What does it mean when one million people are found fit to work?

DWP says almost one million sick found fit to work reports The Huffington Post:

A third (32%) of all new claimants for employment and support allowance (ESA) were assessed as being fit to work and capable of employment between October 2008 and March 2013 - totalling 980,400 people, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said.

We've now had five years of reporting the numbers of people turned down for ESA as some kind of success story; they're getting disabled people back into work. A third of those who claimed ESA are being found fit to work. Welfare Reform is justified!

Those turned down for Employment and Support Allowance are not necessarily making false claims. They may be fit to work but have not understood the rules, or they may be unable to work but have struggled to fill in the form in such a way that conveys this. Some of those turned down may have had a good case for appeal (40% of appeals are successful), but couldn't face the ordeal. The fact that this complex and mixed group number a million people (or strictly speaking, a million claims) seems unremarkable.

The criteria for Employment and Support Allowance are much stricter than those of Incapacity Benefit, the process takes many more months, with many people either dying, getting better or giving up before a decision is made and some claimants' benefit is stopped after the first year if they have savings or a working partner. Despite this, there were still 2.49 million people on ESA and other incapacity-type benefits in 2013, against the 2.6 million on incapacity benefits in 2008.

Reform to this benefit, at massive cost to government, a very great deal of  personal stress, heartache and hardship for disabled people and their families, as well as a media-driven regression in social attitudes towards disabled people, has only succeeded in reducing the numbers on this kind of benefit by 110,000 people or a little over 4%.

This is what has been achieved since October 2008; there are a little over four percent fewer people on ESA and related benefits than before. It is unclear whether or not the incapacity bill - either in terms of benefits or the cost of assessing for and administering benefits -  has been reduced. A stable 40% of appeals against ESA decisions are successful. Fraud levels (around 0.3%  for incapacity benefits) remain stable.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of those found "fit to work" will have simply moved onto other kinds of benefits such as Job Seeker's Allowance. Disabled people who are fit to work remain unlikely to actually get work, largely due to discrimination.

Starting as He Means to Continue?

Imagine the uproar if a new (male) Minister for Women's first press article said 'well, we all know that they are all sluts', or if a new (white) Minister for Racial Equality's first article said 'well, we all know that they're all terrorists', but the (non-disabled) Minister for Disabled People fronts an article saying 'well, we all know that disabled people are all frauds and scroungers' and no one bats an eye. 

Yes, with DLA fraud at 0.3% the lowest of any benefit, new DWP Minister of State for Disabled People Mike Penning's first public act was to star in the latest* in the Hate Mail's ongoing demonisation of all disabled people as frauds and scroungers by claiming that DLA is riddled with people put there by Labour in an attempt to defraud the unemployment figures (apparently he's a bit hazy on the fact DLA is an In Work benefit) and that 94% have never had a medical assessment. As Sue Marsh eloquently points out, that might just be because in 94% of cases a DWP decision maker has decided there's really not much point in checking that an amputated limb has grown back, cerebral palsy has vanished overnight, or whatever.

Unfortunately as disabled people we're growing used to this. You wait years for justice and then along come three Ministers Against Disabled People in a row. First we had Miller, Miller the Cripple Killer, then the odious 'they get better' McVey, and now Penning, whose only prior contact with disability from a quick scout of Hansard appears to have been questions about disabled shipping while Undersecretary of State for Transport. If you look at his c.v. in more detail it doesn't get any more promising - squaddie in the Grenadier Guards (and IDS is an ex-Guards officer), fireman, junior minister at Transport, junior minister at Northern Ireland, and now us. We can be charitable and assume that he didn't come by his disablist views independently, but nothing in his background suggests anything likely to have generated an informed or remotely empowering attitude to disability. He was Shadow Minister for Health, but that's more likely to have driven him into the 'they're broken' Medical Model camp, amply reinforced by his coming of age in the relentlessly physical Army and Fire Service. Whatever his own views, it's clear that the institutional disablism of the Department of Work and Pensions (or maybe just IDS's SpAd), have thoroughly nobbled him in his first week in the job.

So once again disability advocates and activists are faced with dragging another Minister kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, and god forbid we manage to get one to understand the Social Model before they are moved on. It is clear the DWP's Unum-trained advocates of the perverted Bio-Psycho-Social-Model (aka 'the scroungers have only got themselves blame if they're too lazy to recover from a spinal cord injury') have already gotten their claws into Penning, but note that both Miller and McVey were promoted for what they did as Minister Against Disabled People, so clearly vilifying us in the media equals a job well done in Cameron's eyes. I'm not sure that even Miller or McVey started their ministerial stint with such an open attack on disabled people as frauds and scroungers, and neither were exactly slouches at that, so keep your eye on Penning, he may be the coming man.

Disablism, the one form of hate that's growing ever more popular, now with extra Ministerial approval....

*I'm not going to link to it, that just drives up their advertising revenue and convinces them that attacking disabled people gets plenty of page hits.

Edited to add: I may have been unreasonably positive about Penning, I've just seen his interview with Disability News Service: Spending on DLA and PIP will be cut next year, says new disability minister and apparently he knows all about disability because he's friends with Simon Weston and knows some disabled ex-rugby players *headdesk*  *headdesk*  *headdesk*

Workfare: Privacy? What Right to Privacy?

One of the comments on my piece on Workfare, the DWP and Duty of Care raised a further alarming prospect, that DWP believe their right to impose Workfare takes precedence over a disabled person's legal right to privacy regarding their medical records.

The comment pointed out that a FOI request at the 'What do they Know' site contains the following statement by DWP:

Section 3 of the Social Security Act 1998 allows DWP to reuse personal information relating to social security and employment and training for another social security function. This includes reuse by persons providing services to DWP, such as Work Programme providers, where acting as the DWP's data processor.

In addition, in order to carry out their functions under the Employment, Skills and Enterprise Scheme, the Work Programme provider may need additional personal information from the claimant. If the claimant does not wish to provide this information it may be the case that, with the provider, they can investigate ways in which they can still participate in the Scheme,  without the additional information being provided.

However, there may come a point when the Work Programme provider becomes concerned that the claimant’s withholding of information potentially amounts to non-participation in the Scheme. If this is the case, they will refer the matter to a decision maker who will consider all the facts of the case, including any good cause issues the claimant wishes to raise, and determine whether the claimant has failed to participate. If the decision maker considers that the claimant has failed to participate, their benefit will be sanctioned.


