Welfare charities are alarmed at a rising tide of disabled benefit claimants who turn out to be wrongly deemed fit to work under Government medical assessments.
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has estimated that 23 per cent of Britain’s 2.1 million incapacity benefit claimants are ready to work. But Citizens Advice said that “too many people” were overturning decisions to deny them employment support allowance and force them to find work.
The news came as a pilot scheme launched in Burnley and Aberdeen this week, to test every disability benefit claimant over the next three years. Claimants who fail the tests will be put onto the less generous jobseeker’s allowance and encouraged to find work.
Lizzie Iron, Citizens Advice’s head of welfare policy, said that the organisation was winning an average of 80 per cent of the appeal cases against ESA medicals they take on. She told Tribune: “It says that there’s something wrong. There are too many people going to appeal and succeeding in their appeals.”
Ms Iron said there had been “lots of complaints about poor delivery of the test”, which is run by private contractor Atos Healthcare, leading to people with diseases such as Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis being found fit to work.
A Mind spokesperson said: “Whether it’s deliberate or not, we’ve had people who’ve found that the report of their assessment has been completely skewed. I think it just shows how ineffective the system is.”
Labour introduced ESA in 2008 to replace incapacity benefit, along with a new medical assessment designed to measure the ability to work. But the coalition is accelerating the changes by planning to test existing claimants as well as new applicants.
The latest Government statistics show that 32 per cent of ESA claimants deemed “fit to work” appealed against between October 2008 and November 2009. 40 per cent of the appeals have been upheld, a total of 21,200 cases.
However, the number of claimants appealing is on the rise. The Tribunals Service last month reported that there were 46,000 ESA appeals lodged in the first quarter of this year, a 128 per cent increase year on year.
