THEY have thrilled and amazed us for the past week, from a corner of East London – those without limbs, eyes, working spines or with numerous other daunting disabilities. I’m looking forward to taking my young daughter to roar the athletes around the final bend of the stunning Olympic stadium tomorrow, before the curtain comes down on the Paralympic Games.

Then, presumably, the Government will quietly resume the task of forcing hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people off benefits and into jobcentres.

But this is the story that simply will not go away – the huge worries over a policy condemned for being “inhumane” and for spreading “fear and anxiety”. And if there was ever a time for ministers to pause and, finally, to recognise these deep flaws it must be now, in the glow of the Paralympics.

To recap: a tough new “work test” is reassessing millions of incapacity benefit (IB) claimants with the tests being carried out by a private company called Atos.

Nowhere will this have bigger implications than in the North-East, where 120,000-odd people currently claim IB – a legacy of the industrial meltdown of the 1980s.

Around three-quarters will be put through the assessment, of which 30 per cent are expected to be judged ready for work and be placed on job seeker’s’ allowance (JSA) instead – losing at least £25 a week in benefit.

A further 40 per cent are likely to be assessed as able to work in the future, with support.

They will be moved onto JSA after one further year if they have savings above £16,000 or their partner works.

The process has clearly been botched.

Huge numbers are being wrongly judged as fit for work, given that a staggering 40 per cent of appeals are successful. MPs found Atos was guilty of errors that stripped vulnerable people of benefits and turned away claimants because appointments were overbooked None other than David Cameron’s former speech writer, the father of a child with severe autism, condemned ministers for colluding with right-wing newspapers to brand the disabled as “scroungers” and “benefit cheats”.

And Professor Malcolm Harrington, who reviewed the tests for the Government, left his post suddenly having demanded a big overhaul to make them more “fair and humane”.

In June, I reported the example of a mentally- ill single mum, from Stanley , driven to the edge of suicide after bring told to find work, after an Atos test stretching to just 20 minutes. The 36-year-old suffers from bipolar depression and receives a “cocktail of medication”

with treatment from a community psychiatric nurse. Other MPs’ postbags bulge with similar cases.

This week, some fresh ministers arrived at the department for work and pensions – to make, we can only hope, a fresh start.

THE Cabinet reshuffle was described widely as David Cameron’s lurch to the right – but the Prime Minister had a riposte to that charge yesterday.

The new Transport Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, has a fascinating past as a Staffordshire coal miner (and, ahem, 1984 strikebreaker). An early election poster captures him in tin helmet complete with lamp.

Mr Cameron told MPs: “I have done something that New Labour never managed: I have taken a miner and put him in the Cabinet - and he is running the railways.”