Now the first paragraph is disturbing enough, but clearly falls within the legal powers granted to DWP, however the second and third paragraphs are particularly troubling, both in general and specifically for disabled people, as they seem to show the DWP taking the position that they can insist that any information they feel relevant is provided under threat of sanction, even where that insistence is counter to a disabled person's rights under the Equality and Data Protection Acts..


A disabled person when considering an employment position is forced into the iniquitous position of having to decide whether or not to reveal their disability. Declare your disability and you have the protection of the Equality Act when requesting a reasonable adjustment, but declaring your disability also opens you to the threat of discrimination. Equally there may be considerable privacy issues wrapped up in information that could be relevant to Duty of Care issues, as examples mental health issues, continence and epilepsy all draw considerable negative opinions, if not outright discrimination, in contemporary society.

When we face a new job, disabled people face a whole additional set of decisions over and above non-disabled people: do we declare, if we do declare, then how much of the extent of our disability do we declare, and how widely do we allow that knowledge to be spread. The Equality Act and the Disability Discrimination Act before it provide specific protections for disabled people, we cannot be penalised for not declaring (though we have to declare to make the reasonable adjustment provisions enforceable) and we can insist that the details of our disability are not spread to people other than those we declare to. So for instance, I could declare my disability to HR, but insist that my line managers are told nothing more than that I am disabled and can legally request reasonable adjustments. If those provisions are breached. particularly in instances where that data is passed to other organisations entirely, then I can bring legal action against my employer for violations of both the Equality Act and the Data Protection Act.

The DWP statement above appears to attempt to subvert those rights, by stating that they can insist that information is provided to the Workfare provider, no matter that the Equality Act gives disabled people a right in law to insist that it is not, no matter that the Workfare provider is not an employer in any normal sense. Given the overwhelming disablism in recruitment decisions that disabled people face, forcing people to reveal details of their disabilities is actually going to undermine any chance of them getting a job out of the mandated assignment, the overwhelming advice from recruitment consultants is not to reveal disability until you have the written offer of a full time job in your hand. So DWP are actually shooting the whole point of the exercise in the foot by forcing declaration of disability. Worse than this, however, is the way it tramples over the right of disabled people to maintain privacy around the details of their disability. If I am being forced against my will into some utterly inappropriate position,  with an utterly inappropriate company, a company whose data protection measures I have no confidence in and with whom I have no hope of a job at the end of it (and we've seen plenty of those reportedly involved with Workfare), then there is no way that I am willing to provide them with the full details of my disability, and I will be far from the only disabled person to feel that way. It will particularly be a problem for people with Mental Health issues, who are likely to be particularly frightened of being forced to declare details of their disability, and where there is already considerable evidence of them being deliberately targeted as 'an easy mark' for sanctions by JCP staff.

Workfare alone is bad enough, but to combine it with an contempt for the right to privacy of the people with most to lose from privacy and data protection violations, and to do so in apparent contempt for the protections granted by the Equality Act and the Data Protection Act, suggests that this is just one more piece of evidence that DWP consider themselves above such menial issues as the law, particularly laws relating to equality and discrimination.

Short and Sweet Truth

A screenshot of a tweet by @stavvers, reading, "Imagine being diagnosed with terminal cancer, facing a humiliating series of tests then being told you have to work for free in Tesco."

It just about sums it up.

The Magical Thinking at DWP Gets Worse

In my earlier piece on Magical Thinking, I said that it was clear that DWP didn't have the faintest understanding of long-term disability, and were basing their policy on their lack of understanding.

Just how bad that lack of understanding is became chillingly clear in an article in the Guardian on Thursday. The article reports that in a meeting with disability groups in December, DWP announced that it intended to extend a Workfare-like scheme to disabled people. Under Workfare, unemployed people can be forced to take 30 hours a week of unpaid work experience for 8 weeks, or even 6 months in some cases, with the threat of being sanctioned and their benefit withdrawn if they do not comply. Workfare is already under severe fire from many unions and campaigning groups who view it as akin to slave labour, with people effectively working for far less than the minimum wage and jobs effectively taken permanently out of the marketplace as companies like Poundland, Asda, Tesco, Argos and others just take one Workfare assignee after another. Public pressure has already forced several companies, such as Sainsbury's and Waterstones, to withdraw from the scheme.

For disabled people the potential of Workfare alone would be bad enough, but when asked about time limits on the disability scheme, a DWP official said "There are no plans to introduce a maximum time limit." and also made it clear that sanctions would be applied to force people onto the scheme, or punish them if they refused: "Ministers strongly feel there is a link-up to support those moving close to the labour market, and the individual's responsibility to engage with the support. Ministers feel sanctions are an incentive for people to comply with their responsibility."

The scheme will be targeted at people in the ESA WRAG, which includes people with long term disabilities which are severe enough to mean they are not currently capable of work, but are expected to potentially be capable at some point in the future. As I made clear in my earlier article, that 'potentially' means 'might become capable', not 'will become capable' and for many people we are looking at years not decades of them being unfit for work. Unfortunately DWP are sticking their head in the sand in an attempt to deny the reality of disability and replace that reality with magical thinking in which we all have miracle cures at the 12 month mark and become miraculously capable of competing in the job market on an equal footing with none disabled people. Forcing anyone from WRAG into work is a subversion of what the scheme is supposed to stand for, and the limits on the scheme as currently proposed mean it could even be applied to someone with a terminal illness if they have more than six months to live. Worse, it could be applied to someone with severe mental health issues, with no regard for the consequences to their mental health, or to someone with a physical disability with no thought to the negative physical consequences for them.

We knew DWP was being run to an ideological diktat, sorry, Christian principles, with a disregard for facts that would have embarrassed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at its worst, but this is a step far, far beyond the pale. I know both from direct personal experience and the experience of others that JCP Disability Employment Advisers have an appalling inability to recognise and understand disability, in particular how it will impact working (which considering that is their sole professional purpose is a pretty utter failure). To now give these people the ability to decide on their own initiative that a disabled person should be forced into a work assignment, with only the vaguest notion of what the consequences for that person's health might be, is taking the DWP's duty of care and tossing it not just out of the window but into a passing bin wagon.

A lot of stuff coming out of the DWP worries me, but the consequences of this notion truely scare me. The whole point of people being in the ESA WRAG is that they have been assessed as not currently fit for work, and to design a scheme whose sole purpose is to force people who aren't fit for work into work, and then to try and justify it both having no limits and being subject to sanctions, suggests that DWP are truly placing diktat above reality and that magical thinking has displaced any other form of thinking they might once have been capable of.

(Edited to correct who has withdrawn from Workfare - should have been Sainsburys, not Tesco, Tesco admit to having taken 1400 people under the scheme in the past 4 months, potentially 168,000 hours of unpaid work ).

