The reports of delays in access to Employment and Support Allowance are unsurprising. The finger of blame has been pointed at Atos Healthcare. Atos has been the subject of a barrage of criticism during the last couple of years; their processes were described by the Harrington report as “mechanistic” and “impersonal”; many of the decisions made about fitness to work are wrong and 40% of appeals have been successful. Atos has issued a statement attributing the delays to the longer, more sensitive assessments introduced since Harrington.
There is however a more general issue about the capacity of the administration to deal with mass reassessment. Governments have not just undertaken in recent years to reassess all the former claimants of incapacity benefit; they also propose to introduce equivalent tests for the Personal Independence Payment, the reformed Disability Living Allowance. As people with disabilities are displaced from the labour market, and as the government requires further categories to be ready for work, including lone parents and those who are bereaved, the demands on the system of reassessment will increase. Current calculations on throughput rely heavily on people not turning up for the assessment.
There are some practical ways of relieving the burden of administration. One is to exempt more groups – such young people with severe disabilities from early ages or people with defined conditions like cancer. Another might be to offer compensation to some people to transfer to JSA voluntarily. A third might be to license a range of independent practitioners to certify the assessment. The procedure needs to be faster as well as fairer.