Thursday 8 December 2011

WCA - Atos Audio recording trial

I have seen a number of questions in various places asking what has happened with this.  The answer is:

·      A trial took place in the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Medical Assessment Centre
·      Started in March2011 finished May 2011
·      DWP is still after 6+ months “considering” and “trying to understand “the results and offers all sorts of pseudo-confidential reasons why the evaluation report cannot be published.
·      There is an implication that the results were not as expected, but no more clues.
·      Absolutely no commitment to a deadline.
·      I am trying to establish the nature of the trial.
What a way to run a brewery!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Im insisting on a recording being made of the next WCA so Atos have cancalled the appointment they made for me as, allegedly, the recording equipment wasn't available that day.So if one claimant in my area wants a recording made there's no other equipment available ?Doesn't sound like Atos are planning on doing a lot of recording of assessments.If the rolling out of recorded assessments was a genuine one there wouldn't be problems with availability of the equipment to do so.

Tia Junior said...

The whole "project" has been a poorly organised charade from the outset & DWP is clearly only doing anything under sufferance and trying to engineer it so that the problem just goes away. They are not announcing the facility so that they can subsequently say that take-up was so poor, costs cannot be justified - not surprising if nobody knows about it. Also, first time vistors to Atos will not appreciate why recording is vital until it is too late. There was an unconfirmed rumour recently that there was just one audio recorder that was being couriered around the country as necessary.

There are a series of outstanding FoI requests about this at http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ for anyone interested. DWP won't release ANYTHING, even about the trial from a year ago on the basis that it would interfer with a report that is in production and will be available "in due course" - no date needless to say.