To Their Lordships on #SpartacusReport

Lord Freud has today sent a letter to the Lords claiming that the Spartacus Report is not representative of the views of disabled people and that the DWP do indeed research the attitudes of disabled people. Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin have already written a response on behalf of the Spartacus Report team, available here, but I thought that I would tackle Freud's assertion from another angle, and look at the actual quality of that supposed DWP research. This is pulled together from a piece I wrote last year, and structured as a letter to the Lords, if you want to personalize it and send it off to any of the Lords in advance of tomorrow's vote, then please feel free:

Dear Lord/Lady <>,

Lord Freud wrote to you on Monday 16th January in relation to the Welfare Reform Bill, challenging the assertions of the Spartacus Report, which exposed the weaknesses and distortions in the government case to justify terminating Disability Living Allowance and replace it with Personal Independence Payments, slashing the budget by 20 to 25% along the way. As a disabled person I feel compelled to write and register my opposition to the assertions made by Lord Freud.

Lord Freud's assertions can essentially be reduced to three points, an insistence that the consultation over the changes to DLA was adequate, that the Spartacus Report analysis is selective, and a claim that the DWP has indeed researched the opinions of disabled people. Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin have already responded to Lord Freud's letter on behalf of the Spartacus Report team, pointing out that while government standards call for a 12 week consultation period, the Welfare Reform Bill consultation lasted 10 weeks, over a Christmas period. Other disabled people have reported that disability accessible material did not become available until nearly a month into the review period and in some cases an utter failure by DWP to provide accessible formats at all. The Spartacus Report is based on all material that was made available to the team via their Freedom Of Information request and is in no way selective. As the information provided was the group responses, including those of large disability charities, it therefore represents the views of far more disabled people than the 10% of responses Lord Freud has alleged to you that it represents. Equally, as has been shown over the past year of campaigning, the views of individual disabled people are overwhelmingly opposed to the changes to DLA, so the claim by Lord Freud that the individual responses not seen by the Spartacus Report team are overwhelmingly in favour of his proposals is received by the disability community with surprise, and a large pinch of salt.

In the end, the conflict of opinions is balanced on who holds the most accurate assessment of the opinion of disabled people: Lord Freud and DWP, or a team of disabled people who have been working on engaging with the disabled community for the past year and are held in high regard by all disabled people who have dealt with them. An examination of the quality of DWP research may throw some light on the matter,

Last August the DWP released a research paper 'Attitudes to health and work amongst the working-age population' on the public's perception of work as 'good for us'. David Gillon, a disabled blogger and campaigner writing for the disability website 'Where's the Benefit', set out to analyse the paper for inherent bias and the following section summarizes his findings looking at just two of the questions within the survey:

"Problems start even before we get to the questions, the executive summary explicitly references boosting support for Dame Carol Black's report that being out of work is bad for you as part of the survey's aims.

Um... Which part of Anthropology 101 and the danger of predetermining your findings did the author miss? Anthropological/Sociological survey design is science in a minefield; just the difference between one word and another of similar meaning can completely change the answers that are given. I therefore want to look at the two most important questions asked by the survey in some depth:

The first asks “Doing paid work can affect physical or mental health both positively and negatively. Taking everything into account, do you think that paid work is generally good or bad for physical or mental health?” This is so wide a question as to be almost meaningless. If it had been asked in conjuction with “do you think that paid work is _always_ good for physical or mental health?” then we might have had a useful comparison for understanding how the public actually view long-term health issues and whether they understand that disability really can interfere with the ability to work. But it doesn't ask that, and we have to ask why that might be. And disturbingly, buried in the data tables, three appendices after the final conclusions, is the innocuous statement “‘Don’t know’ responses to questions were removed for this analysis.”

A large part of probing people's understanding is recognising whether they have a good enough grasp on the subject to validate their opinion. How many people understand what that negatively might represent? My own spinal condition means that working left me feeling like I had a second degree burn over most of my lower body, frequently in so much pain that I could barely string two thoughts together. What proportion of the survey population considered the possibility of negative effects on that level when answering the question? And if they didn't consider it, then doesn't that specifically mean we have to throw out any conclusions based on the question, particularly any attempt to use the results in relation to disability and long-term illness?

With the second question we progress from bad to worse. The author sets out to compare attitudes to short and long term conditions, but her two scenarios are back pain that is particularly sore and depression making you feel particularly down. Back pain and depression, the two disabilities which everyone is convinced they understand, and almost no one does. I have already described what my experience of back pain feels like, is sore really an adequate descriptor for the possible extent of disability we are discussing here? And down? Where understanding is bad for back pain, it is far, far worse for depression. In fact the report itself acknowledges this limitation, but again buries it in the appendices.

There are more questions, but almost all face similar questions of applicability and balance. The conclusions state: “The findings are broadly positive and show that the health benefits of work are widely recognised among the working-age population.” That something is believed is not the same as it being positive. Much of the population once believed that the world was flat, that was a workable approximation if you never got more than five miles from the place you were born, but not exactly one we would now call positive. We now have the subtlety of understanding that tells us that the world can be considered flat over short distances, but over longer ones we must recognise that it is round. Similarly, the population may believe work is good for you, but disability benefit design requires a subtler distinction that work is good for most people, but for a significant number of people with disabilities, is actually bad for them. Only that subtler understanding may genuinely be labelled positive, and that is not what the survey has measured.

There appears to have been no independent review of the questions from outside of government, most particularly from Disabled People's Organistions or disability specialists in academia, and yet, as I have hopefully demonstrated, it is all too easy to raise major questions over the entire structure of the survey. The author may genuinely not have recognised the weakness of her questions, but that excuses her, not the findings of her report and raises the question of whether the DWP has any understanding of the scientific concept of independent peer review and why it is an absolute necessity?”

Lord Freud has told you that the DWP has conducted research into the views of disabled people, disabled people tell you his conclusions do not accurately reflect their beliefs, and an analysis of DWP research reveals troubling questions of balance. The choice of who to believe is yours, all I can do is tell you that I, and every disabled person I know, is genuinely scared of the consequences for us if you allow Lord Freud’s proposals to proceed. 

Yours

<Signature>

You Couldn't Make it Up...

We already knew that the Welfare Reform Bill was making some creative interpretations of standard parliamentary behaviour - such as putting a controversial bill into Grand Committee, but the nuance I found out about a couple of hours ago had me picking my jaw up from where it had hit the floor.

