This actually demonstrates how wrong the Tory dogma of privatising state functions and leasing them to private companies actually is. This was begun under Thatcher and Major under the assumption that private industry would always work better than the state. Clearly, as this case shows, they don’t. And unfortunately the people, who pay dearest for their failure are the poor, the sick and the disabled.
As for Capita, they are so regularly in the pages of Private Eye for their repeated failures and abysmally poor performance that the magazine calls them Crapita. This is just another in a long line of examples of the company’s utter inability to provide services efficiently and on-time, without additional state aid. It’s appalling that this company keeps on having its incompetence rewarded by even more government contracts. It’s about time they went they way of Atos too.
Ministers have been forced to intervene and deploy civil servants to shore up a private company struggling to clear a backlog of medical assessments for payments to tens of thousands of terminally ill, sick and disabled people.
In a letter leaked to the Guardian, a senior civil servant says the “one-off” step will be taken because Capita is failing to process the recently introduced personal independence payment (PIP) claims in time.
The benefit, worth between £21 and £134 a week, is meant to cover transport, care and other costs associated with being seriously sick or disabled. Waiting times for assessment have been so long that in some cases people with terminal conditions have died before receiving a penny.
Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, said his new PIP system would be fairer than the old disability living allowance (DLA)…
View original post 654 more words
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
April 7, 2014 at 8:23 am |
I thought Atos just changed their brand name? If so going the same way as Atos, is just staying put isn’t it?