BBC - Disabled or Faking It (Panorama) [MP4-AAC](oan)

BBC - Disabled or Faking It (Panorama) (2012) [MP4-AAC](oan)





Panorama investigates the government's plans to end the so-called 'sick note culture' and
their attempts to get millions of people off disability benefits and into work. In Britain's
modern welfare state, millions are being paid to private companies to assess sick and disabled
claimants but is the system working? Or are new tests wrongly victimising those who deserve
support the most?



Lucy Mangan
guardian.co.uk

'Why don't you just stop it," you wanted to say. "Just stop doing this cruel, pointless, terrible
thing to people. Stop adding to the sum of human misery in the world and start working for our
betterment instead."

It wasn't too many minutes in to Panorama: Disabled or Faking It? (BBC2) that this thought began
beating steadily inside your head, and it didn't let up until long after the credits had rolled
on this examination of the new assessment tests being administered by the French company Atos
Healthcare. Their purpose is to determine which of the claimants of disability benefits should
be allowed to remain so when the government wants to cut £10bn from the welfare budget.

The Department of Work and Pensions' own estimate is that fewer than 0.5% of incapacity claims are
fraudulent. Via the new, computer-led tests – no further questions or external evidence required!
Oh, brave new world! – Atos is currently deeming about a third of the people it assesses "fit to work".
Panorama showed us a handful of them. They included Christopher Davies, who has emphysema, cannot climb
stairs or walk 50 yards without needing to stop and recover his increasingly elusive breath. Maybe the
government's austerity measures are to include the use of human draught excluders in public buildings
to cut heating bills. I do see that Mr Davies could do that. As long as there was someone to help him
up and take him home afterwards, of course. But they'll have to find something else for Shannon Thompson
because she uses a wheelchair and is permanently on morphine to help with the pain caused by three
types of bone disease and although – like 60% of the assessors – I'm not a doctor, I imagine cold air
might aggravate her condition. And Panorama showed us Steven Hills, though only in family pictures
because he died of a heart attack 39 days after being pronounced fit to work for the second time.
He had successfully appealed against the verdict of the first assessment. That was the one at which his
heart problem had first been noticed. The assessor advised him to see a doctor as soon as possible.
It was while he was waiting for the operation that resulted that he received the news that he should,
apparently, be at work.

It is hard not simply to regurgitate the vast numbers of astonishing, appalling figures, facts, attitudes
(Chris Grayling's, I trust not to your surprise, foremost among them – he's still wishing "the [appeal]
judges would sometimes look beyond the first impression and think 'Is it really the case that these people
could not return to any form of work?'") that scrolled across the screen in the course of a programme that
was basically one 30-minute-long howl of despair. Clear, educational, informed and informative, but
despairing nevertheless. We are at the point now where even our documentaries can't believe what they have
to show us.


I just spoke to Iain Duncan Smith about the disabled




=== File Information ===

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Duration: 00:29:00 (43,511 fr)
File Size: 215 MB (or 221,050 KB or 226,355,424 bytes) bytes

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Thanks to the original Riper / Poster