I was already aware that Clause 102 of the WRB was going to introduce measures to allow DWP to recover overpayments made through its own errors, which may seem obvious and reasonable, but is more of a problem than most people will realise. The problem is that errors in payments may go on for a period of years before errors are noticed (a friend of mine had underpayments stretching back a significant number of years before DWP admitted there was an error), and by the time the error is realised we may be talking about a very substantial amount of money, particularly for someone living far below the poverty line on benefits. Equally that overpayment will have led people completely innocently into expenditure that they wouldn't have made if they had been budgeting for the amount DWP should have been paying them. They may not have been entitled to the money, but in a very real sense they will be the ones punished for the DWP's error.

Lord Freud insists that the DWP will be understanding about repayment rates, but frankly their reputation for being understanding about anything isn't good. As I say, I knew about this provision, but what had my jaw bouncing off the carpet was learning that it is going to be retroactive, an ex post facto law is the technical term. Why is it going to be retroactive? Because DWP have been forcing people to pay back overpayments for a while now, and have just realised it might not actually have been legal.

Now a normal person would expect the reaction to be a bunch of red faces, and then a quiet apology and re-payment of the sums involved to people who have bullied into repayments they couldn't afford and weren't legally obliged to make. But that isn't how DWP-think works. If DWP has broken the law, then the best way to react isn't to make amends, it is to change the law retroactively so that what they did is now legal, even if it wasn't at the time they did it, and that is what clause 102 of the Welfare Reform Bill does. Many countries (such as the US, and Iran) outlaw ex post facto laws, and the UK is theoretically forbidden from ex post facto criminal law by the European Convention on Human Rights, but there's no exclusion from passing ex post facto civil law, and apparently we have something of a tradition of it. I think that's something that will shock people, I know that it is something that has shocked me, and isn't it reasonable that we should expect government to obey the laws of the land as they stood at that time, not gerrymander the law to retroactively legalise their illegal cockups?

Terminally ill people told to go back to work

Not content with the current cuts to benefits, the Department of Work and Pensions has been sending worrying letters about the Welfare Reform Bill, which has yet to be passed.

Terminally ill people claiming Employment and Support Allowance have received letters telling them that as of April 2012, ESA will only be paid for a year to those in the Work-Related Activity group. However, this change is retrospective so people currently receiving ESA could lose it when the new rule comes in.

Understandably this news has been met with shock by disability groups. Neil Coyle of Disability Alliance told the Guardian: "The impact of cutting support will be devastating for people already told they only have a limited time left to live. Many will have worked for years and will feel they deserve a little support in return until they pass away.”

It is reported that the cost of sending these notification letters is £2.7m.

A DWP spokesman said “The process of working may be helpful in giving [terminally ill people] a sense of being useful and prolonging their lives.” But in a economic climate where it’s hard enough for an able-bodied person to find work, the challenge of finding work for someone with a life-limiting condition may be a step too far.

Lib Dem Minister Washes Hands Over ESA Criticism

Steve Webb, the junior Liberal Democrat minister left in charge at the DWP while his Tory bosses are on holiday, has responded to the savage criticism (in oh-so-polite parliamentary language) of his department's handling of ESA figures by both the Select Committee on Work and Pensions and the UK Statistical Authority (which considered the situation bad enough it had to invoke its statutory powers to intervene), by writing to Dame Anne Begg, chair of the Select Committee.

Yet according to Dame Anne, his response addresses neither the criticism of the language used around the statistics, nor the use of the statistics, nor the Select Committee's call for DWP to discuss the use of the statistics with newspaper editors and did nothing to reassure her over the DWP's off-the-record briefings to newspapers - which leaves you wondering what he did address. Dame Anne described the letter as 'not satisfactory,' 'very short' and 'overly dismissive', while describing ministers as 'shrugging their shoulders'.

It seems the DWP treat the Select Committee with the same contempt they treat us!

See the article here by WWW.DisabilityNewService.Com for the full story.

"Swimmer admits benefit fraud charge"

"Luckily I broke a rib so I won't be going swimming for a couple of weeks," is possibly one of the stranger sentences I have ever uttered. How could hearing a rib go "snap" upon bending down resulting in me being unable to partake of an activity that's good for me possibly be considered "lucky"?

This is how:

A benefits cheat who fraudulently claimed £25,000 in disability payments was caught out after being spotted going swimming on holiday.

I explored a lot of the issues in this post a few months ago, but in short: Swimming is good for me, it's good for keeping my skeleton as strong as possible and helps prevent things like ribs going snap when I bend down. And news stories like this make getting that vital exercise a terrifying prospect because they fuel vigilantism and make it likely that I'll get reported to the DWP accused of "faking" because I can swim a bit.*

I concluded that post in April with the paragraph:

Next year will the DWP be reviewing the entire Paralympic team using the television footage as "evidence" that the athletes are too fit to be disabled?

When actually what happened was something far more bizarre than that, something that I couldn't possibly have imagined: Atos will be designing and building the Paralympic website, as well as providing technology support during the games. As @SaliWho put it "satire is cancelled."

* = Emphasis retrospectively added as I'm gathering from the comments I wasn't sufficiently clear as to the main problem with this case. It's not about whether or not she was actually guilty, it's about the media convincing the general public that ill/disabled people who can swim must be faking. Apologies for my initial lack of clarity; I was a bit of a zombie yesterday after the aforementioned broken rib prevented me from finding a comfortable sleep position the night before so I was trying to function on only a couple of hours sleep.

DWP, The Dodgy Figures Come Home to Roost

The Welfare Reform Bill is the Department of Work and Pension’s flagship benefit reform, a major part of which is the axing of Disability Living Allowance in favour of Personal Independence Payment in order to allow a politically-mandated 20% plus cut in the number of people receiving it (as a historical parallel/reminder, ESA was originally supposed to generate an even smaller cut). The justification of the change was supposedly the 30% increase in people claiming DLA, a rise DWP ‘sources’ described as ‘inexplicable’. The Broken of Britain were challenging these figures as soon as they appeared last year, pointing out ‘The claim is made that DLA claims have risen by 30% in eight years – without accounting for population growth of 5% in this period, a pronounced demographic shift, and increased awareness of DLA.” Their protests, and those of others, were ignored, and the 30% growth was part of the justification used to convince MPs to vote for the Welfare Reform Bill as it passed through Parliament.

