But if you're in a DWP team motivated to sanction payments and leap on what you see as an opportunity to notch up another scalp  . . . .

[papasmurf]

Not me that misdirected with that 'Second paragraph is states he had severe mental health issues, and that is ultimately killed him, not the DWP.'

it wasn't the second paragraph and very much did not contain that 'that is ultimately killed him, not the DWP'

The relevant facts are:
a) the DWP unreasonably cut off his money for food (even they admit it)
b) he starved to death with virtually no food available to him

It really is a no shit Sherlock to connect (a) and (b)

Sorry but the DWP killed him and many others.(I and others will not back down from that.) Which is why the book of collated evidence going back to when Peter Lilley got into bed John Le Cascio the then vice president of Unum:-
Private Eye article which they did not get sued for publishing:-
'Private Eye' piece on Unum, the American insurance company, and income protection cover, 11 November 2011 - The ME Association

From [color=var(--ast-global-color-0)]'Private Eye'[/url], In the Back section, 11 November 2011[/i][/i][/font][/size][/color]
Tricky questions are again being asked about the profits American insurance giant Unum stands to make from its massive media push on income protection cover, promoted as the answer to the latest tough welfare reforms.
Pulling stunts like persuading six bloggers to live for a week on the current average benefit of £95 and then write about it, Jack McGarry, chief executive at Unum UK (pictured), earlier this year warned: "The government's welfare reform bill will seek to tighten the gateway to benefits for those people unable to work due to sickness or injury. Each year up to 1m people in the UK become disabled and the reforms mean that working people will be able to rely less on state benefits to maintain the standard of living they were used to prior to their illness."
Well, Unum should know. Behind the scenes it has been helping Tory and Labour governments slash the benefits of disabled and sick people for years – going right back to Peter Lilley's social security "Incapacity for Work" reforms of 1994. Lilley hired John Le Cascio, then vice-president of Unum, to advise on "claims management". Le Cascio also sat on the "medical evaluation group", which – according to Professor Jonathan Rutherford in the academic journal Soundings – was set up to design and enforce more stringent medical tests.
At the same time, the UK wing of Unum was launching what it boasted was "a concerted effort to harness the potential" from predicted cuts in benefits, urging people to protect themselves with a "long-term disability policy from Unum".

Eye asked first
The Eye first questioned Unum about the possibility of a serious conflict of interest back in 1995. Dr Le Cascio said he didn't "feel that way" and wouldn't have taken the government job if he thought there was a conflict. That, of course, was ten years before Unum was found guilty in the US of "systematically violating" insurance regulations and fraudulently denying or "low-balling" claims using phony medical reports, misrepresentation and biased investigations (see Ad Nauseam, last Eye).

Fast-forward 16 years, and plus ça change. Unum's tarnished reputation has done nothing to diminish its influence here and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is still denying there's anything amiss about Unum's more recent meddling. In a lengthy reply last month to Norman Lamb, Nick Clegg's chief adviser, the DWP neatly skirted questions about whether Unum was advising on welfare reform and about its unlawful activities in the US.
Yet Unum executives sat on both the mental health and physical function "technical working groups" set up under the Labour government in 2006, which reviewed and finally came up with the new, stricter "work compatibility assessments", introduced for new claimants in 2008. In fact Unum and Atos, the huge French outsourcing company that holds the government's multimillion contract to conduct the widely criticised assessments on behalf of the DWP (see In the Back, last Eye), were the only for-profit companies represented on the groups. Unum chief executive McGarry has now been appointed to the expert panel reviewing the sickness absence from work system announced by the government in February.

Lobby styles
Prof Rutherford wrote that Unum had also been "building its influence" in a variety of ways over a number of years. He said that in 2001 Le Cascio was a key player at a ground-breaking conference at Woodstock near Oxford, titled "Malingering and Illness Deception". Malcolm Wicks, Labour work minister at the time, and Mansel Aylward, then chief medical officer at the DWP, were among the 39 delegates.

In the same year, Unum launched a public private partnership to act as a pressure group to extend influence in policymaking. And in 2004 it opened the £1.6m UnumProvident Centre for Psychosocial and Disability Research at Cardiff University. (The centre has since been renamed and Unum says it no longer provides any funding – no doubt because of claims that academic integrity could be called into question by its influence.)
Unum has been lobbying, sitting on expert groups and hosting meetings at party conferences of all colours ever since. And lo and behold, in May this year, Unum's then medical officer Prof Michael O'Donnell jumped ship to become chief medical officer at Atos. He barely had time to catch his breath before giving evidence to the Commons committee looking at the welfare reform bill.
But Unum is once again denying any conflict of interest "since our current work with the DWP and our marketing campaign are different." It said its current consultation work is about helping people return to work and its advertising campaign was educational and does not support tightening benefit changes.
Meanwhile disability activists who have fallen foul and been forced to appeal cuts in DWP benefits based on flawed Atos assessments, and campaigning groups like Black Triangle, think the whole thing stinks and are urging MPs to investigate.

[Nick]

Not me that misdirected with that 'Second paragraph is states he had severe mental health issues, and that is ultimately killed him, not the DWP.'

it wasn't the second paragraph and very much did not contain that 'that is ultimately killed him, not the DWP'

The relevant facts are:
a) the DWP unreasonably cut off his money for food (even they admit it)
b) he starved to death with virtually no food available to him

It really is a no shit Sherlock to connect (a) and (b)

He missed a review, that is not unreasonable. 

[Unlucky4Sum]

You're now just being pedantic.

The documents would have shown that the DWP knew Errol had been experiencing significant mental distress just three years before his employment and support allowance (ESA) was suddenly withdrawn by the department when he failed to attend an assessment in the autumn of 2017.

Not me that misdirected with that 'Second paragraph is states he had severe mental health issues, and that is ultimately killed him, not the DWP.'

it wasn't the second paragraph and very much did not contain that 'that is ultimately killed him, not the DWP'

The relevant facts are:
a) the DWP unreasonably cut off his money for food (even they admit it)
b) he starved to death with virtually no food available to him

It really is a no shit Sherlock to connect (a) and (b) 

[Scott777]

That he did not contact the DWP he did and was ignored.

Mon 5th June 2023


MPs have raised concerns over the actions of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), after it hid vital evidence from a statutory safeguarding review into a disabled man who starved to death after his benefits were wrongly stopped, the Disability News Service (DNS) has reported.
Nottingham City Safeguarding Adults Board found that the DWP failed to share key documents with the independent consultant who carried out the review into the death of Errol Graham.
The documents would have shown that the DWP knew Errol had been experiencing significant mental distress just three years before his employment and support allowance (ESA) was suddenly withdrawn by the department when he failed to attend an assessment in the autumn of 2017.
Alison Burton, Errol's daughter-in-law, who has fought for years for justice in the wake of his death, said last week that DWP's behaviour was "absolutely disgraceful" and "a cover-up".
Now the Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee has told Disability News Service (DNS) it is considering taking action.
But it also raised concerns about the DWP's continuing failure to sign a legal agreement with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that would force the department to improve its treatment of Disabled claimants.

You post a load of text which says nothing about him contacting the DWP.  Stop wasting my time.