I’ve heard quite a few people say that MPs should concentrate on making laws and not act as “glorified social workers.” I totally disagree with that approach.
I’ve also heard politicians, ministers, even Liberal Democrat ones, confidently tell meetings that it’s fine, such and such a problem is fixed and the service in question is now working well when any service user will tell you that this is far from the truth.
This is why it’s so important for MPs to understand what problems people are facing and to take action to fix them.
One example of this comes from Orkney and Shetland. We all know that claiming benefits is s bit of a nightmare, particularly if you are required to have a Work Capability Assessment. If you live in a remote area, and they don’t come much more remote than those two islands, you could find yourself waiting for a very long time for that assessment, leaving you temporarily out of pocket.
Island residents took their concerns to local Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael who flew to Aberdeen last week to meet contractors Maximus (who replaced ATOS). The Shetland News reports:
Earlier this week Carmichael met with Maximus management in Aberdeen to discus the slow progress of assessments in Shetland and Orkney. He urged them to “act swiftly” to clear the backlog.
He said the historic problems dated back to when ATOS was the contractor, but since Maximus took over “we have not seen the hoped for improvements”.
“One area where there has been an improvement, however, has been their willingness to engage with people like myself,” Carmichael said.
“I was pleased, therefore, to meet with managers in Aberdeen this week to get to the root of the problems that are causing the delays.”
Carmichael said he felt few of those problems seemed “particularly difficult to solve” and “ought to be capable of restoration”.
“I have agreed to work with them to identify local solutions to the problems they have found and it is possible that we could see dramatic improvements in a short timescale and a clearing of the backlog by the end of the year.”
He added: “Obviously it remains to be seen what progress can be made but I was impressed by the willingness to listen and to act.”
I saw Alistair in London last week when I was down for the Federal Executive and, as he says in the article, the problems are relatively simple to sort and with his help should be sorted very quickly. The way in which bureaucracy creates massive problems out of simple circumstances is extremely frustrating and has a massive impact on people’s lives. This is why you need practically minded MPs to help resolve these difficulties. It’s what people go into politics for – to make lives better.
The other reason casework is so important is that the institutions which govern us are often not very good at admitting when they’ve got stuff wrong and people need someone to cut through that nonsense for them and sort out wrong decisions and injustices. Sometimes it takes some effort to do it but it’s always worth it to see an injustice rectified.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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Good to hear Alistair is making the effort – BUT – it misses the point. The WCA system was set up by the Brown Government in 2008 as a response to the ‘benefit scrounger’ campaign by papers such as the Daily Mail . It was flawed system and was then implemented by the Coalition in 2010 (in which our own party was just as responsible as the Tories).
WCA was initially run for £ 400 million by the French company ATOS (who walked out on the contract) andit was ‘rescued’ for £ 600 million by the American Maximus in March this year. If colleagues click on the following link they will get the whole sorry story. ‘ After hated Atos quits, will Maximus make work assessments’ … http://www.theguardian.com › Lifestyle › Benefits.
We should never have been associated with such an horrendous out sourced to a foreign company disaster which caused so much misery. I hope the Party now, under its new Leader, will get its head round the whole issue and take a radical look at the issue.
Yes, well done – to a point -, Alistair. But applying a case work sticking plaster to a broken leg – never mind to someone who is terminally ill but told they are fit for work – is not a truly radical response.
I’ve just noticed the link doesn’t connect. Look up the article in the Guardian by Amelia Gentleman (as below) on 15th January this year. Search under ‘ After hated Atos quits, will Maximus make work assessments work ?’
Heading as below.
Bad for brand … a campaigner at a protest against Atos’s sponsorship of the Paralympics in London in August 2012. Photograph: HM x/Demotix/Corbis
Amelia Gentleman
Amelia Gentleman
@ameliagentleman
Sunday 18 January 2015 18.30 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 20 January 2015 11.05 GMT
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Shortly before Atos bought its way out of the contract to conduct the government’s controversial fitness-for-work testing scheme, the company briefed journalists about the scale of abuse its employees were facing. As well as periodic bomb threats to its testing centres, the company said managers had recorded about 163 incidents of assault or abuse against staff every month in 2013.
David Cameron used to draft questions for his leader to use at PMQ and tried to make them unanswerable.
As PM he received an oral question (from a Labour MP and therefore probably without prior notice) .
“Is the Prime Minister aware that ATOS have passed Richard the Third as fit for work?”
