On paper, Linda Smith‘s job with an Aberdeen company was straight-forward – she was meant to be helping the long-term unemployed – many of them disabled – to find jobs and move off benefits.
The reality, she said, was a corporate culture that saw staff in training sessions referring to those same people as LTBs – code for “lying, thieving bastards”.
“That is how they are referred to,” she said of the clients of Triage, which is a key player in the government’s ambitious plan to pay private companies to move people from benefit into work.
There are 2.5m long-term sick and disabled unemployed people in the UK. The cost to the taxpayer is £13bn a year.
The government’s £5bn Work Programme has identified 68,000 disabled people in receipt of incapacity benefit who it believes can work.
‘Bucks, ker-ching’
To achieve that, 18 main providers have been contracted to do the work and are paid in stages when the clients are referred and when they find jobs. A further payment is made if they stay in work for two years. It is called payment by results
Mrs Smith said her time working at Triage – a sub-contractor to two of those main providers – was an eye-opener. She said the nature of the scheme is that the firms earn more money from taking on the disabled as clients.
“These people were probably more difficult to place in employment for us as employment workers, but for them (the company) these people were bigger money…these people were the bucks, the ker-ching.”
But once those people were on the company’s books, and an initial fee paid, Mrs Smith said the company – which operates in Scotland and northern England – told its staff to spend as little time and effort as possible on helping them find jobs.
She said the practice is known as “parking”. Four other former Triage employees told the BBC similar stories of being told to “park” clients rather than actively help them find work. They also confirmed the use of the term “LTBs” to describe their clients.
“They would be put on telephone interviews…just to make sure that there was this contact made so they could tick a box to say ‘yeah, they’re still on the Work Programme’,” Mrs Smith said.
‘Parking’
Tony Wilson, 34, from Middlesbrough, had been unemployed and receiving incapacity benefit for almost nine years before being referred to the Work Programme through Triage in February 2012.
Mr Wilson said he suffers from depression, anxiety disorder and borderline personality disorder and he believes he has been “parked”.
He said he has only met his advisor three times, some of the courses he was told he would be sent on have not happened and he has not even been asked to produce a CV. He said his contact with Triage has been reduced to occasional phone calls.
“They haven’t done a single thing to help me in any way.”
In response to the allegations about parking, Triage said in a statement: “It is standard practice, particularly for those clients that are sick or who have otherwise been unable to attend, to telephone them to check on their progress and maintain contact. Triage’s delivery structure of the Work Programme does not allow for ‘parking’.
“The compliance requirements of the programme demand a frequency of contact and this together with our own commitment to excellence and meeting client needs means that ‘parking’ is not an option.”
Triage also said the term LTB was referring to an isolated incident, adding: “This is not a phraseology used or accepted by Triage.”
Left behind
Mrs Smith’s concerns about the attitude of some Triage staff comes as a survey of charities and other organisations recruited to back up the 18 main providers conducted by the BBC found that many do not feel the Work Programme is delivering.
In the survey of 348 organisations listed with the Department for Work and Pensions, so-called Third Party providers, 184 answered a series of questions about their involvement in helping the long term sick and disabled to find work.
The survey found:
- 77% of organisations with specialist expertise to support disabled people believe that expertise has not been correctly utilised by the main provider
- 80% of organisations which responded had fewer referrals than they expected
- 40% of respondents have had no referrals at all
And 40% of those which responded said they were not actually part of the Work Programme, therefore should not be on the DWP’s list.
The RNIB Group (Royal National Institute of Blind People) was one of the organisations that did sign on to help big companies to get the visually impaired into work.
