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More than nine in 10 disability benefit claims are being assessed remotely as civil servants work from home, raising fears of widespread fraud.

If you put that into a comedy script they’d insist on taking it out again, so unbelievable is that….

12 thoughts on “Snigger”

  1. Since mental disability is a) a big fashion thing to worry about in the circles of the great and good and b) probably a big thing in terms of numbers of Lord Alli’s co-religionists as a consequence of the tendency to marry your sister or aunt, they’ll be safe. It’s only the old white cripples who, no matter how far right they are, won’t be rioting on the streets or even calling police dogs gay, who’ll have their bennies eliminated

  2. Oh, and Labour will be crying their eyes out about it and they really, really don’t want to do it, but it’s all Liz’s fault leaving a trillion pound black hole…

  3. More than nine in ten?

    How is that possible? Is it Holy Hand grenade of Antioch territory for disability claims?

    Ten shalt be number thou shalt count. No more nor less. Thou shalt not count to 11 etc.

  4. Why can’t they assess them remotely? They simply look at paperwork generated by the medical profession and make a call on if that person can work or not. Occasionally they will visit someone or invite them to attend an assessment to assess them but most of the time it is the paperwork they use.

    They have a procedural bias towards Yes, they can work to keep the costs down and there are some decision they make that make no sense.

    The assessors don’t like it much as for some reason someone who is assessed able to work seem to get upset and so assessors don’t really want to be near them. I believe the sickness levels for these assessors is through the roof as they are contractually required to be medical professionals like nurses and yet they have to tell people they are able to work. For the first time facing the consequences of their decisions.

    The government thought that getting third parties to do the assessments would take the heat from them.

  5. I’ve always thought the highest disability rates in Northern Ireland was due to the risk of the medical professionals getting a shake down visit from one of the informal enforcement organisations.

  6. Dunno. Got my disability by handing in some medical records. If you just need to confirm that a leg is missing, or lab numbers that can, absent divine intervention, never go back down, that kind of thing, then no need for an appointment. Doctor found falsifying records gets the Mr Ecks treatment. Fraud cut to “as low as reasonably achievable” with a couple of swift and painless changes to legislation.

    I’d argue there’s also no need for an appointment for “I az stress an’ long Coldvid an’ ME syndrome an’ ADHD an’…” because there is no objective assessment possible for those things, to the extent you can assess mental disorders by questionnaire it’s easy to game, etc.

    The only solution I see is to stop providing benefits for people claiming solely on the basis of self-reported symptoms, and require of mental disorders that they be accompanied by some objective behavioural disturbance characteristic of a well described and known illness, like schizophrenia. Staying in bed until midday is a lifestyle choice, not a mental illness.

  7. …the Mr Ecks treatment…

    Ecksy is probably dead – it would ironic if covid killed him – but he may ressurect himself, as SMFS used to do occasionally.

  8. Ecksy’s not dead, he’s merely been irrevocably fired and had his pension irrevocably cancelled.

    Almost no one died of covid, and almost all of those who did would have got their pensions irrevocably cancelled at about the same time by whatever other bug would have been going around in its place had covid not been around.

    The only one I know of for certain (because I reviewed their medical records at rellie’s request) did so within weeks after their third “95% effective” vaccination. That’s irony for you.

  9. “The only solution I see is to stop providing benefits for people claiming solely on the basis of self-reported symptoms, and require of mental disorders that they be accompanied by some objective behavioural disturbance characteristic of a well described and known illness, like schizophrenia. ”

    Which was my suggestion a few days ago on this very blog…..

    Maybe this is the solution to the disability problem – payments only available for conditions that are verifiable by actual tests/scans etc. Want to go on the sick with a bad back? Come back with an MRI showing a slipped disc, we’ll talk. Otherwise hard luck.

    Oh, and nothing for being obese.

  10. Someone made the comment many many years ago that instead of determining what ‘disabled people’ can’t do, tell us what they can do…..

  11. As pointed out, if this is the verification of medical documents then it really doesn’t matter where it is done, if someone has a chronic illness backed by legitimate medical evidence, that won’t change whether a relatively junior civil servant is in the room with them or not.

    As for people talking about self-reported symptoms, well most symptoms start as self-reported, I presume there has to be some level of verification by qualified medical professionals before money changes hands? In which case it comes down to the evidence.

  12. Meant to add a lot of these half-baked anti-WFH media pieces seem to stem from interests whose have no real concern for the actual pros and cons of WFH or hybrid working, usually it’s because they represent landlords or archaic/poor management practices. And ironically the people who write the pieces, and the rent a quotes they cite, usually engage in WFH/hybrid working themselves, they just don’t like others doing it.

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