Among the ensuing laughter the PM was not heard to reply.
The Speaker did not insist on a reply.
I do not know whether the PM put anything in Hansard.
Publicity of that kind could adversely affect the reputation a busines might believe it had for fairness.
Good one, Richard – yes, I remember that. What the Labour member didn’t say that it was the Labour Government that set the system up.
What we need now is to look at the impact of all the PFI contracts and outsourcing created byboth the Labour and Coalition Governments and the interconnection between Party donors and those contracts. It is no surprise that the Government took so long to (timidly) tackle Wonga when one of the biggest party donors was a director of Wonga.
There is a vacuum waiting to be filled by the Lib Dems. If they miss it you can be sure Caroline Lucas and Jeremy Corbyn will step in there. Try reading Owen Jones’ latest book to get some well researched low down on all this – and why – for example – we have a privatised railway system largely run by French, Dutch and German nationalised operators.
I don’t think anyone is trying to suggest that this system is particularly fair and it doesn’t tackle the quality of decisions, many of which are questionable, at all. I’m sure Alistair will be trying to help individual constituents with appeals. However, this is a systemic issue which severely disadvantaged people on the islands that he has been able to intervene with and, we hope, resolve.
The issue of time wasting, inefficiency and sheer inabiiity to sort our simple or difficult problems, which the Gov. and its contractors seem to find impossible to deal with, hurts the most vulnerable and I would include asylum seekers and other migrants in this issue. When inefficiency hurts it is up to all of us to call the Government’s attention to it. . In the meantime(until we change inefficient systems) many thanks to those MPs who get things sorted.
I am one of those people who think that MPs have gone too far towards being glorified councillors.
While an MP obviously needs to know these things, and clearly has competence to help with some of these issues (and the work assessments may be one of those since they are Westminster driven), I am still not sure why it should be Alistair Carmichael’s job to come up with local solutions and not the council’s?
Wouldn’t they be better placed to make sure that this works, and shouldn’t we insist in those companies working together with local government rather than merely the MP?
“This part of the form asks about ‘Eating and drinking’. You need to fill in this section if, because of your illness, you would not eat or drink and need someone to prompt and encourage you.”
If someone has to be told to eat and drink then they would hardly be able to fill out a form.
I wrote to a government department over a month ago and I am still wating for a reply. What a system!
David Raw
Abuse- people got angry.Hardly suprising when it becomes a silly game with the object of wearing down the claimant so they no longer persist in making a claim. What about identifying real need?
Casework and MP’s regular surgeries are a vital part of an MP’s job. Case work provides direct contact with constituents. Face time and personal contact establishes a local MP as a go to person for help and advice. The MP gets lots of data on social problems right at source and gets an intimate knowledge of the demographic of the area.
The public can see that MPS are not remote characters roaming round Westminster being pedantic.
Without direct contact with the public MPs loose track of real life.
That is why people have such a low opinion of politicians. They have probably never met their local MP and have no idea what they do
Maybe we need a reality TV programme, where members of the ‘they’re all the same/in it for themselves/don’t deserve their salaries’ brigade have to shadow an MP for a period of time.
In a village outside Tunbridge Wells there is a modern hospital of which the Tory MP is proud because he pressed for it.
The Labour government refused to fund it, except through the Public Finance Initiative, which is a huge post-dated cheque sucking money out of the NHS.
@Maria Pretzler why is it the council’s job to sort? They don’t have responsibility for DWP services.
Maria Pretzler:
“I am one of those people who think that MPs have gone too far towards being glorified councillors.”
I am concerned that any Lib Dem can say this without any obvious knowledge of what Members of Parliament do for constituents in terms of casework and why they do it. Of course much of what is done should potentially not have to be done. It is stuff caused by injustice. There should not have been this injustice, but there is. Arguably, there should be other agencies capable of helping the constituents concerned within the necessary timescale. Usually, there are not. Sometimes the errors, acts or omissions complained of are purely as a result of unconstrained acts of people who should not behave the way they do. More usually, thy are more systemic in nature: something very useful to an MP in determining how to hold the Executive to account.
In about 18 years as an MPs caseworker I have personally achieved results on about one million pounds for individual constituents including two cases of over £140,000 and one of £60,000. I have also helped people to achieve things which are considerably more valuable than that. The bottom line, unfortunately, is that much of these results are achieved because the recipient of our approaches is scared of the potential adverse consequences of ignoring the MPs representations in a manner where no other form of treatment would achieve the desired results.