Anger over ‘incompetence’ and delays within DWP’s Access to Work scheme

An autistic woman has been left without the workplace support she needs for more than 15 months because of repeated delays and incompetence by the government’s Access to Work scheme.

Laura’s* employer, the autism support charity Autistic Nottingham, says it is “genuinely flabbergasted” at the “incompetence” displayed by Access to Work (AtW).

Her ordeal has emerged as a “devastating” dossier of evidence from DWP union members this week reveals that DWP is a failing organisation in a “state of crisis” (see separate story).

Laura started her new job with Autistic Nottingham in September 2022, and her application for support from AtW was submitted the following month, but she had to work from home while she waited for an assessment.

When she was finally given an appointment for an assessment at the charity’s offices, on 27 March 2023 – five months after she had submitted her application – the assessor failed to turn up, with no explanation provided.

It was only when Laura’s manager called AtW for an explanation that they were told the assessor had been off sick.

A follow-up assessment took place online two days later, and Laura received a letter in April which described the services and equipment AtW would fund.

Autistic Nottingham, which is a disabled people’s organisation, put all of this in place within a month, apart from a specialist chair the assessor had recommended.

This was because the AtW assessor had put the wrong cost on the award, and there was a substantial difference between that figure and the actual cost of buying the chair from the supplier.

For the last six months, Autistic Nottingham’s chief executive, Claire Whyte, has been asking AtW to update this quote so she can go ahead and order the chair.

Every time she contacted AtW to check on progress, she was told the “task” had been “assigned to someone”.

But when she followed up later, she was told: “It was assigned, and they didn’t action it; I will reassign it.”

After two months of repeatedly being told the task had been assigned – and then not actioned – Whyte lodged a formal complaint.

But AtW was not even able to deal with its own complaints process correctly, with Whyte being told again, when she asked why there had been no response: “It was assigned but never actioned.”

She complained a second time, and had the same response, so she has now been forced to lodge a third complaint.

Eventually, AtW decided to carry out a new assessment, which took place last week.

Meanwhile, Laura has still not had all the support she was assessed as needing, and is still working from home, nearly 15 months after starting her new post with Autistic Nottingham.

Whyte told Disability News Service: “I am genuinely flabbergasted at this level of incompetence from a government organisation whose sole purpose is to support disabled people to stay in work.

“It is December now. This has been half a year of a disabled person not being able to engage in their employment fully when all that was required was one updated quote.”

DWP claims it has made several attempts to establish the details of the additional cost of the chair.

It did not address the concerns about the complaints process.

A DWP spokesperson said: “Our priority is to ensure everyone who applies for support through Access to Work has their claim progressed as quickly as possible.

“We have recruited additional staff to meet customer demand, which has already improved processing times, and a new digital claims process is being tested to help customers better track progress of their claims going forward.”

*Not her real name

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