Full Story BBC News
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The only LTBs are the PTB.. they are lying to the nation and getting away with it. Till more people are impoverished, stood upon and generally abused by them no one will bother to notice. The evil will grow, lying, cheating and stealing their way. I still think the unknown effects if Universal Credit, the fact that so many people do not actually understand what it is going to bring in, might be the turning point. But I won’t hold my breath. People won’t speak up when you point out their murderous ways as it is, they will just suck it up, sigh, and do with less.
no mention of the dozens of mps that have thieved all that they can of the tax payer,surely it is they who are the real lying,thieving bastards and not the sick and disabled.
you are so right bob ,we are all responsible for our own actions and its time those lying thieving b…… mps faced their own
This LTB is seeing his shrink tomorrow. This is the last insult I will let them accuse me of.
This about sums our position up.
LTB’S Lying thieving B******S
this is totally the pits of degradation ,lying thieving bastard is very hurtful remark to make to a disabled person…..they dont know how difficult life is being disabled,we have to develope strong characters to cope with our difficulties…my own integrity and self respect would have made me find a job if i could work,ive owned my own shops and a garden centre until i couldnt work anymore…ex PRISONERS recieve a better level of care when they are released from prison and they are not called LTB stuff the system it stinks,its time it was all stopped before it gets worse,please respect the disabled and sick we didnt ask to be like this
I’ve just this week had my medical, doctor arrived nice chap by the time he left I knew I had been done good and proper, what a real ATOS expert. I knew most of the ways they use to get people to make errors but boy was he an expert, he asked me about people who were cheating and I said I did not know any, he put down good intelligence with social knowledge. So it’s tribunal and appeals then.
My disability is pretty bad Paraplegia not good enough though, this doctor actually said people with no legs could do office work
I’ve spent ten years with the Job center being farmed out to Remploy inter works and the Shaw Trust.
All of my specialist so called disability advisers were about eighteen nineteen, have just left college and know nothing about disability, yet these are the people to find me work.
I returned to the job center but was told I could pick up at the door each week three jobs they saw as good choices for me, the first one was working on a building site as a Labourer, from a wheelchair mind you. then I was told I could do long distance lorry driving, it was obvious after a few weeks they just picked any jobs and gave them to me.
After ten years I had only seen my adviser three times because she went off with exhaustion.
I was then called in for an interview and told they had decided to offer me a very good course which would give me the first rung on the ladder to employment, a computer course for six months.
I signed up and they told me to go for an interview at the college, to get the information, I arrived to be asked how I was going to pay for this, it would be £1600.
I told them I was disabled unemployed, they said yes and we do not give courses for free £1600 when I said no I had a phone call from the the Job center saying your benefits are at risk.
after six months of argument and they demanding I take this course they dropped the price to £1000 and I said no if you want me to take a course you pay for it.
they came back saying they give me a loan, I said no, then they said ok it’s £90 and I still said no.
I have been arguing over this ever since because six weeks later I had to go before the job center who wanted to know why I refused this course, then they found out I was exempted from the work program because I had volunteered to do this work program.
Since then they have not asked me back if I go down to the job center I’m given a piece of paper to go to some other job provider like A4e.
The simple fact this is about reductions of benefits not a work related program. cuts are cuts.
It makes my blood boil reading about fellow people who are being denied the right to have an independent life, with disabilities and treated with respect.
I can say that DWP and ATOS are not interested in helping people,they are in fact on a savings charter,hence why so many disabled are being trampled by the their system of abuse.
In this situation whereby I attended ATOS Dundee,the uneducated quack of a Doctor had all the wrong information,as did the DWP Clydebank.
They have admitted the errors but will not relent on their decision to place me in ESA WRAG.
Even contacting a MSP has had little effect,on further investigations I found out the party whom I voted for has accepted sponsorship from ATOS,vile greed that Politician’s are.
So I did the necessary outcome informed the Scottish party involved and withdrew all support to them. In my opinion the Scottish government in sitting on the fence is as much to blame as the coalition for the gross inequality being meted out to disabled persons.
I am in the throes of an appeal to DWP and can say in fairness these pen pushing ignorant robots in their cozy office do no give a damn for anyone,or the havoc they create.Useless,worthless public servants who have never did a real days work,and the heaviest item they lift is their paycheque.