Can they include self-employment as an option?

If I were obliged to travel to work 5 days a week, I would be wiped out inside a fortnight.

I can, however, use a computer keyboard from my bed, most days for some of the time.

Could DWP/ATOS decide that I could manage some form of keyboard activity if I didn't have to travel, and had my home facilities?

You see this in the newspaper forums, and they seem to guide policy these days.

I know I'm not fit for employment, but I might be able to work for a few hours a week - providing no one was worried which hours they were. And didn't care if there were weeks when I couldn't do anything.

How far down the scale of activity does the DWP's definition of work descend?

Is there any official ruling, or any unofficial feedback of what people have been told to do?

I believe that the yardstick for the assessment is work in a call centre. I share your concern though, as many people on various fora trot out the old 'if you can post on a forum, you could work' chestnut.

Gordon wrote:

The ESA assessment is not a test of your ability to work, at a workstation or elsewhere, whether that be for 16, 35 or some other number of hours, it is a test of whether you meet certain descriptors or not.

Gordon,

My question is not quite as clueless as it seems. There is one place where this question of "what is the definition of work?" is sensible, I think.

On p13 of your guide, you describe one of the "exceptional circumstances"

The second regulation says that you will be found to have limited capability for work if:
(b) you suffer from some specific disease or bodily or mental disablement and, by reasons of such disease or disablement, there would be a substantial risk to the mental or physical health of any person if you were found not to have limited capability for work.

As I understand it, this consideration can come before the WCA is even decided upon. Could this not be decided on a more general basis than whether you would "pass" on the WCA descriptors?

There may be a similar problem when the ATOS assessor says how long they think it might be before you should consider a return to work. It sounds as though this is more subjective judgement.


I have severe ME/CFS and "overdoing it" invariably exacts a high toll.

No one who has seen me believes that I would be capable of working 9-5, 5 days a week. I'm not capable of regular work at all, and trying to do so would be very harmful to me.

It would be easy, I think, for me to collect evidence that even the attempt to do one week's worth of full-time work would have a serious attempt on my health.

It is just conceivable that someone might[\i] think that "capacity for work" might mean doing 8 hours a week transcribing records on to my computer.

If the definitions require me to be unable to do 8 hours a week, at my own pace, in my own home, then it will be correspondingly more difficult to get supportive evidence.

This is why I am asking about the definition of "work" within the context of that evaluation.