• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About DNS
  • Subscribe to DNS
  • Advertise with DNS
  • Support DNS
  • Contact DNS

Disability News Service

the country's only news agency specialising in disability issues

  • Home
  • Independent Living
    • Arts, Culture and Sport
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Employment
    • Housing
    • Transport
  • Activism & Campaigning
  • Benefits & Poverty
  • Politics
  • Human Rights
You are here: Home / Employment / Access to Work: Scheme accused of distressing, penny-pinching incompetence

Access to Work: Scheme accused of distressing, penny-pinching incompetence

By John Pring on 5th September 2014 Category: Employment, News Archive

Listen

newslatestThe government’s Access to Work (AtW) programme is plagued by “penny-pinching”, administrative incompetence, and “rude” and “intimidatory” communication that is causing disabled people “immense distress”, leading campaigners have told a committee of MPs.

The Commons work and pensions committee was hearing evidence for its AtW inquiry from three leading disabled figures who all receive support through the scheme.

Andy Rickell, chief executive of Action on Disability and Work UK, Fazilet Hadi, managing director of engagement for RNIB, and Marije Davidson, equality and diversity advisor for York St John University, all praised the scheme but were highly critical of how it was run.

Hadi said: “It is a fabulous scheme, it is fantastic for disabled people when it works well. It enabled me to achieve things I could never achieve [without it].”

But she said recent letters from the scheme had been “quite rude” and “intimidatory”, while she still received print letters even though she has been blind since the age of nine.

And about 90 per cent of the RNIB colleagues she approached who use or have direct knowledge of the scheme gave her a similarly negative report.

She said: “The whole culture of the scheme at the moment seems to be almost against supporting the disabled person, so something is going culturally wrong.

“You don’t know what the rules are, you don’t whether the person doing your assessment has any expertise at all. There are huge delays.”

Hadi said that “penny-pinching” by AtW was causing “immense distress”, while legal cases supported by RNIB that were previously about employment discrimination were now “often about people losing work in the early months [of a new job] because things like AtW aren’t working”.

Davidson, who is Deaf and was formerly policy and research manager for Disability Rights UK, said the scheme was a “really fantastic way of helping me work and do my job” and was “very powerful”.

She said: “Access to Work is the one thing that really empowers us as disabled individuals to go out to employers and reduce the concerns they may have about employing a disabled person.”

But she also told the committee that she had encountered a series of problems since 2013, with invoices from her support workers not being paid by AtW, and the scheme taking four months to arrange her new support package when she moved jobs.

At one point, she discovered that AtW had “terminated” all of her support without telling her, while she was forced to make repeated phone calls to arrange a fresh assessment.

Dame Anne Begg, the disabled Labour MP who chairs the committee, said: “So if you’re blind you get a paper copy, if you’re deaf you’re expected to make an application by phone. And this is an organisation that is meant to be disability-aware!”

A major reorganisation now means all AtW queries have to go through a call centre, replacing the old system where every claimant was allocated a local AtW centre.

Rickell told the MPs that AtW was “based on the right principles” because it was personalised to people’s individual circumstances, and “that makes it different to the rest of employment support”.

He said his organisation had heard from disabled people who had lost their jobs because their AtW support had not been put in place in time.

He added: “The first a person knows that their review is due is because their ongoing support has stopped, and they are not even told it has stopped.”

All three agreed with Dame Anne that AtW was a great tool but was “very, very poorly administered”.

4 September 2014

Share this post:

Share on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on WhatsAppShare on Reddit

Related

Labour government will push for jobs for ‘not fit for work’ group, says Ashworth
12th January 2023
Minister for disabled people fails to sign up to his own disability employment scheme
12th January 2023
Disabled gig economy workers ‘must do hours of unpaid work to cope with oppression’
12th January 2023

Primary Sidebar

Access

Latest Stories

Claimant deaths still linked to systemic flaws in benefits system, DWP document shows

Coffey scrapped plan for independent review of sanctions, DWP admits

Second Labour-led inquiry in two months fails to demand end to care charges

Silent vigil will mark latest stage in fight for second Jodey Whiting inquest

Disability poverty campaign calls on PM to act urgently on prepayment meters

‘Halt new mental health bill until there is a public inquiry into deaths and abuse’

Investigation reveals ‘discrimination and hostility’ faced by disabled parents

Warning of ‘humanitarian crisis’ if governments fail to act on disability poverty

Fresh plans to shut down protests ‘show government is running scared’

Universal credit judgment ‘shows legal system has failed us again’

Advice and Information

Readspeaker

Footer

The International Standard Serial Number for Disability News Service is: ISSN 2398-8924

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site map
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2023 Disability News Service

Site development by A Bright Clear Web