natalyad | Access to Work #AtW - workplace support for deaf & disabled people (Reply)

Context for this blogpost

I've been hearing a lot about increased problems with Access to Work (AtW) over the past 12-18 months and thought I'd collate some information all in one post so I can point people at it - this post will be a work in progress.

Access to Work is the government's system for providing assessment and funding for support for disabled and deaf employees in the UK. The government likes to talk about things in pure economic terms but will ignore their own figures which show in 2005 that for every £1 spent on AtW, the wider 'economy' benefitted by £1.48. The primary source for this is nearly impossible to find other than cited as DWP 2005 but it was cited by Liz Sayce in her widely cited Getting in, staying in, and getting on report colloquially known as "The Sayce Report".

If you want to help

If you want to do something to help, even if you are not an AtW user or your AtW is working well for you please consider joining Srtop Changes to Access to Work and watching the video of Jenny Sealey's rally speech in BSL with English subtitles.

Access to Work has never embedded true accessibility by design

Access to Work has never been the most accessible or user friendly system. Administered by the Jobcentre Plus (JCP) within the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) it feel oh so very much like the hassle of trying to claim social security benefits such as job seekers allowance (JSA). I should know, I've claimed both.

Examples include

AtW not communicating accessibly,

Repeatably asking deaf people to telephone them even if AtW is needed to access deaf-suitable-telephony;

sending print letters to blind and partially sighted people even if they don't (yet) have technology to access them.

These things matter because they expose the lack of inclusion and respect for deaf and disabled people at the heart of the organisation. Processes are more important than access!

Recently the DWP has made large numbers of the AtW caseworkers redundant and closed down contact centres. This means that instead of a named advisor, we now have a nameless contact centre so can't even 'train someone up' to our communication/access needs, but have to start afresh every time which is time consuming and stressful.

AtW users have not been officially informed of changes such as redundancy of case workers or changes in "the process", we only find things out when postal addresses fall out of use (or we check the gov.uk website and see things have changed), telephone numbers and email addresses don't work or our support workers are not paid. This is made harder by the fact that even advisers who are still in their jobs don't answer their phone, return calls or respond to emails.

Collating experiences

I'm going to collate people's personal experiences of Access to Work in this post and write a separate post of my own about my experiences of this potentially brilliant but institutionally disablist support system.

I'll put things under categories of D/deaf and disabled separately as D/deaf people are being disproportionately affected as a single-impairment group due to the high cost of communication support workers.

I am happy to receive links to sensible resources and people's experiences in English or BSL in comments, to @natalyadell or to natalyadell at gmail dot com and I'll upload them when I can.