In February of this year, Declan Gaffney wrote an article for the prominent political blog Left Foot Forward entitled ‘The ‘inexplicable’ rise in Disability Living Allowance explained’ In this article he points out that 36% of the growth (246,000 of 680,000) comes from people over retirement age, which is actually explained entirely by existing DLA recipients reaching retirement age as it isn’t possible to start a new DLA claim after retiring. And as DLA was only introduced in 1992 the number of people claiming it and then retiring will continue to grow for a number of years yet. So 36% of the ‘inexplicable’ increase is immediately explained by simple logic. He then points out that demographic change, the growth in the population and other related changes -- more simple logic, absolutely basic stuff for this kind of analysis, accounts for another 125,000, meaning we have now explained over half of the supposedly ‘inexplicable’ growth. The remainder does represent an increase in the rate at which DLA is received, but Gaffney goes further, noting that increases in the receipt of DLA by children are related primarily to Learning Disabilities and Mental Health, and can likely be explained by greater awareness, and now 71% of the ‘inexplicable’ growth has been explained. That leaves 199,000 cases to be explained, these are the working age cases which are actually relevant to the government’s argument, but, rather than 30%, they now represent 8%. Gaffney notes that the rate of new claims has actually dropped slightly, and the rate of claims ending has increased slightly, and speculates that this may relate to a historical rise in rates of disability in the ‘90s and that the figures are playing ‘catch up’. He also notes that the wording in the report is ‘almost designed to foster misinterpretation’, talking about the ‘subjectivity and complexity’ of claims, which is interesting wording indeed when you remember that ministers have been continually pushing the line that DLA is too ‘complex’.

Despite all of the arguments against it from Disabled People, groups such as Broken of Britain and Where’s the Benefit, and from disability charities and anti-cuts groups the Welfare Reform Bill has ground its way through the Commons and was all set to head into the Lords in July when at the last minute it was postponed until September. And then last week, on Monday, at the peak of the national crisis over the rioting, DWP released a new report, which Declan Gaffney has again dissected in an article for Left Foot Forward, DWP admits disability reform based on dodgy figures, as reported by Left Foot Forward He notes the growth figure has now dropped to 29%, while DWP now admit that the figures for recipients over 65 “distorts the overall picture of growth”. Correcting for that drops the growth to 23%, demographic changes drop that figure to 16%, Yet even as it admitted comprehensively screwing up the original figures, DWP was briefing its tame tabloid attack hacks, leading to the Daily Express claiming that ‘Handouts for Disability Soar by 185%’, as reported by the TUC’s Touchstone Blog which also notes that the population has aged as it increases, yet another reason for DLA claims to have increased, and that the increases are concentrated in the early years of the benefit, which was to be expected as DLA Lower Rate was a new benefit rather than a replacement for an existing one, and therefore would be expected to bring in a new population of claimants over a period of years, while also noting that what the tabloids reported as an incomprehensible rise in the number of young men in receipt of DLA was actually simply a rise in people first receiving it as children. In fact, the Touchstone article notes, the DLA statistics figures show a steadily declining rate of increase, with the latest figures representing the lowest rate of increase since the benefit was introduced.

So DWP has been caught using dodgy figures and logic and has owned up to it, problem solved? Not exactly, because the government has used that now unsupportable 30% figure as a substantial part of its justification for getting the Welfare Reform Bill through the House of Commons. MPs have been convinced that the Welfare Reform Bill was needed to stop an out-of-control disability benefit by that 30% figure, and it turns out that not only wasn’t 30% even the right figure, but the growth was built into DLA by the way it was designed and would have petered out in a few more years. Those MPs have taken that false argument and used it to justify their votes for the Welfare Reform Bill, and those votes can’t be taken back. In fact, but for the postponement of its date in the Lords, it wouldn’t just be MPs voting for the Bill based on dodgy figures, but Lords as well. And, as Declan Gaffney goes on to note, not only does that dodgy figure mean MPs have been misled, but it means the whole basis for replacing DLA with PIP has to be called into question, because if DWP hadn’t identified blatantly obvious reasons for the increase like people retiring, then it probably didn’t understand anything else about DLA, or the impact of the changes it proposed to make.

And then things turned even more dodgy. The regular Left Foot Forward commenter ‘Mason Dixon, Autistic’ was reading through the new report and noticed something odd about the dates, it was published on Monday 8^th August, but it was signed off in May 2011. And of course May was when MPs were voting on the second reading of the Welfare Reform Bill based on the 30% figure, while July, but for the postponement, was when the Lords would have voted on it, also based on the 30% figure, and now it has finally been released, three months late, and buried on the worst Bad News Day in recent memory. Left Foot Forward picked up his point and ran with it in a third story, Why did DWP delay releasing new data until after welfare reform bill cleared Commons? analysing the last quarter’s comparable releases from DWP and finding that with only one exception they are released in the same month they are signed off, and that exception is the one in which the DWP shows itself using dodgy figures to support a Bill passing through parliament. There is a very real suspicion that DWP have hidden figures that would have undermined the case for the Welfare Reform Bill and cast major questions over the preparation behind the Bill; while hiding those figures amounts to DWP having deliberately and consciously misled Parliament. Left Foot Forward have presented DWP with a string of questions over the delayed report, the preparation behind the changes to DLA and how Parliament was kept informed. The answers should be fascinating, if for nothing else than for watching DWP squirm, but potentially for so much more.

Nor is this the only problem the DWP is having with statistics. Having been savaged in a report by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions over its reporting of ESA related statistics and the headlines they relate to in the press, the DWP have this week been hauled before the government’s statistical headmaster and told that they had better pull their socks up. The chairman of the UK Statistics Authority has written to the chair of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, telling them that, in his opinion as the official watchdog on government use of statistics, DWP have failed to reach an acceptable level of clarity in their reporting of ESA statistics. He specifically draws attention to the failure to make clear that people in the ESA Work Related Activity Group are not fit for work, and the similar failure to show the effect of the rate of successful appeals on the overall figures, and states that he is therefore invoking his statutory powers to require DWP to conform to the Code of Practice for Official Statistics in regard to reporting of these figures (astoundingly government statistics are not required to follow this code unless they are designated 'National Statistics' or UK Statistics Authority has exercised their authority to require it under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, which is what they are doing here). His statement in the letter that ‘The presentation of statistical releases is the responsibility of departmental statisticians, not their Ministers.’ appears to be a direct message that ministers, and the political ‘Departmental Special Advisers’ (aka SPADs) should keep their political fingers out of DWP’s statistical reporting.

So not remotely a good week for DWP, but the question I’m personally starting to wonder about is at what point sheer incompetence, or politically directed misreporting, crosses the borders of legality to become subject to criminal charges of Misfeasance in Public Office.

Work Capability Assessment – Year 2 call for evidence

The Independent Review of the Work Capability Assessment is calling for evidence. You can see some of what we have written about this assessment here, and I am sure that many of you will have plenty of your own stories.

