Atos wants out

[Dolph]

The real problem is that we still are not being clear about what our benefits system is supposed to do, or what being in receipt of benefits for disability is supposed to indicate. There are a great many disabled people who work without issue, there are others who, despite having the same conditions, do not. Furthermore, there are another group who cannot and will never be able to work.

IMO, disability benefits should be about the condition, not about whether the individual is working or not. That would remove much of the issues are multiple assessments with differing expectations, as well as allowing disables people to have their issues acknowledged when they are successful In employment.

 

[scorza]

GPs most defininitely are not independent. They have an interest in keeping the patient happy as their income depends on this.

Well they're certainly more independent that Atos, who are actively incentivised to find people fit for work. GPs are also professionals, they have a responsibility to do what's in the best interests of their patient, if they're fit for work it's imo a deriliction of duty to sign them off sick. They can't just do what the patient tells them to do, try asking your GP for a morphine prescription.

Government outsourcing is bad, but so is government work done in house. Maybe the common factor is the problem?

I think the majority of government offices do very good work - we just hear about it when it goes wrong. In many cases the staff on the front line are often unsung heroes, but are often let down by interfering politicians and meddlesome Whitehall mandarins.

Government outsourcing normally offers poor value for taxpayers and it creates non-value adding non-jobs, but crucially when it goes wrong a government minister doesn't have to resign - he can just blame the outsourcer.

 

[Dolph]

Well they're certainly more independent that Atos, who are actively incentivised to find people fit for work. GPs are also professionals, they have a responsibility to do what's in the best interests of their patient, if they're fit for work it's imo a deriliction of duty to sign them off sick. They can't just do what the patient tells them to do, try asking your GP for a morphine prescription.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/29/gps-patients-capacity-to-work

It is very good easy to take the easy way out when you have a responsibility to the patient and none to the benefits office.

Of course, the whole thing could be avoided by having a better designed system in the first place.

I think the majority of government offices do very good work - we just hear about it when it goes wrong. In many cases the staff on the front line are often unsung heroes, but are often let down by interfering politicians and meddlesome Whitehall mandarins.

Government outsourcing normally offers poor value for taxpayers and it creates non-value adding non-jobs, but crucially when it goes wrong a government minister doesn't have to resign - he can just blame the outsourcer.

All the productivity metrics for the public sector show that it doesn't matter what you think...

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

I left Capita on moral grounds because I was disgusted at how they operate.

I can second that. I book interpreters across my NHS Trust and Capita was our first supplier. Then a couple of years ago, we started getting complaints due to their falling hit rate and the fact that some of their interpreters weren't CRB-checked. We then trialled out some more language suppliers and settled with one of them. Been fine for the last 2 years now.

But yeah, not too sure about the proposed benefits screening suppliers. It looks to me very much like "out of the frying pan and into the fire".

 

[scorza]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/29/gps-patients-capacity-to-work

It is very good easy to take the easy way out when you have a responsibility to the patient and none to the benefits office.

Of course, the whole thing could be avoided by having a better designed system in the first place.

Yeah so a GP doesn't want to do an unpleasant part of his job. I say hard cheese old boy - you get paid a shed load of money to do what's in your patient's best interest and it's never in anyone's best interest to be idle unless you really need to be. Mind you, given the NHS's appalling mental health capability it's not surprising that they ignore this.

What is your idea of a better designed system anyway? Just have no benefits amid vague notions of personal responsibility?

All the productivity metrics for the public sector show that it doesn't matter what you think...

Ah yes, productivity metrics - they can't be manipulated can they? Just like how stats on the number of prisoners tagged by outsourcers can't be manipulated in any way.

 

[LordSplodge]

IMO, disability benefits should be about the condition, not about whether the individual is working or not. That would remove much of the issues are multiple assessments with differing expectations.

So everybody who has, say, multiple sclerosis would be treated the same? Would they be deemed fit or unfit for work?

What about cancer sufferers?

What about those with mental health issues?

You can't judge if any of the above are fit to work just by their condition. You can't expect untrained people working on a government contract that gets paid to prove people are fit for work. We have these people called doctors, they're trained in understanding medical conditions. Some even have years of knowledge of their patients.

