Beyond Reason and Law

The ' therapeutic payments ', term used by Peter Kinsey on behalf of the Surrey and Borders NHS Trust has a specific legal meaning in an employment and training context. Let's look at how Mr Kinsey uses the term again in his e-mail to all those who criticised his Trust's decision to cut the £3 a day wages of the Old Moat garden centre staff to nothing.

"Thank you for emailing me to express your views regarding this matter. This is a local issue in eastern Surrey which we are discussing with our stake-holders. Changes to therapeutic payments are part of a larger change project which we are undertaking to modernise and improve employment services for people with mental health problems in line with recognised best practice. Those changes have been discussed extensively with our staff and people who use our services."

Peter Kinsey

Director of Operations

In fact the ' therapeutic payments or earnings ' scheme was run by the DWP and in 2002/3 updated to the new ' permitted work or earnings ' scheme which was targetted at ( but not limited to ) disabled people on benefits who would take some time or help getting into mainstream work or who werent likely to ever get into a sustainable mainstream job at all but who would benefit from activity in some work-like environment with a social theme.

For example, somewhere like S&BP's showcase Old Moat garden centre in Epson Surrey.

(Search for it on Google earth as it is now listed.)

The ' Permitted Work ' scheme is complex and not particularly well thought out however if S&BP's disabled workers were previously on 'therapeutic payments ' 'modernisation' would require them to be treated under the new 'Permitted Work' scheme rules but this has not happened as it seems S&BP or more specifically its commercial arm ' Priority Enterprises' is operating outside of the law and simply using the now legally outdated term ' therapeutic payments' as a way of sidestepping paying S&BP's disabled garden centre workers.

Priority Enterprises has to act in accordance with employment legislation but its not doing that here, Peter Kinsey has applied a self-serving and meaningless category on the garden centre workers as a means to say, " Well we used to pay our workers 'therapeutic payments' of £3 a day but now we have decided to cut these payments to nothing with the expectation that our workers, some of whom have worked for us on a near permanent basis, can now be re-categorised as trainees and we can simply go on exploiting their labour and them without any regard for Employment regulations, the Law at all or you because we are a large NHS Trust and we can get away with operating outside of the law. "

Here's the rub, if S&BP was paying its garden centre workers outside of the DWP's old ' Therapeutic Earnings ' scheme then it has always been operating outside of the law in its dealings with the garden centre workers, as part of the reason why that scheme existed was to prevent employers like S&BP abusing disabled workers on benefits in the workplace.

Fiona Edwards , the Chief Executive of the Surrey and Borders NHS Trust has refused to discuss this issue with us and as we see from Peter Kinsey's response and Priority Enterprises refusal to respond to Jill G's questions , Surrey and Borders have slipped over into anti-liability mode, they have robbed the disabled workers who service their showpiece commercial garden centre of the pittance they were paying them outside of the law but now refuse to make their actions available for public scrutiny.

We have asked the Surrey and Borders PPI to take up this issue and will also be pursuing the matter with the DWP.