{"id":7908,"date":"2012-02-07T21:40:52","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T20:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7908"},"modified":"2012-02-07T21:40:52","modified_gmt":"2012-02-07T20:40:52","slug":"a-small-victory-over-an-unfair-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7908","title":{"rendered":"A small victory over an unfair system"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ten months ago, I did <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=5322\">a posting<\/a> about how I had accompanied a good friend of mine with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) to an interview as part of a Work Capability Assessment (WCA) because he had applied for the new\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.direct.gov.uk\/en\/DisabledPeople\/FinancialSupport\/esa\/index.htm\">Employment &amp; Support Allowance<\/a> (ESA). He was refused the ESA, he appealed, and today he had his appeal hearing before a judge and a doctor in Reading. I had submitted a written statement in support of his appeal and, as with the original interview, I accompanied him as a friend.<\/p>\n<p>The original assessment awarded my friend no points and judged him fit for work and therefore ineligible for the Allowance. At the end of today&#8217;s appeal, he was awarded 18 points and, since 15 or more is needed for the ESA, he was awarded the allowance, backdated to his original refusal, but only for the 12 months allowed under the Coalition Government&#8217;s harsher regime. It is a victory of sorts, but this very different result was only achieved after months of further anxiety and is one of almost 40% of appeals that are finding the original assessment flawed. What a crazy and cruel system,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ten months ago, I did a posting about how I had accompanied a good friend of mine with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) to an interview as part of a Work Capability Assessment (WCA) because he had applied for the new\u00a0Employment &amp; Support Allowance (ESA). He was refused the ESA, he appealed, and today he had [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs","category-my-life-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7908"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7910,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7908\/revisions\/7910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}