- Target:
- David Cameron M.P. Nick Clegg M.P.
- Region:
- United Kingdom
Atos Healthcare has the £80million-per-year contract for 7 years to act for Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) to 'assess' sick people claiming Employment Support Allowance (ESA).
They have been working to the previous government's target of pushing 1 million claimants onto Jobseekers' Allowance, and there are some well-documented abuses of vulnerable individuals such as refusing to allow note-taking or tape-recording of the assessment, failing to report truthfully where the claimant has demonstrated incapacity, inadequate facilities for those who are ill during an assessment, a computer system which gives garbled versions of examinations to DWP and various other abuses.
Update, August 2011: Owing to lack of free time there is only so much the admin can do regarding this petition. Anyone wishing to do more than sign this petition can write at any time to David Cameron, 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA. You can also ask everyone you know to view the petition and, if they agree to sign it and ask everyone in turn they they know to do the same. Advertising it on Facebook and Twitter would also increase attention for the cause. Thanks for reading this.
Update, March 2011: Atos' contract is now worth £300 Million as the Government rolls out medical testing of I.B. patients with the eventual aim of testing disabled claimants too. To look at deaths reportedly caused by Atos, Google "Sack Atos" and "Atos deaths".
We, the undersigned, call upon Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg to terminate Atos Healthcare's contract with immediate effect, to pay the enhanced rate to all claimants whose claim is over 13 weeks old and to pay basic rate ESA to all other claimants.
We call for a return to family doctors as the primary source of information as to whether an individual is too sick to work, not a profit-driven plc.
We further call for a new approach to the sick by government whereby such vulnerable people cease to be treated as 'scroungers' particularly when many of these individuals as taxpayers have paid into the NHS, in some cases for many years.
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The Sack Atos Healthcare Immediately petition to David Cameron M.P. Nick Clegg M.P. was written by Anonymous and is in the category Justice at GoPetition.