HEALTH HARMER STARMER AND KENDALL TOO

Keir Starmer and his DWP Secretary Liz Kendall are continuing their harrying of the sick and vulnerable by announcing that they will impose interviews with ‘work coaches’ on patients in hospital for treatment for poor mental health. The government claims this will ‘help them get back to work’.

Since last year, DWP work coaches have been responsible for applying benefit sanctions – a massive cause of debt and poverty – on claimants they decide are not working hard enough to find a job, so a meeting with a job coach is inherently a source of stress and anxiety for claimants. Forcing mental health patients to meet them, especially while they are in poor enough health to need treatment, is cruel and astonishingly reckless – and entirely in line with the approach of Starmer’s ‘Labour’ government, which has announced a raft of policies and punitive measures on benefit claimants without conducting any kind of assessment of the impacts and dangers of them and which is taking legal action to hide how many people the preceding government’s DWP policies killed.

Making the announcement, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall said that trials had produced ‘dramatic results’. At the time of writing, we are still waiting for a reply from the DWP press office advising whether and if so where these ‘dramatic results’ and the trial methodology can be found.

Mikey Erhardt of Disability Rights UK condemned the plan:

It is ridiculous to try and turn a hospital, a place of care and support into a business setting… [and] hugely inappropriate to be considering subjecting people who experience mental ill-health and distress to a CV check-up,

Kendall has previously made clear that her plans on benefits will see some people lose them altogether, implying that unemployment benefits – the UK has one of the stingiest social security regimes of comparable countries – are too generous and disincentivise people from working, a parrot-like repetition of Tory propaganda.

Kendall claimed that the UK is ‘really struggling with health problems’. The solution for that is to improve the NHS and help people have better health, not to traumatise or persecute them into work they are unfit for, but this seems not to occur to the Starmer government. Labour yesterday announced it will make the unemployed take a slimming drug or lose benefits – and that eventually NHS treatment may be withheld from any ‘overweight’ people who refuse to do the same.

The United Nations repeatedly slammed the Tories for their abuse of poor, sick and disabled people and their human rights and last year the Equality and Human Rights Commission submitted a report to the UN condemning the government’s discrimination against the vulnerable. It seems Starmer, Kendall and co, who have long made clear their intention to force sick people into work, are not only determined to do nothing to reverse those evils, but to extend and intensify them.