ESA and PIP uses the fatally flawed Waddell and Aylward biopsychosocial (BPS) model of assessment.

Finance and benefits
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Ideas behind ESA and PIP assessments:

"The political rhetoric willingly reported by the national press, and repeated by various charities writing more official reports, is that the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) were introduced by the government as ‘cost-saving measures’, with the ambition to reduce government spending on disability benefits.

That claim was a political smokescreen that most seem to have fallen for…

Clearly, the introduction of the ESA and PIP have not reduced the costs of disability benefits funded by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP); not least because the corporate contracts paid to the private sector to conduct these test runs into £multi-millions, money which if better spent could save the NHS, and has trebled the expenditure by the DWP in the last ten years.

The reality is that the assessment for both ESA and PIP uses the fatally flawed Waddell and Aylward biopsychosocial (BPS) model of assessment, with this 2005 DWP commissioned research funded by UnumProvident Insurance, and designed to restrict access to benefit as the BPS model disregards diagnosis, prognosis, past medical history and prescribed drugs.

In other words, the totally bogus Waddell and Aylward BPS model of assessment, as used to assess claimants for the ESA and PIP benefits, and for the new Universal Credit too, is designed for sick and disabled people to fail the assessment, and is a replica of the assessment model used by Unum (Provident) Insurance to resist funding income protection insurance policies.

Rather than government ‘cost-saving measures’, these assessments were designed to reduce public confidence in the welfare state, which would lead to the removal of the welfare state to eventually replace it with private healthcare insurance, as a replica of the American system.

That is why the second worst insurance company in America, who were identified as an ‘outlaw company’, have been official government advisers for ‘welfare claims management’ since 1994, and distinguished academics were warning about the American influence with the UK’s welfare policies as long ago as 2004."

READ MORE…

https://welfareweekly.com/charities-are-missing-the-point-benefit-assessments-were-designed-to-fail/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316545213_WELCOME_TO_LITTLE_AMERICA

https://welfareweekly.com/tories-creating-hostile-environment-for-disability-benefit-claimants/

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oh man!

just when i thought it couldn’t get any worse.

yet still i know people who aren’t wealthy but vote tory!

what we need is to get a labour government in.

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Unfortunately the MS Society UK has been funding research by academics connected to this biopsychosocial project.

eg this paper for research funded by the MS society includes Trudie Chalder, who was a primary investigator in the PACE trial, the only clinical trial that got funding from the DWP:

https://www.ejpn-journal.com/article/S1090-3798(18)30016-3/pdf

Rona Moss-Morris has also been involved, and got money from people at the MS society who don’t seem to understand the implications of what is being done to people. It’s pretty ridiculous that money being donated to help people is being used for stuff like this.

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Actually as much as I would like to see a labour goverment it was them that kicked this off and nicked our pensions care off garden brown him and blair turned labour into red torres Corbyn with some off his ideals might Have us disabled locked up again into institutions like the old days.

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These problems are a result of a foundation put in place by Labour when they were in power. It looks like Aylward moved on to work with Welsh Labour. To me, it looks like there is some hope for progress with Labour now they’ve moved away from trying to just appeal to the tabloids, but they’ve been pretty quiet on disability issues.

The UN has condemned how disabled people are treated in the UK, but it seems like most Brits (and many charities) have bought into the notion that we just need to give more money to those claiming to be able to rehabilitate disabled people so that they can be less of a burden to others. Never mind that loads of the rehab is just rubbish.

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Here is the Labour manifesto for disabled people.

I particularly like this bit on page 8.

PLEDGES

• Labour will transform our social security system. Like the NHS, our social security system should be there for all of us in our time of need, providing security and dignity in retirement and the basics in life should we become sick or disabled, or fall on hard times. We will repeal cuts in social security support to disabled people through a new Social Security Bill published in our first year of office.

• Labour will reverse the cruel cuts to Personal Independence Payments, Employment Support Allowance Work-Related Activity Group and Universal Credit Limited Capability to Work and we will repeal the hideous Bedroom Tax which has punished so many disabled and non-disabled people. The Conservatives’ punitive sanctions will go too.

• Labour will scrap the discredited Work Capability and Personal Independence Payment assessments and replace them with a personalised, holistic assessment process which provides each individual with a tailored plan, building on their strengths and addressing barriers, whether financial, skills, health, care, transport, or housing related.

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Ok I am not going to get all political etc but I would love to understand the thought process and plan for the last one Labour will scrap the discredited Work Capability and Personal Independence Payment assessments and replace them with a personalised, holistic assessment process which provides each individual with a tailored plan, building on their strengths and addressing barriers, whether financial, skills, health, care, transport, or housing related. Great on paper, but who do Labour think are going to actually have the money and resources to supply these personalise and holistic assessments? How is that different to what we have at the moment? Same thing, just different words.

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Well if the cruelty of this current Tory Government has not convinced you that there must be a better alternative, I doubt anything I say will help.

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You can see where the ‘conditionality’ vs ‘functionality’ issue comes from and ignoring GPs:

“Problems in the assessment of psychosomatic conditions in social security and

commercial schemes” argued that General Practitioners (GP) should not be expected to

determine a patient’s incapacity, and the authority and clinical opinion of GPs would eventually

be curtailed. The 1995 paper expressed concern as to the increases in “subjective impairments”,

with conditions such as chronic pain and fatigue syndrome listed as the significance of

diagnosis was rejected as having “a high degree of subjectivity”. This one academic paper

rejected the clinical opinion of GPs and disregarded diagnosis, prognosis and the claimant’s

past medical history, which opened the door to the planned introduction of the fatally flawed

biopsychosocial (BPS) model of disability assessment for State funded long-term sickness and

disability claims."

More here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316545213_WELCOME_TO_LITTLE_AMERICA

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Has anyone read: “The Scientific and Conceptual Basis of Incapacity Benefits”? I can’t find the PDF. If you want to join the debate you need to know what is in it. “Gordon Waddell, DWP commissioned research led to the hastily produced publication in 2005 of “The Scientific and Conceptual Basis of Incapacity Benefits”, which would be used by the DWP from 2008 to justify the introduction of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) to limit access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), as used to replace Incapacity Benefit.”

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I can’t see that one on-line anywhere.

There is this shorter piece from the same authors that was used to justify cutting DLA back to PIP: http://www.webility.md/praxis/downloads/Models-of-Sickness-Disability-Waddell-and-Aylward-2010-2.pdf

I read these 2016 piece on the problems with the DWP’s use of the biopsychosocial model: http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/library/by-date/in-the-expectation-of-recovery.html

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261018316649120

Since then MPs have started speaking out about some of the problems with spun research in this area, and the biopsychosocial PACE trial for CFS that the DWP gave money to has become an international scandal while people in the UK try to pretend there’s no problem:

The whole thing seems really bad. People in authority looking out for their class and trying to ignore the harm they do to others.

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Gordon Waddell died in April 2017. So, with this “expert” finally pushing up daisies perhaps there is room for a new report, and a new expert to lead the way to better assessments or a totally different system based upon a medical model - which was working fine for those with MS. IB and DLA need to come back!

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So many people seem to have their careers and reputations tied to ignoring the harm caused that I doubt that the deaths of just a few of them will make much difference tbh.