Funny old world.

 

[Dolph]

So everybody who has, say, multiple sclerosis would be treated the same? Would they be deemed fit or unfit for work?

What about cancer sufferers?

What about those with mental health issues?

You can't judge if any of the above are fit to work just by their condition. You can't expect untrained people working on a government contract that gets paid to prove people are fit for work. We have these people called doctors, they're trained in understanding medical conditions. Some even have years of knowledge of their patients.

Funny old world.

You remember that I support universal, not means tested, benefits offset by the tax system?

That means a flat minimum income with adjustments for things such as disability, that is not lost due to employment etc. No more need to judge fitness to work, no more trapping of people on benefits and so on. You would still need independent testing for the additional income, but you also remove the stigma of applying and the testing can be more about needs and less about work.

We need to move away from the conditional benefits system toward a universal, less adversarial one that applies to all and treats people fairly based on their potential, not their choices.

 

[Mr Jack]

This doesn't mean atoms did a good job or that the current assessment is right, but the idea of an independent assessment is still a good and needed one if the current flawed conditional benefits system is to remain in place without the needed total reform.

It's not a good idea.

Firstly, it is not possible for an independent assessor to accurately judge the ability of someone to work without a level of intrusion that is unreasonable both in its duration and cost. Any assessment has, instead, to based on a brief interview. You can't judge someone's ability to work on such a basis because far too many conditions are variable in their presentation. It's quite possible that someone can make it to an interview and perform decently for 15 minutes but be unable to hold a regular job or maintain such a standard for any period of time. That's leaving aside the need for any assessor to be sufficiently medical trained to interpret and understand the medical records of claimants.

Secondly, it cruelly imposes an extra burden of stress on society's most vulnerable. By nature, the people who are being assessed include a large number of people are mentally, or physically, particularly disadvantaged by stress. To impose additional burdens on them is unconscionable.

It's true that the system of assessment by Doctor's is flawed but a system of independent assessments is worse.

The only good part of the change in system was the change in principle from "what stops you working" to "what work could you do?"; unfortunately this shift in principle hasn't been backed with money to support the disabled into work.

 

[Dolph]

Hence why I only support it in the as being a necessary part of our current broken system.

The whole tax and benefits system needs reworking from the ground up to address the fundamental consequences of conditionality.

 

[jimjamuk]

Have worked for a number of "large" IT companies on contract doing some of these types of things - the problem I would say about 50% of the time is that the muppets in the cival service or gov departments that need to pin down the deliverables from day 1 of the contract, do not have a clue what they want and its a series of moving goal posts from that point. Nothing gets delivered and costs spiral when someone remembers the odd 500Tb data or some daft requirement to duplicate every bit of hardware. The other half of the time is the total disregard to public finances. On one project £1M worth of SUN servers turned up on a Monday but by the Tues someone had decided that they wanted HP instead. So the SUN servers were sold to the company I was contracting for £1 (yes 1 pound) to save on costs for storing the kit on site.

The one silver lining - my contracts go on for ages whilst we laugh at the total incompetence of the programme teams

The gov should split work into smaller pieces and hand them to medium sized IT companies - ones still capable of delivering smaller projects on time and in budget

 

[spankingtexan]

DPAC&Black Triangle: Joint Statement on the Bizarre ATOS Exit Strategy

http://dpac.uk.net/2014/02/dpacblac...arre-atos-exit-strategy/#sthash.sQcf1hV1.dpbs

Why we will never give up the fight.

 

[Tunney]

Have worked for a number of "large" IT companies on contract doing some of these types of things - the problem I would say about 50% of the time is that the muppets in the cival service or gov departments that need to pin down the deliverables from day 1 of the contract, do not have a clue what they want and its a series of moving goal posts from that point. Nothing gets delivered and costs spiral when someone remembers the odd 500Tb data or some daft requirement to duplicate every bit of hardware. The other half of the time is the total disregard to public finances. On one project £1M worth of SUN servers turned up on a Monday but by the Tues someone had decided that they wanted HP instead. So the SUN servers were sold to the company I was contracting for £1 (yes 1 pound) to save on costs for storing the kit on site.