Specifically, they are looking for "information that is relevant to how the Work Capability Assessment is operating and what further changes, if any, are needed to improve the process".

You can see the full call for evidence information at the DWP website, where you can download the call for evidence (pdf) and the response document (rtf). They say they will provide information in alternative formats, but that these "may take some time to prepare, so please let us know as soon as possible if they are required". Considering this is a call for information about an assessment for disabled people, you might assume that large print, Braille, audio, BSL or Easy Read formats would have been produced automatically, and the fact that they have not been suggests that they are only expecting contributors to be non-disabled professionals working in the sector. Some could even suggest that the two-month duration of the call for evidence being a relatively short time, and alternative formats of information taking "some time to prepare", that they are hoping to avoid the contributions of disabled benefit claimants, but I couldn't possibly comment on that!

It is vital that the Independent Inquiry looking into the Work Capability Assessment hears from disabled benefit claimants who have undergone this assessment, or have fears about the assessment. It is us who will be most affected by the WCA, so we must not let the inquiry only hear from ATOS assessors and DWP staff about the implementation and impact of the WCA, and "what further changes, if any, are needed to improve the process".

Conclude, then Survey, DWP at Their Finest

The DWP has just issued a report, Attitudes to health and work amongst the working-age population on the public's perception of work as 'good' for us. This report necessarily has to be viewed against the DWP's continuing campaign to portray being out of work as bad for you and explicitly references boosting support for Dame Carol Black's report (which says precisely that) as part of its aims.

Um...

You're conducting research on attitudes towards work as good for you, and one of your expressed objectives is to further the perception of work as good for you. Which part of Anthropology 101 and the danger of predetermining your findings did the author miss?

The danger with the piece is actually that the conclusions seem so reasonable and logical. I am implacably opposed to the position of the DWP, but even I would agree that in most cases work is good for you. And there is the rub, in most cases, not all. For some disabled people, work can be very clearly bad for you. in most cases is inapplicable to the use the DWP will likely put this report, as we can already see from their splash page for the release of the report here. That talks about 80% believing work is good for physical and mental health, with no caveats whatsoever, and that is not at all what the survey says.

There is a major problem in comparing even the expressed aim of the research and the questions asked. Anthropological/Sociological survey design is science in a minefield, just the difference between one word and another of similar meaning can potentially completely change the answers that are given. The survey asked do you think that paid work is generally good or bad for physical or mental health? (my italics, see remainder of paragraph for the reason behind the emphasis). This is so wide a question as to be almost meaningless. If it had been asked in conjuction with do you think that paid work is always good for physical or mental health? then we might have had a useful comparison for understanding how the public actually view long-term health issues and whether they understand that disability really can interfere with the ability to work. But it doesn't ask that, and we have to ask why that might be. And disturbingly, buried in the data tables, three appendices after the final conclusions, is the innocuous statement ‘Don’t know’ responses to questions were removed for this analysis.

It might be argued that I am being unfair to the author by only quoting part of the question above, but I've split it because I want to address the separate problems with the rest of it. The full question actually reads Doing paid work can affect physical or mental health both positively and negatively. Taking everything into account, do you think that paid work is generally good or bad for physical or mental health? Let's look at that initial, italicised, part of the question, because a big part of probing people's understanding is recognising whether they have a good enough grasp on the subject to validate their opinion. It says can affect physical or mental health both positively and negatively, but how many people understand what that negatively might mean? Let's take me as an example; my spinal condition means that working left me feeling like I had a second degree burn over most of my lower body on pretty much a daily basis, frequently in so much pain that I could barely string two thoughts together. Hands-up if you think the survey population considered the possibility of 'negative' effects on that level when answering the question? And if they didn't consider it, then doesn't that specifically mean we have to throw out any conclusions based on the question, particularly any attempt to use the results in relation to disability and long-term illness?

We then progress from bad to worse. The author sets out to compare attitudes to short and long term conditions, but her examples of long term conditions are as follows: The first long-term scenario asked respondents to imagine they were in paid work, had long-term back pain and were currently in a phase when their back was particularly sore. The second long-term scenario asked respondents to imagine they were in paid work, had long-term depression and were currently in a phase of feeling particularly down. Back pain and depression, the two disabilities which everyone is convinced they understand, and almost no one does. I have already described what my experience of back pain feels like, is sore really an adequate descriptor for the possible extent of disability we are discussing here? And where understanding is bad for back pain, it is far, far worse for depression. In fact the report itself acknowledges this limitation, but only in the very last paragraph of Appendix A.

The survey then goes on to look at whether people have gone into work when feeling ill, and notes that people with long term health conditions are more likely to have done this than those without. Unfortunately the questions fail to allow for the every-damn-day factor of long term disability. Someone without a long term health condition may not go into work with what they perceive as severe backache, because they'll be back at work in a couple of days, but if, like me, you experience a far more severe level of pain on a daily basis, then you have no option but to go in, because tomorrow will not be better, nor the day after that, nor... If I want to work, I have to go in no matter how I feel, because I feel severe pain every damn day! Yet at the same time as someone disabled may be more likely to have gone in, through lack of any alternative, they are also far more likely to recognise that pain or depression may make it impossible to work, but the questions fail to present them with the option to say that. (Notably several tables include data indicating as many as 1 in 8 participants have spontaneously insisted on answering 'it depends', clearly indicating that a significant number of participants recognised major structural problems with the questions they were being asked).

Participants were then probed as to why they worked while feeling unwell (assuming they had), but again the questions fall apart when looked at in the light of experience of different levels of sickness/disability and the reality of long term conditions. The answers are unavoidably individual and simply cannot be extended to the general case.

Next up was whether people might have pulled sickies and why (6% had), and I actually don't have any problems with this question, just as long as it doesn't turn up being used to claim anyone going sick is faking it (and this is the DWP, so all bets are off).

The questions then move on to whether GPs and Employers should have an input into how long someone is off sick, with a disturbing 53% thinking employers should have a role. Again the issue of truly understanding the question arises and I suspect the 53% who think employers should have a say are people who have never faced an Occupational Health department who are part of the problem rather than part of the cure.

There is one very interesting breakdown that comes out of this section: Respondents with long-standing illness, disability or infirmity which did not limit activities were also much less likely (46 per cent) to agree that employers should have a say when compared to respondents with no long-standing illness, disability or infirmity (54 per cent). (my italics). As a first point this does suggest that experience of disability significantly changes views on how useful it is to involve OH in sickness for the worse, but as a second point, isn't which did not limit activities an absolutely fascinating qualification?

