This is the first time since the inception of this site (by the way ALL materials and comment on this site are written, edited and researched by me, no interns!) that I’ve never been able to meet my own self-imposed deadline such has been the state of my health the last few weeks. But as there’s an important by-election tomorrow in Glasgow for Britain’s New Labour, I break my cardinal rule on this site and publish the chunk I’ve managed to write ‘out of context’. Hopefully, I can finish the rest by the weekend and the next instalment will return to its weird self.
Glasgow East by election explained
By-election: A Glasgow kiss for missing Brown?
For many in Glasgow East, Labour picked up where Thatcher left off
This week the government announced its “revolution” in welfare reform. The DWP's technology strategy is one of the government's largest and most complex. The Employment Support Allowance, which is to replace the Incapacity Benefit, will go live at the end of October - and with it the £295m technology programme to run it.
James Purnell MP, and Work and Pensions Secretary outlined his ‘vision’ on BBC TV’s The Andrew Marr Show: transcript, (there’s also video of Conservative opposition leader David Cameron on Tory tax plans).
James Purnell's reforms of incapacity benefit are inspired by a US company with vested interests and a murky record. Now, that's really sick." (The Guardian, March 2008). "In the US, Unum claims management had been coming under increasing scrutiny. In 2003, the Insurance Commissioner of the State of California announced that as a matter of ordinary practice and custom, it had compelled claimants to either accept less than the amount due under the terms of the policies or resort to litigation. The following year, a multistate review forced Unum to reopen hundreds of thousands of rejected insurance claims. Commissioner John Garamendi described Unum as, "an outlaw company. It is a company that for years has operated in an illegal fashion".
Purnell, Blair's true heir? (The Guardian,17/3/08)
What angers me about Labour’s reforms is that if they were really serious about them (i.e. serious about helping people not just catching votes or outsourced contracts) they wouldn’t have allowed the often ridiculous medical assessments to continue. A couple of close friends who initially failed their assessments showed me the questions and ‘Yes/No’ boxes on their forms that bore little relationship to their problems. Here’s what just an hour on the internet dug up, so I guess my ‘Chomsky moment is in’:) Much of this information comes from the website Benefits and Work the encourages people to subscribe for a fee though a lot of their info is freely available. There are some sites that are there for the sole purpose of ‘scrounging’ but these guys seem very genuine about informing people, even going to the trouble of demanding government documents under the Freedom of Information Act. And for the government to say its hands were tied in contractual terms just doesn't wash. Their hands shouldn't have been tied in the first place.
Paris based French IT services company Atos Origin has been one of the fastest-growing IT operations in Europe, having been created by a series of mergers stretching back a decade. Formed from the combination of Axime and Sligos in France, it came together with Origin in 1997. At the time, Origin was owned by Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. They bought KPMG's consulting business in the UK and the Netherlands, and Sema, the Anglo-French telecoms and IT services group, which was previously owned by Schlumberger. That purchase left the group employing more than 46,000 staff worldwide, with almost 5,000 in the UK alone.
In 2005 The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) awarded Atos Origin a £500m seven-year contract(originally signed by Sema in 1988, the company Atos bought for $1.5bn in 2003 from SchlumbergerSema) for the delivery of medical advice and assessment services (also to the Ministry of Defence Veterans Agency). The company had just signed a $400m application management outsourcing deal with car manufacturer Renault. Atos’s longer-term aim was to eliminate paper from the DWP system. The contract was extendedable by a maximum of five years under two separate extension clauses: the first for three years, and the second for two years. These took the potential total contract value to in excess of £850m over 12 years. The original deal SchlumbergerSema signed in 1998 was a five-year contract worth GBP305m ($588m) which was extended by two years in 2003.
“Atos Origin will also focus on the recruitment, training, and career development of the DWP’s medical staff to ensure that it retains and attracts medical professionals with the qualifications, experience, and skills needed to carry out such assessments.” The DWP refers over two million cases to Atos each year, and these result in over 600,000 face-to-face examinations.
