Infamous Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) outsourcing company Maximus will be attending the Labour Party’s 2024 conference. Not only that, but the private firm will be co-hosting a talk with the Fabian society on ‘The Future for Work’. If it wasn’t bad enough that a US corporation with a torrid history of profiteering off the backs of disabled people thanks to DWP PIP is sponsoring an event on this, it only gets worse.
That’s because Maximus will be in conversation with none other than ardent right-winger and Labour DWP boss Liz Kendall.
Maximus: company heading to Labour’s annual conference
Between Sunday 22 and Wednesday 25 September, the Labour Party is hosting its annual conference in Liverpool.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a Who’s Who of private corporations schmoozing with Labour ministers and officials. Arms company BAE Systems is sponsoring a talk on the ‘Future challenges to defence’ with defence secretary John Healey. Naturally, it isn’t the only arms company sponsoring fringe events on Labour’s defence policy either. Others include for instance Northrop Grumman, and Babcock at two further talks.
Big pharma companies have muscled their way in on fringe events from everything to do the ‘role of self-care’ in saving on GP appointments, to the NHS winter vaccine programme.
Housing developers are sponsoring talks on Labour’s plans for more house-building. There are bigwigs from the finance sector in droves, and health insurance companies partnering on numerous events. Carbon sequestration corporation 1PointFive is funding a talk on ‘Working Together for a Net Zero Future’. It’s a subsidiary of fossil fuel firm Occidental.
In short then, the 2024 Labour Party conference will be a display of the prominent corporate capture that’s become a fixture under Starmer’s leadership and Labour right.
Given all these partnerships, Maximus looks right at home sponsoring an event on ‘The Future for Work’. The Fabian Society programme details how this will involve a conversation between DWP boss Liz Kendall, the Fabian Society’s general secretary Andrew Harrop, and Maximus’s UK president Dr Paul Williams.
However, there’s a expansive litany of damning reasons the privatisation giant should be nowhere near a talk on Labour’s plans for work.
A torrid history of Maximus and DWP PIP
Maximus has long had its claws in the DWP. In less than the last decade alone, the DWP has handed the outsourcing giant 12 separate contracts.
Of these, five are currently active. This includes a contract for running the DWP’s ‘functional assessment services’. Essentially, this means Maximus will conduct Work Capability Assessments (WCA) for Universal Credit, as well as Personal Independence Payment (DWP PIP) assessments.
It also has contracts for multiple government work programmes, and a key government mental health service that purports to support people in the workplace.
However, the company’s reputation precedes it – but notably, not in a good way. The Canary reported recently on this, writing that:
If its name rings (alarm) bells, that’s because it should. For one, Maximus was the infamous company behind the 2017 Work Capability Assessment ‘Kill Yourself’ scandal. This was where the benefit assessor had been asking claimants why they hadn’t taken their own lives.
But its record didn’t get better from there. Crucially, Maximus has overseen the process for many vulnerable claimants – and sometimes to fatal effect. Notably, this includes the claimant deaths of Alan McArdle, Jodey Whiting, and more recently, Philip Pakree.
We detailed this in the context of the DWP handing the routinely disgraced DWP PIP provider yet more contracts. In particular, this was an extension for one of the department’s flagship work programmes, the Restart Scheme. Significantly, across two contracts, the DWP is funnelling over £200m to Maximus for this.
However, here too Maximus has made a mess of things. Firstly, the Canary identified how providers, including Maximus, were failing even on the scheme’s own terms. Specifically, they weren’t hitting the programme’s already unambitious targets for helping participants into work.
Even more telling however, was the fact that its vehement preoccupation with doing this actually harmed chronically ill people on the scheme. It perfectly encapsulated the glaring problem with the Tories – and now Starmerite Labour’s – fixation on work as a health outcome.
Given all this, you’d think Maximus should have no business giving this talk at Labour’s conference. Only, its role in the welfare system to date may in fact perfectly align with Labour’s punitive plans for social security and work.
DWP boss Liz Kendall’s back-to-work agenda
Of course, we already know some of Kendall’s vision for the future of work and welfare. Primarily, she is picking up where the Tories left off.
So far, Kendall has bandied about her plans to:
reform so the department for welfare becomes a genuine department for work.
Naturally, it panders to the right-wing rhetoric demonising benefit claimants as “scroungers”. This is the disgusting trope pushed vociferously by right-wing politicians and their corporate mouthpiece media.
Largely, Labour’s focus has been on extending the Tories’ assault on the chronically ill and disabled people outside the workforce.
In fact, Kendall wasted no time in getting started with this. Days after election, she was at a Jobcentre in Leeds. There, she pronounced the party’s agenda for tackling the soaring numbers of “economically inactive”.
Ostensibly, this simply refers to unemployed people who aren’t actively looking for work. Crucially, Kendall herself pinpointed the 2.8 million of these who are off work due to long-term sickness.
DWP PIP and the NHS
Then, there’s the fact Kendall appears poised to sink the DWP’s teeth deeper into the NHS to help with this. As the Canary previously reported, since coming into power, Kendall has already met with former Blair health secretary-turned-Wes Streeting advisor Alan Milburn, and health secretary Streeting himself to hash out these plans.
In a nutshell, Milburn was articulating the findings of a report he’d headed into “economic inactivity” and the benefits system. It called for the new Labour government to:
integrate health services into job centres to unlock a hidden workforce of about 3 million “economically inactive” people who are without jobs
Now, Kendall will be rubbing shoulders with a company that oversees social security ‘functional assessment services’ for the DWP. Obviously, with these, Maximus ultimately determines who’s fit for work. However, as we’ve set out above, it often gets this wrong – and caused claimant deaths in the process.
Maximus is doing this in conjunction with its DWP work programme contracts. The DWP has long-designed these schemes to push people back to work, no matter the impact to participants.
Cementing Labour’s lurch to the right on welfare and DWP PIP
What’s more, it also isn’t the first time that Maximus has hosted an event at a Labour Party conference. In 2023, it sponsored a fringe event with then shadow health minister Andrew Gwynne. This was a discussion on how Labour could “improve the performance of health and care services?”
Of course, Gwynne is now a full health minister at the Department for Health and Social Care. Obviously, in the broader context of Kendall’s plans for greater DWP-NHS integration, the privatisation giant with its claws in both, should be cause for concern.
Under the Tories, Maximus has had its podgy profiteering fingers in numerous DWP pies. Already, the Canary has shown that under the new Labour government, the DWP has flogged a work programme contract extension to the dangerous company.
Now, its appearance at Labour’s conference with DWP PIP boss Kendall in tow signals that Labour is probably set to continue the trend of handing the profiteering company enormous, multi-million pound contracts.
Naturally, Labour knows the firm’s chequered record on the rights of chronically ill and disabled people. That it’s in bed with Maximus at its party conference anyway, shows where its allegiance lies. As ever, it’s with the parasitic corporate capitalists. In other words, it’s likely a sign of more of the same “hostile environment for welfare” that is to come under the new Labour government. The government can change hands, but the DWP and its outsourced services are as unfit for purpose as they ever were.
Feature image via Youtube – Sky News/ the Canary
