As the 2012 Paralympics opens, disabled people are asking
questions that go beyond the athletes and the competition; and those questions
are directed at the International Paralympics Committee and its unholy
partnership with AtoS. AtoS is the French multinational whose AtoS Healthcare
subsidiary is charged by the UK government with carrying out the Work
Capability Assessment to decide if disabled people are eligible for Employment
Support Allowance, and which will soon also be carrying out the testing to
determine if disabled people are eligible for PIP, the replacement for Disability
Living Allowance, the benefit that recognises the extra costs imposed simply by
living as a disabled person, whether you are in work or not. The reputation of
AtoS on WCA testing is little short of appalling, around 40% of people refused
benefit appeal, around 40% win their appeal, far more with appropriate support;
so one in every six disabled people AtoS refuse benefit to successfully wins at
appeal. Yet that appeal process can take up to a year, putting AtoS’s victims
under near unbearable stress, and many disabilities are markedly worsened by
stress. It is estimated that 32 disabled people a week are dying after having
been declared fit for work by AtoS.
Nor it is solely disabled people who are paying the price
for a failure rate that would be considered catastrophic in any other industry,
fixing AtoS cock-ups costs the UK Taxpayer £50m/year over and above the more
than £100m/year AtoS are paid for their ‘performance’. Given the expansion of AtoS responsibility
to include PIP and as the DLA to PIP transition is defined by around one in
five current DLA recipients (i.e. c500,000 people out of 2.5m) losing their
eligibility for the benefit, the situation is likely only to worsen.
Unfortunately the failures of AtoS go far beyond the simple
execution of the WCA. Staff attitudes have repeatedly and all but systematically
proved wanting, with disabled people subjected to disablist slurs, homophobic
rants, attempts to browbeat them out of giving vital information and just about
every failure of a customer facing organisation you can imagine; completed
assessment reports have repeatedly been found to contain accounts of tests that
never took place and other outright falsehoods, to the point that the BMA found
it necessary to issue a reminder to their doctors that simple honesty is a
professional requirement. Even simply making eye contact with their victims is
beyond many AtoS medical professionals. Yet AtoS executives persist in denying
that there is any problem with their performance or that there are targets for denying claims implicit in their disciplinary practices.
On the physical level, AtoS have consistently refused to
meet even the most basic of disability accessibility requirements, with many
centres failing to feature disabled parking spaces or to be wheelchair
accessible. Nor is this simply a problem with older buildings, AtoS have
actually opened new centres which fail to meet the most basic accessibility
needs. When challenged on this, AtoS claim their buildings meet legal
accessibility standards, which more closely reflects the weakness of the
Equality Act, which leaves enforcement to disabled people finding the physical,
mental and financial resources to sue a multinational, rather than any willingness
on the part of AtoS to do any more than the bare minimum. Nor is accessibility
AtoS’s only resort to the legal defence, as disabled people started to organise
and document their failures via social media, AtoS lawyers forced the shutting
down of several disability forums, at least one of them solely because a user
had posted a link to an article on another site which AtoS claimed breached
their trademark.
So
that’s AtoS, and their attitudes to disability are clear enough, but what does that
have to do with the Paralympics? It started with computers, AtoS are primarily a
computer company (disabled people would say it shows) and have the Olympic and
Paralympic IT contracts. And, having considerable negative publicity to
overcome, they decided to build on that linkage to become an official sponsor
of both Olympics and Paralympics. And then something strange happened, the
International Paralympic Committee and its Chairman, Sir Phillip Craven,
decided that this disability hating company was not the worst possible partner
for them, but instead the ideal partner for the IPC. The IPC’s Strategic Plan
dedicates the IPC to “Change perceptions about people with a disability and
existing stereotypes,” the opposite attitude to disability to that perpetuated
by AtoS, yet it seems that when money talks, morality walks.
Nor
did it stop there, the IPC’s reputation descending into French farce as it sank
ever deeper into bed with AtoS. Not content with making them a ‘Worldwide
Partner’, in August 2011 it took the unprecedented step of co-opting the former
AtoS CEO, Bernard Bourigeaud, onto its governing board, despite the fact that Bourigeaud
has no links with disability sport other than AtoS’s sponsorship of the IPC.
Faced
with sustained criticism from disabled peoples’ organisations for its ever
deepening ménage a trois with AtoS
and Bourigeaud, the IPC reacted defensively, claiming AtoS shouldn’t suffer for
the actions of its subsidiary and suggesting that in abusing disabled people AtoS
were simply ‘doing their duty’. The ‘they were only following orders’ defence
did little to impress disabled people.
And
then it got stranger still, with Sir Phillip Craven, head of the IPC, going out
of his way to defend AtoS, stating : "I am very happy with our
relationship" and that AtoS were "very much a part of the
International Paralympic Committee" while the Communications Director of
the IPC, Craig Spence, dismissed the overwhelming opposition of British
disabled people as ‘a small minority’ and said that people should take up their
differences with the Department of Work And Pensions, apparently having
forgotten (or desperately trying to ignore) that people and organisations are
judged by the standards and behaviour of those they choose to associate themselves
with – ‘You can tell a gentleman by the quality of his friends’.
The
British Paralympic Association, effectively the local IPC subsidiary, tried to
run for cover, issuing a confused statement that simultaneously claimed that it
wished to “inspire a better world for disabled people” and that it did not want
to “comment on wider, non-sport related disability issues”.
To
compound everything else, a handful of days before the opening of the Games Sir
Phillip Craven astonishingly demanded that the term ‘disabled’ should not be
used in relationship to the Paralympics, claiming it was like saying disabled
people were ‘broken’, yet, as Craven should well know, the overwhelming view of
disability subscribed to by the British disability movement is the Social Model
of Disability, which specifically defines our disability as the discrimination
we face as the result of society’s refusal to adapt to our needs. Or to put it
more simply: deny my disability, deny me.
There’s
something very wrong when the International Paralympic Committee allows the
core values of the Paralympics to be prostituted out in the hope of allowing a
company with the literal blood of disabled people on its hands to wash the
evidence away behind the cover of the Paralympic flag. At every step the IPC
and its senior officials have revealed themselves to be out of step with
disabled people to a degree that beggars belief, yet simultaneously willing to
lie back and think of England
whenever a sponsor waves a large wadge of cash under their nose.
Perhaps
it is time for a change of regime, and for the IPC to return to its roots as an
organisation that actually cared about the rights of disabled people.
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