Atos’s Sema acquisition
and the company’s annual report for that.
Atos has another lucrative contract:
Personal carbon trading goes real time (The Guardian,9 June,08) "Drivers filling up with fuel will, from today, be able to participate in a trial for the world's first real-time personal carbon trading scheme. Up to 1,000 volunteers will be able to use their Nectar shopping loyalty cards at any BP garage to record how much fuel they have purchased - and, as a result, create an electronic record of how much carbon dioxide they will consequently be emitting into the atmosphere." The software and computing infrastructure is being supplied by Atos Origin.
British IT jobs at risk as Euro merger draws closer (2005)
Atos Origin is the major IT supplier for London's 2012 Olympic Games. More deals include a five-year $99m contract to manage desktops for BNP Paribas and a $40m infrastructure hosting deal with Capita.
The minutes of an All Party Parliamentary Group meeting from 16th November 2006 discussing the illness M.E.
This was the last incarnation of welfare reform (the Welfare Reform Bill)headed by John Hutton MP (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions).
Outrageous secrecy as DWP protects multinational
details the government’s total confusion as to whether the intellectual rights to Atos’s software belonged to them or the DWP. ”The DWP has made the astonishing claim that it doesn’t have a copy of the software, used to assess people’s capacity for work, and doesn’t even know, except in the most general sense, how it works.” LiMA (Logic integrated Medical Assessment) is the computer programme introduced by SchlumbergerSema (now Atos Origin).” If most of the cost of developing the software had been borne by the private sector company, why would they give away the ownership?” asks the site.” SchlumbergerSema do not own the copyright of the software,” was Maria Eagle’s reply on behalf of the Secretary of State in Feb 2004.“Sema Group UK...has always held the Lima computer system copyright,” replied the DWP in another letter.
Furthermore on the Work and Benefits website, “DWP doctors are hired on a self-employed basis by a company called Nestor, who provide private medical staff for a range of companies. Nestor are sub-contractors to Atos Origin... what about incapacity for work personal capability assessments? These are carried out at Medical Examination Centres. According to Nestor, doctors have the potential to earn more than £300 a day carrying out examination centre work. They also explain that on average doctors examine 4 to 5 clients within a 3.5 hour period of work in the centres. So a reasonable estimate is that a doctor doing two sessions a day would see up to 10 clients in order to earn that £300. So that’s around £30 a time for incapacity medicals. But the faster the doctor can zip through them – the fewer questions they ask and the less typing they do – the more money they can earn.”
Claimants given mental health therapy by computers“A company called Ultrasis has won contracts to provide computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to claimants in Doncaster and Newham. Benefits and Work understands that claimants with mild to moderate depression, anxiety and schizophrenia will be offered the opportunity to get help from a computer terminal. The software programme, 'Beating the Blues', provides 8 sessions of CBT which uses animation and voice-overs to help 'motivate and engage the user'. According to Ultrasis the treatment results in an 30 additional depression free days in the six months after treatment.”
Tribunal chief slams 'absurdity' of computerised incapacity medicals21 incapacity benefit medical centres axed
“One of the issues that disability benefits campaigners are now particularly keen to explore is whether amongst the assets transferred to Atos Origin were any of the 21 medical centres that Atos is now seeking to close down. Unless the terms of the original contract are made public, the fear that the DWP may now be being asset stripped by the private sector will be difficult to dispel.”
Benefit discs missing for year
Government must learn to curb its enthusiasm
The real cost of contracting out: "Most large government departments have, in one way or another, outsourced large parts of their IT. That is not something you could say of anywhere else in Europe," said David Tait, an executive vice-president of IT services firm Atos Origin, last year. By comparison, Atos Origin was contracted to revamp, not run, France's VAT computer system.” "Whitehall spends just under £5bn on corporate and support services contracts. By 2009 this will have risen to £7.4bn. Some 42% of support services are outsourced, with central government spending £2bn on estate management contracts alone. Most security, portering, mail and catering are provided by private firms."
