A BBC Scotland investigation found that under ESA [Employment Support Allowance], more than two thirds of claimants are being found fit to work, almost 20% more than the government had planned.

It is now the most commonly appealed benefit, with 8,000 tribunals heard every month across the UK – and 40% of decisions are being reversed.

Citizens Advice Scotland said it should never have been introduced and was unfit for purpose.

Paisley GP, Chris Johnstone, has piloted a back-to-work scheme and said he had serious concerns about the medical.

He believes the medicals are not thorough enough and they “don’t appear to cover the areas that the patients want to talk about, often mental health problems”.

Dr Johnstone added that a lot of stress and anxiety had been caused to a “vulnerable group of patients”.

The medicals are carried out by private company Atos healthcare which also conducts staff medicals for the civil service.

ME sufferer Vikki Bell was dismissed from her Department for Work and Pensions desk job she had held for 15 years, after an Atos assessment concluded she was too ill for the role, and was unlikely to return in the foreseeable future.

But just three weeks later when applying for ESA, she was told by another Atos assessor that she was fit to work and did not qualify for the benefit.

You can see BBC Scotland’s investigation – Benefits: Who’s Cheating Who? on BBC One Scotland at 2245 BST Wednesday 26th May

It should also be point out those appeals are to DWP tribunals, if they were independent and people had proper representation the 40% reversal figure would be much larger. In short the assessments are a con brewed up by government and Atos to meet a policy goal while attacking people with poor health and little money. The Disability Alliance reported in 2007-

Claimants undergoing the current PCA [Personal Capability Assessment] are assessed by Atos Origin doctors using the current PCA descriptors and the Atos-designed computer system LiMA. The same doctors then make an estimate of the claimants’ scores under the new PCA descriptors.

Records of this assessment are then considered by two technical groups in DWP. People serving on these groups have no actual contact with claimants, nor do they have full reports from health or social care professionals who know the claimant. Hence they are unable to make an accurate judgement of capability to work in each case.

In 2006 another investigation found-

Almost 80,000 sick and disabled people a year are being wrongly denied benefits…It has emerged that medical reports on people claiming some benefits are unreliable or inaccurate.

Jim Allison, a benefits adviser based in Cumbria, came across one case in which an applicant for Disability Living Allowance had had 20 alterations made to her medical report.

The corrections had the effect of invalidating her claim: only when she decided to appeal did the alterations come to light.

our investigation found inconsistencies: in the case of 11-year-old identical twins with autism, one had her Disability Living Allowance uprated while her sister – who has exactly the same level of disability – was turned down.

When this was pointed out to the DWP, the twin who had initially received the increase had it withdrawn.

The twins’ mother took the case to appeal and both children now receive the higher rate.

So years ago the errors were egregious but rather than scrap the system they are refining it and making it more vicious, the ESA PCA is another step worse as this investigation has found. As for the software Atos use-

In 2002, SchlumbergerSema, the company contracted to provide the DWP’s Medical Service (MS), began trials of a new computer system called Lima (Logic Integrated Medical Assessment), designed to facilitate the provision of medical examinations and reports for the purposes of the personal capability assessment (PCA). Lima was rolled out on a national basis during 2003 and 2004. In 2004, SchlumbergerSema was taken over by Atos Origin, an international IT company which was recently awarded a new seven-year contract to continue to provide the MS. The contract includes a commitment to reduce the PCA processing times and improve the capabilities of Lima.

Although Lima allows doctors to override the automated features, they are discouraged from doing so. The DWP’s Technical Manual on Lima for MS doctors (v2 12 October 2004) advises them to ‘use the supplied phrases whenever possible’ because Lima is unable to recognise free text when choosing appropriate descriptors. It also advises doctors to only override the automated choice of descriptors in exceptional cases.

Two other features of Lima are of questionable validity. Firstly, most of the standard phrases relating to the ‘typical day’ are couched in terms of what the claimant can (as opposed to cannot) do. As the Technical Manual states, ‘Lima works best when it has positive information about the claimant’s abilities’. This is at odds with the law, which is about incapacity and inability to carry out prescribed functions. Secondly, in the words of the Manual, ‘Lima is programmed to give more weight to observed behaviour than to either the history or the examination’. The validity of this was recently called into question by a social security commissioner

A whistleblower has said previously in a report by Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian-

Later, a healthcare professional working for the private healthcare company which carries out these assessments, wrote in indicating that there was a target that the inspection team were expected to meet. Under the username rightthewrong, he wrote:

“I probably am going to get fired tommorrow for coming on this forum, but I don’t care. I have been doing these “assessments” for some time now. It’ s rubbish, draconian to say the least and it is designed to get people off the sick benefit. It is designed so that 75% of the people who apply for ESA, come hell or high water, ‘fail’ it.”

A criminal level of abuse and incompetence is being allowed to prosper because it fits political agendas that do not care as to the extra pain, poverty and deaths that are caused. This is one -of the many- reasons why I don’t succumb to the jingoistic fantasies that we go to war to ‘help’ people in other countries, a government that has determinedly set about what in some cases could reasonably be described as bureaucratic manslaughter of its own disabled citizens, is not about to suddenly find humanity when it applies to people in far off lands whose culture they are ignorant of and who can’t even vote them out of office. But I digress… Not that we could vote out the policy anyway, all three parties sing from the same -neoliberal- hymn sheet on welfare. That New Labour hired Baron David Freud (another relative who like Edward Bernays or Mattie has hardly covered Sigmund’s legacy in glory) an investment banker to author their welfare reform policy -a man who very quickly joined the Tories and is now Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Work and Pensions thus it did not matter who won the election, welfare was a consensus issue- tells you who this policy is designed to serve, clue: It ain’t sick or poor people. Public money, as Feud knows only too well, is just for the financiers-

A member of his own team called him the “Fraud Squad” because of his ability to heavily promote new share issues that subsequently tanked. After one particularly difficult meeting with John Prescott, in which Freud’s consortium asked for a further £1.2bn from public coffers for the Channel rail link, the deputy prime minister asked: “Are you the banker?” After admitting he was, Freud says the only “appropriate” response was to add “sorry”.