A string of questions then follow based on asking for help in the back pain and depression scenarios and the likelihood of getting it. All of the previous caveats apply, people who are not disabled are likely to severely underestimate the degree of disability potentially involved and are unlikely to have an educated understanding of possible employer attitudes to requesting reasonable adjustments. It isn't that the questions are invalid, rather that the survey population are incompetent (in a non-pejorative sense) to answer them, and this means that the conclusions absolutely cannot be used to represent a general case. Similar concerns apply to a following set of questions on the help expected from GPs.

A question on whether colleagues come into work when sick, which is reasonable, is then followed by a final question on whether colleagues call in sick when not sick. 'Objection, M'lud! Calls for speculation on the part of the witness.'

The report then moves on to its conclusions section and quickly states: To see improvements we would expect the percentages who agree (that work is good for you) to increase. The preset thinking that work is universally good for you is all too apparent and again casts major questions over the entire survey structure and the independence of its conclusions.

Amidst some relatively innocuous conclusions is a statement that: Far more respondents agreed that GPs should advise them (not to work) under the back pain scenario when compared to the depression scenario. No attention is drawn to the poor, if not downright biased, understanding of depression in the general population.

Alarmingly the report then states: the information will be of use as the health work and well-being agenda develops more widely. It also provides information that will be of use as the Government develops its plans for healthcare reform and also reforms to welfare benefits. Welfare benefits here undoubtedly refers to disability benefits, yet I have just demonstrated that the entire findings of the report are completely inapplicable to questions of disability due to the structure of the survey population and the inappropriate nature of the question design.

The conclusions then state: The findings are broadly positive and show that the health benefits of work are widely recognised among the working-age population That something is believed is not the same as it being positive. Much of the population once believed that the world was flat, that was a workable approximation if you never got more than five miles from the place you were born, but not exactly one we would now call positive. We now have the subtlety of understanding that tells us that the world can be considered flat over short distances, but over longer ones we must recognise that it is round. Similarly, the population may believe work is good for you, but we need them to understand the subtler distinction that work is good for most people, but for a significant number of people with disabilities, work is actually bad for them. Only that subtler understanding may genuinely be labelled positive, and that is not what the survey has measured.

Moving into the appendices, in Appendix A a worrying statement is made that: An initial set of survey questions was drafted by Health, Work and Well-being (HWWB) analysts and revised following discussion and consultation with policy colleagues and analysts from ONS, Independent Social Research (ISR), Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Department of Health (DH), Scottish Government and Welsh Government. There appears to have been no independent review of the questions from outside of government, most particularly from Disabled People's Organistions or disability specialists in academia, and yet, as I have hopefully demonstrated, with only an interested amateur's knowledge of anthropology/sociology surveying, though considerable knowledge of disability, it is all too easy to raise major questions over the entire structure of the survey. Concern must also come from the attaching of the DWP survey to the ONS's omnibus survey, which could potentially confer stature on the DWP survey through association.

The appendices also note that around 35% of selected individuals declined to take part and that results have been weighted to reflect the absence of these individuals. No consideration is given to the potential that some of these individuals may have declined to take part specifically because their experience of DWP behaviour and use of statistics towards disabled people causes them to profoundly distrust the motivation and lack of bias within DWP, and that their answers to the questions might not have reflected the general distribution within their geographical/age/sex based sub-groups.

To reduce the problems with the report to an analogy that might be more generally accessible to non-disabled people, it's as though Nature had asked 2000 random people whether the Universe's 'missing mass' was best explained by a) the Higgs Boson, b) another WIMP, c) String Theory, d) the Cosmological Constant, or e) all of the above; and then published it as serious astrophysical research. Being able to offer an opinion is not the same as being able to offer an informed opinion and the conclusions of the survey can only be used within the scope of that limitation.

In the author's defence, the report states she has now moved on to work for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, strongly suggesting she is not a disability specialist and may genuinely not have recognised the weakness of her questions, but that excuses her, not the findings of her report and raises the further question of whether the DWP has any understanding of the scientific concept of independent peer review and why it is an absolute necessity?

Based on previous behaviour from the DWP we have to expect the likelihood that the findings will soon be mis-cited in support of a new set of attacks aimed at people with long term spinal conditions and/or clinical depression, implying that we should all be able to work through them and not need to access disability benefits, no matter that the overall structure and experience of the survey population renders them completely inappropriate to cast judgement on people with disabilities and that serious questions must be raised over the independence of the conclusions given the clear flaws in the survey design.

DWP Uses BBC as Puppet Yet Again

Today the Work and Pensions Committee released its long-awaited report into the widespread failings in the ATOS execution of the ESA Work Capability Assessment - disabled people being hounded out of their benefits by a foreign-owned multinational with a cushy government contract, sounds like just the kind of story to get any journalist to roll out their righteous indignation, right?

But no, what do the BBC lead with: "Tests claim few benefit claimants 'unfit to work'", with the Work and Pensions Committee report relegated to halfway down the page with a suggestion that there has been 'some criticism' rather than the near universal criticism that is the reality. Purely by coincidence (yeah, right - the last quarterly report released on a Wednesday, not a Tuesday), the DWP have chosen today to release their new ESA figures, again claiming that only 7% of ESA claimants are unfit for work. As I showed in my analysis of the BBC report on the previous figures a more reasonable interpretation would be that 43% of people assessed are unfit for work. Interestingly the DWP's own page on the press release states "New statistics published by DWP today show that over a third (39 per cent) of those who claim Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) are assessed as fit for work." So that would be 61% not assessed as fit to work by the DWP's own statement, when did 61% become 'few'?

That the BBC have to include an 'Analysis' section in their report explaining that the figures are more complex than whether someone is unfit for work or not and have to be taken in context (a context the article fails to provide), no matter the implication the headlines will already have firmly implanted in the reader, suggests that there is division within the newsroom on how the story should be handled, with the authors recognising that the form of the story as cast by editorial diktat will be fundamentally misleading; and if that is the case, then isn't the BBC failing to meet the requirements of its Charter that it serve the public interest?

We've grown to expect the disablist propaganda of the DWP and the outright bigotry of the Daily Mail, a hate-mongering rag which makes the late and unlamented News of the World look like an edition of the Church Times, but shouldn't we expect better of the BBC, shouldn't we DEMAND better of the BBC?

BREAKING NEWS!!! Government Delays Welfare Reform Bill...

This just in from the Disability Alliance. I'm sure they won't mind me posting it in full:

Government delays Welfare Reform Bill

The Government has been forced to delay the 2nd Reading of the flagship Bill in the Lords due to peers' concerns over the people affected.

