Academic

Introduction

During the ten years of research for the Preventable Harm Project (2009-2019), it was my very great pleasure to have contact with various academics from universities both in the UK and in the wider world, who all willingly shared their research papers and commentary with me. This page offers a small sample of published academic papers, which represent many years of research and demonstrate the preventable harm created by UK government social policy reforms.  Of special interest are the quarterly benefit sanctions statistics by Dr David Webster, whose research demonstrates that sanctions are more common with disabled claimants  than with the general unemployed community.  I am very grateful to all the academics who have enthusiastically supported my research, and for their agreement for me to reproduce academic papers on my website so that others may benefit from their work. Very special thanks to Alison Shaw and the team at Policy Press for their kind permission to offer access to a selection of published academic papers from their Journals, which are now available online free of charge. Links to the journal articles are identified on the web links page.  Of special significance, ‘First do no harm’ (2016) by Ben Barr et al identifies the impact on mental health of the WCA, and ‘Blaming the victim, all over again’ (2016) by Tom Shakespeare et al exposes the Waddell and Aylward BPS model of assessment, as adopted by the DWP to be used for the WCA, as having “no coherent theory or evidence behind this model” and revealed a “cavalier approach to scientific evidence”. That’s academic speak for the fact that the research used to justify the WCA, as used to resist funding the ESA, is totally bogus.   I am very grateful to the academic publishers who have granted me permission to reproduce published journal articles on this page.  MS