Surrey & Borders Refuses to disclose how Many service Users it Employs

Des Curley

Yesterday I received the following delayed and totally evasive response to my Freedom of Information requestof September 18th 2006 which I also put in person to Surrey and Borders Chief Executive Fiona Edwards and Trust Board at the pre-AGM Board Meeting the following day.

I asked how many service users the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust employed in manual jobs at the national minimum wage.

Ms Edwards, who dodged answering the question at the time although she was clearly aware of the figure , and the Trust Board were clearly aware that I was not limiting this question to the Trust's work services but trying to establish what the Trust's track record was as an employer of its own service users as we already obviously knew the Trust expected those involved in its exploitative work services to work for nothing as this is the reason why this blog exists.

The Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust is desperately trying to conceal the fact that it is guilty of employment discrimination and prefers to have people with mental health and learning difficulties do odd jobs around the Trust like filling envelopes for nothing rather than pay them the national minimum wage and employ them under the same terms and conditions of employment as non-disabled employees.

This campaign has managed to help restore the pathetic £3 a day payments that Fiona Edwards on a salary of around £120,000 deemed it necessary to deprive from the 150 or so disabled workers using her Trust's work services but we need to move on from there to get any disabled person working for the Trust or its work services externalised to or still being greedilly eyed over by MCCH Ltd and the Richmond Fellowship paid at the national minimum wage level or above.

We should not view helping to get the exploited disabled workers their £3 a day back as a victory as it is totally disgusting that they were expected to work for so little in the first place .

There is no excuse for Surrey and Borders ,the above charities or anyone else to force disabled people to work for nothing or £3 a day while triggering massive payments for themselves for doing this.

Take a look at the people in the pictures scrolling by above, these largely elderly professionals grew up in a society where it was commonplace to simply pity and infantalise people with disabilities while viewing working on their behalf as somehow virtuous in its own right.i.e.These people are good people because they work with people with disabilities.

In fact they are exploiting and living off the very people they claim to ' care ' for since their disability employment schemes are an unwaged ghetto walled in by barriers to mainstream employment that these people and their organisations have erected to ensure that they not their service users generate an income.

Barriers like the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust not bothering to employ its own service users , barriers like MCCH Ltd and the Richmond Fellowship basing work on imposed volunterism to fund and perpetuate themselves and create impressions of success that simply do not bear up to scrutiny .

The huge growth in the disability employment industry with its prevailing model of workers engaging in work preparation , work placements , work opportunities and other jargonistc variants of unpaid work is exploitative and that growth has only occured because there is a ready political supply of funding unattached to any meaningful requirement to audit these schemes for effectiveness rather than any real demand for these fraudulent exploitative schemes from service users.

Disabled people who are able and want to work should be able to do so without being exploited and abused by these self-serving parasitical organisations, they should have access to professional recruitment and employment agencies and real paid employment training and work.

This is not available instead we see millions of pounds being wasted on the useless disability employment sector as organisations like MCCH Ltd , the Richmond Fellowship and the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health fall over each other to shunt service users , whether they are able to or want work or not, into useless unpaid disability work schemes to pay themselves nice salaries or, in SCMH's case, to make fraudulent claims about being academic disability employment experts.

Its funny how Helen Lockett and Dr Bob Groves, who both made sure thay took a cut out of the Surrey and Borders externalisation project, never commented on the barriers to employment and employee discrimination the Surrey & Borders Partnership Trust clearly maintians in place and continues to try to conceal.

These people are simply targetting service users with their useless unpaid disability work schemes - which also route funding away from non-work related provision - because it funds their status, careers and lifestyles rather than provides disabled people who are able and want to work in real jobs at the national minmum wage or above the law says they are entitled to.

Here's the response from Surrey & Borders totally avoiding the question of how many service users it pays the minimum wage or above to for doing ordinary manual work these exploitative disability employment schemes make them do for nothing.
.

from Jo Young

Wilhelmina Cox ,
Angie Ellis ,
Vicky Wattridge
date Nov 10, 2006 4:59 PM
subject FOIA request ~ Work Service's Review

Dear Desmond

As the Director now responsible for leading on the 'Payments Project' I am contacting you regarding your question raised at our Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust Board on 28th September 2006. Your question was with regards the numbers of people who use the services currently being paid the minimum wage or above for manual work and this was specifically related to the work services.


I can tell you that as of the 28th September 2006 we wrote to 159 people who attended Netherne Print, Assembly Matters, Art and Crafts Matters, Old Moat Garden Centre and Queens Park

Garden Centre. All of these people were previously receiving "therapeutic payments" for their attendance. All of these people have had these payments re-instated.

None of these individuals are employed by Surrey and Boarders Partnership NHS Trust



Please contact me if you require anything further.


Jo Young

Director (PLD), SABP, Ridgewood Centre, Old Bisley Road, Frimley, Surrey. GU16 9QE

T: 01276 605555 M: 07770 876028

jo.young@sabp.nhs.uk

..but wait there's more, a legalstic disclaimer that could have been written by the Monty Python team. These people would have made great Nazi's as they are paying lawyers to draft this shit to intimidate their own service users.

Is this the modern face of professional care ?


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