The committee should look at all these issues through the lens of human rights. It is well known that the United Nations special rapporteurs were here in Scotland last December, gathering evidence for the on-going investigation of the UK Government for grave and systematic human rights abuses of disabled people under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
At the time of the Scottish independence referendum, we were promised that there would be
“a system of government as close to federalism as you can have”.
We made a submission to the Smith commission, demanding that all powers over social security be remitted to the Scottish Government, but that has not happened.
Frankly, disabled people now face the catastrophic impact of cuts in their social security due to the migration from DLA to PIP. Let us not forget that George Osborne stood up in the House of Commons and declared that there would be a 20 per cent reduction in the disability budget through PIP. The testing is as far away from evidence-based medicine as it is possible to be. It is underpinned by something called the biopsychosocial model of disability, which is completely unscientific and not worthy of being used in a social security system. It is the same system that underpins the work capability assessment. It was imported from the United States, and Unum Provident Insurance, which was told by the insurance commissioner of California that it was operating “disability denial factories” and was banned from 50 states and fined billions of dollars, advised the UK Government in drafting the test.
The Scottish Government must reject the underpinning of both tests, and it must speak out more forcefully about the number of people who have died or committed suicide after a work capability assessment. We get reports from all over the UK that people have gone for a work capability assessment and have subsequently lost their disability living allowance on the basis of the answers that they gave. That is the knock-on effect; the test is a gateway. Disabled people and people who have been put into the work-related activity group—WRAG—are being found to be fit for work and are on the work programme. That is happening more and more because the goalposts have been moved.
Our campaign began in June 2010 when a man called Paul Reekie hung himself after a work capability assessment, and we have been campaigning solidly since then to make the system safer. It was our campaign, through our medical adviser, Dr Carty of Leith, that put forward the motion to the British Medical Association conference in 2012 that the work capability assessment regime should be scrapped
“with immediate effect and be replaced with a rigorous and safe system that does not cause avoidable harm to some of the weakest and most vulnerable in society.”
Since that motion was passed and became BMA policy, we have sought to get it implemented by raising awareness of the existence of regulations 29 and 35 of the Employment and Support Allowance Regulations 2013, which detail exceptional circumstances in which, because a person’s physical and/or mental impairment would represent a substantial risk of harm to them, they should not be found fit for work or found to have limited capability for work. Unfortunately, because of an impasse in the contractual arrangements between the BMA and the DWP, our success has been limited in getting knowledge of those regulations put out there. Local medical committees around the UK are simply refusing to provide disabled people with the letters that they need to support their applications, and the DWP refuses to build those regulations into the system despite some assurances that it gave and despite a successful judicial review by the mental health resistance network, which found that the WCA discriminates against people with mental health problems.
None of that has been put into place, so people are still being wrongly found to be fit for work and are committing suicide. It is not just one or two people. One death is too many, but when we are getting stories of people committing suicide every other week and it is in the newspapers, we really need to speak up. Flagrant human rights abuses are taking place on Scottish soil today.
The Scottish Government must demand from the United Nations a copy of that report, which is being sent only to the UK Government. If human rights are devolved to Scotland, our First Minister has a right to look at that report.