And that's the fundamental problem with outsourcing.

Unless you have the skills and expertise to define what the outsourcing company should be doing, you can't efficiently outsource the work. However, the skills and expertise are lost as soon as you start to outsource entire departments. You end up with people who have no idea what they're doing defining the work and choosing who wins the work.

 

[Dolph]

And that's the fundamental problem with outsourcing.

Unless you have the skills and expertise to define what the outsourcing company should be doing, you can't efficiently outsource the work. However, the skills and expertise are lost as soon as you start to outsource entire departments. You end up with people who have no idea what they're doing defining the work and choosing who wins the work.

That's not a problem with outsourcing per se though, just with badly implemented outsourcing strategy, especially when combined with poor working practices in the original company, and when outsourcing in the UK, tupe requirements mean that you often cannot address poor staff because they cannot be replaced.

 

[Dolph]

With regards to the current flaws in the benefits system, remember that the current system effectively classifies Stephen hawking as being less disabled than 'white dee'. Sdoes anyone really think that is the case?

 

[Third Opinion]

With regards to the current flaws in the benefits system, remember that the current system effectively classifies Stephen hawking as being less disabled than 'white dee'. Sdoes anyone really think that is the case?

They never get it right when the try to change the system. The 'White dee' of the world will continue to get away with it under the next system and the one after that.

Same with the changes for job seekers, the ones that are making little to no effort to gain work will continue to be ignored whilst the genuine people get bullied and humiliated.

 

[Meridian]

That's not a problem with outsourcing per se though, just with badly implemented outsourcing strategy, especially when combined with poor working practices in the original company, and when outsourcing in the UK, tupe requirements mean that you often cannot address poor staff because they cannot be replaced.

TUPE applies at the point of transfer only. It's then pretty easy to change terms and conditions after as little as 24 hours, and companies often do. If you've ever been TUPEd you'd understand how little protection it actually offers against a creative management team. It's a political fig leaf, and and a small one.

Also, I've been re-reading my post on the current policy, and I'm struggling to find anywhere where I said it was invented by the Tories? I merely said that it is Tory policy. Which is it. Please respond to what I write, not what you think I write.

 

[Dolph]

TUPE applies at the point of transfer only. It's then pretty easy to change terms and conditions after as little as 24 hours, and companies often do. If you've ever been TUPEd you'd understand how little protection it actually offers against a creative management team. It's a political fig leaf, and and a small one.

Also, I've been re-reading my post on the current policy, and I'm struggling to find anywhere where I said it was invented by the Tories? I merely said that it is Tory policy. Which is it. Please respond to what I write, not what you think I write.

It is the policy of all three major parties, highlighting just one is either a mistake or dishonest. Thanks to the above post, we can be clear it is the latter.

 

[Dolph]

They never get it right when the try to change the system. The 'White dee' of the world will continue to get away with it under the next system and the one after that.

Same with the changes for job seekers, the ones that are making little to no effort to gain work will continue to be ignored whilst the genuine people get bullied and humiliated.

Hence why the whole system needs fundamental reform. In a universal system, there is no getting away with it because you will always be better off working.

 

[Tunney]

That's not a problem with outsourcing per se though, just with badly implemented outsourcing strategy, especially when combined with poor working practices in the original company, and when outsourcing in the UK, tupe requirements mean that you often cannot address poor staff because they cannot be replaced.

The real money to be made in outsourcing is when you replace TUPE-ed staff with inexperienced workers on worse contracts. All of the large outsourcing companies have very effective ways of getting rid of TUPE-ed staff.

I've seen it done to friends and it's appalling the way that they treat people.

 

[Dolph]

The real money to be made in outsourcing is when you replace TUPE-ed staff with inexperienced workers on worse contracts. All of the large outsourcing companies have very effective ways of getting rid of TUPE-ed staff.

I've seen it done to friends and it's appalling the way that they treat people.

Or equally qualified staff on market rate contracts when in house staff are substantially overcompensated for what they do.

Outsourcing isn't a perfect solution, but it is not all bad either.