Sarah Evans Andover
26th August 2011 at 15:57
Atos’s climbdown, has to be welcomed, even if its responses to me, the Morning Star, to CarerWatch and to The Herald are disingenuous given that they never tried to contact CarerWatch.
Atos may have gone into retreat but they’ve been dragging their feet for much of the week, failing to provide CarerWatch with any evidence to back up their allegations, and the question remains as to why they never went straight to CarerWatch in the first place, but instead leant on their website forum’s host.
Today CarerWatch has revealed that Atos has finally provided them with a time and date for the allegedly libellous content. That content was not written by a member of CarerWatch, but is merely a link, in a private forum, to an article on another site and that article is still there in the public domain, so why on earth did Atos take issue with CarerWatch?
Obviously more questions need to be asked about the legitimacy of Atos’ actions and allegations.
Read CarerWatch’s latest letter to Atos here.
The vulnerable people who depend on that forum, or any of the other websites Atos has silenced, need far more than what Atos have offered to CarerWatch so far, not least an apology, and better still to know why Atos didn’t approach CarerWatch or any of the other disability action group websites before leaning on their web hosts.
But we all need assurances that they won’t try using these bully boy tactics again: CarerWatch is leading the way for all of us in that fightback.
The Morning Star’s Will Stone first revealed how ATOS uses legalistic bully-boy tactics to silence its critics, going straight to the website host with the threat that the author of the site, in this case CarerWatch, has libelled them. The host immediately takes down the site, leaving vulnerable people who depend on the support and information those websites provide even more isolated and devastated – in this case a private, members-only forum.
The closing down of CarerWatch’s forum by Atos has shocked not just disability action groups but the chief executive of Citizen’s Advice Scotland Lucy McTernan, Anne Begg MP and many others. And it is perhaps this united show of disgust at the care firm’s actions that has put the Atos media machine on the back foot and try to spin their way out.
Commenting in The Herald this week, Atos said: “It was never our intention to close down the CarerWatch forum. Our request was that the libellous content relating to Atos Healthcare and our employees be taken down in order to protect the reputation of our employees and company.”
So, Atos, why didn’t you contact CarerWatch first to give them the opportunity? That question remains to be answered by Atos, despite my asking them several times.
There are wider issues too around the way in which Atos treats vulnerable people – and it is the work of the disability action groups, charities, community groups, Citizen’s Advice and MPs which has forced inquiries into staff and doctors who work for Atos and the way they treat some of the most vulnerable in society.
But we also need to ask what more we can do to stop private companies engaged in work that should be done by the public sector using their legal muscle to shut up their critics. If government agencies and local government can’t do it then why should Atos be able to?
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