DWP reviews £4.5bn IT deals (The Independent, 2/7/08) “The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is looking for suppliers for up to £4.5bn-worth of technology deals to run from 2010 to 2015...The replacement of desktop and datacentre management contracts, which are currently held by EDS and BT and will expire in 2010, will be worth about £3bn. But the design and deployment of future applications may be worth up to £1.5bn, and the DWP is following the trend set by the Home Office's identity card programme with plans to sign up a small number of companies to a framework contract of standard terms and conditions, so that new developments can be put together more quickly than the traditional European procurement regulations enable.”
Mental health in parliament
Stand to Reason
Lunatics take over Westminster asylum
Living in England now seems to resemble the artificial life in Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show. If the government told you the sun was shining you’d want to get a ladder and climb to the clouds to see if they were real!
The new Tony Towers: Blair buys £4million stately home after Cherie 'fell in love with it'
Brown ready to break his own rules to aid economy
Brown's prudence faces battering as Treasury reveals record deficit
For the first time, Britons' personal debt exceeds Britain's GDP(Aug 2007 article)
First the fiscal rules, next monetary policy?, Paul Mason’s BBC Newsnight report.
Cash-for-honours lenders bail out Labour as party plugs £16m deficit
And one of the hottest topics of the day:
Knifed on my street: The ugly divide that ravages our capital city
And ITV TV’s report on how safe is your Oyster
Little Platform, Big Stage (great Arena documentary about the history Routemaster bus conductors) with some interesting links on page.
The British dream: multiculturalism
BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves(15 July 2008) had Philip Dodd and guests exploring whether we have become an emotionally incontinent society and ask if it is time we resurrected the stiff upper lip.
BBC Radio 4’s The Male Stage as Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play Her Naked Skin opens at the Royal National Theatre about the story of female liberation.
And Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Female of the Species that’s angered Germaine Greer (Radio 4’s discussion Saturday Review)(19 July 2008)
Germaine Greer's fury
The Times article
And the contentious story of Lillian Ladele, the Christian registrar who refused to carry out gay 'weddings' and won a landmark legal battle:
Deborah Orr: If this registrar had 'Christian views', why did she ever take on the job?
And I was reminded of an incident many, many years ago now when the director and myself (his assistant) narrowly escaped being killed at the Royal Opera House when an enormous piece of scenery fell towards us. I kept my head down, carried on working hard and never complained. I didn’t even claim incapacity benefit (or indeed receive any compensation). Didn’t do me much good to ‘keep schtum’, though, as I’ve learnt to my cost. (And don't go back or come to England if you want your talent to be nurtured or encouraged. It's true..)
But my misfortune was under another management, and the current one under Tony Hall is trying to make opera less elitist. Yesterday they announced a collaboration with Arts Alliance Media (AAM) and City Screen to relay live ROH/ Opus Arte opera, ballet and concert productions to City Screen’s Picturehouse cinemas and other UK cinemas. The Francesca Zambello production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni will be first on Monday 8 September, the opening night of the 2008/09 season. They’ll also be pre-recorded (using digital hard drives) performances at cinemas this autumn and next summer.
Prices will be £20 and below for the live performances and £12.50 and below for pre-recorded opera and ballet with concessions available. Without shouting my talents too much, I must be one of the few mortals who’ve been an opera critic, opera singer, dancer, actor and opera producer and nothing compares to experience of live opera, believe me. But you avoid a lot of the evenings’ drawbacks and discomforts (I shan’t go into that...) by going to a cinema relay. The ROH are by no means the first to try this- Arts Alliance teamed up with Cineworld to relay Met Opera New York and La Scala Milan shows over the last year, though I missed them all so can’t comment. Oh, la forza del destino...or is that painagi, piangi..
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