DWP is suggesting other business has blocked progress but the surprise postponement till September from Tues will also give the Government time to lobby peers and answer the queries raised in DA's legal challenge

This is wonderful, surprising, startling news!!! I need a little lie down before I say any more, but remember this - if it gives the government more time to lobby, it gives us more time too :)

Picklesgate: How Many DWP Ministers Have Lied to the House?

The revelation of Eric Pickles' January letter to the PM expecting 40,000 homeless families as a result of benefit caps and housing benefit changes looks like touching off a row in the Commons as to whether Tory ministers have been systematically lying to Parliament.

An article in the Guardian identifies a DWP report in February and statements in the House by Chris Grayling (Welfare Minister), Grant Shapps (Housing Minister), Maria Miller (Minister for Patronising Disabled People) as all stating that it is either impossible to quantify the number of affected households or that the problem will not get worse. Yet Eric Pickles' Community Department delivered precisely that quantification of the problem into the Prime Minister's hands in January.

Labour are expected to try and force an urgent question on the issue in Parliament today.

According to the DWP it does not accept the figures in the letter and "There might be some people who have to move to a less expensive area. But that doesn't mean they won't have anywhere to live. We are very optimistic about the behavioural change that this will bring about" Behavioural change? That would be us mere plebs not expecting to be able to continue living near right-thinking, posh Tory voters then?

The DWP spokesperson also said "We cannot carry on with a situation where people on benefits can receive more in welfare payments than hard-working families" But what if those people on benefits need that amount of money simply to survive while supporting family members with complex needs?

Disabled = Hate Target?

BBC Radio Kent led off the Breakfast Show today with me talking about the deteriorating situation on the street for disabled people as a result of the continual stream of press releases from DWP, which pick the most egregious examples of benefit fraud they can find, which are then described in the most outrageous way possible by the tabloids and end up giving the man in the street the impression that every disabled person is faking their disability, which they then use as justification for abusing any random disabled person they come across.

The interview on the Breakfast Show was backed up by interviews with Scope and a professor from UKC, they then did an hour long phone-in on the Julia George show, which had a couple of callers who demonstrated exactly the kind of problems we face, and I was able to email Julia George while the discussion was going on to allow her to put the lie to what was being claimed. She also interviewed Katherine Quarmby about her new book 'Scapegoat', which talks about the wider disability hate crime problem.

Next (busy day!) I was interviewed on camera by BBC South East for a piece on the same topic for South East Today, which had a brief snippet at 1:30PM and should have the full version at 6:30PM.

The Radio Kent Breakfast Show is available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00h6qvy/Breakfast_with_John_Warnett_and_Clare_McDonnell_13_06_2011/ (apologies for the full link, but Blogger doesn't seem to want to embed it) . The interview with me starts 9 minutes in, and a shortened version is repeated at 1:07 along with the interview with Scope, while at 2:08 they have the professor from UKC.

The Julia George show is up on iPlayer. The phone-in about disability hate crime is the first hour of the show.

Both radio shows should be available for the next 7 days if I understand iPlayer correctly.

South East Today is at 6:30 PM and can also be watched at the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011w6pf (blogger having problems again) . Unfortunately they don't seem to put that on iPlayer, so you'll have to catch it there and then if you want to watch it over the net.

More Sloppy BBC 'Journalism'

In a new article on BBC Politics, Auntie takes a look at the situation with WCA and the charities protesting against it (no mention of disabled peoples groups -- I guess we don't count). Just for once they actually give enough detail to demonstrate that there clearly are failures in the design and implementation of WCA, though they do tend to take the Harrington Report on trust.

But then they cite last month's ESA figures and sum them up as "Only 6% of claims - 73,500 people - were considered to be entitled to full ESA support."

Hang on a minute, 6%? Where did that come from? 94% of applicants aren't entitled to ESA?

Look closer and the problem becomes clear, Auntie can't add up.

1,175,700 people applied for ESA in the period covered by the stats.

According to Auntie, 887,300 people (75.5%) had their claims rejected or were forced into withdrawing their claims --which doesn't mean they aren't disabled, flaws in the WCA are, after all, the supposed point of the article. Going to the original DWP source data shows that these split roughly 50:50 (39% 'fit for work': 36% 'withdrew claim').

Which leaves 288,400 people (24.5%) who passed the WCA, four times as many as Auntie's '6%'.

73,500 people (6.25%) passed the WCA and were placed in the Support Group.

Leaving 214,900 people (18.25%) left over. Auntie only missed 200,000+ people from the stats....

Those 214,900 people break down into:

188,300 people (16%) who passed the WCA and were placed in WRAG.

26,700 people (2.25%) who have assessments still in progress and have neither passed nor failed the WCA.

But it's even worse. Those aren't the final figure, they are the statistics before appeal. And the statistics for appeal are that 36% of people found fit for work appeal, and 39% of those succeed.

When you allow for appeals, 235,800 people (20%) have been placed in the WRAG and 77,100 people (7%) have been placed in Support Group, with only 407,300 people (35%) assessed as fit for work.

Disregard the withdrawn claims - Auntie talks about claims being 'considered' and withdrawn ones clearly aren't - and those still in progress to allow us to look only at the assessments that are complete, and we find that the percentages rise to 'Fit For Work': 56.5%, Support Group : 10.5%, WRAG: 32.5%.

So rather than Auntie's 6%, 43% of people who take the WCA actually pass it, 7 times as many as Auntie would have us believe.

You might think that I am being picky, that a careful reading gives most of the figures, that I'm interpreting the data in a different fashion to Auntie, but that isn't the point. Most people don't read articles like this carefully, they don't have the background to know when the figures given by a trusted, supposedly neutral, source are just plain wrong. The impression this article is going to give to most people reading it is that only 6% of ESA applicants are genuinely disabled, and that 94% are faking it or trying it on. I can flag up the flaws in the article, but the damage it does to us is impossible to undo.

A Truth No Longer Fit for the BBC

Mark Easton, the BBC's Home Editor, posted a piece on his blog taking apart last week's DWP attack on us. It's a good, solid article with some actual journalism behind it, considerably better than most coverage out of the BBC in the past fortnight, and points out that the truth is something very considerably different to what the DWP's ministers are trying to have us believe.

But then we get to the comment column, which seems to have been lifted from the Daily Heil and is rife with disablist attacks on disabled benefit claimants. Now remember that the BBC is required to take action against disablism as part of its Public Sector Equality Duty, so surely there's something wrong here? Surely every disablist message is in flagrant breach of the house rules? There are also people like me fighting back, but when I posted a piece to show that Mark's article didn't go far enough, that the deliberate distortion of the truth was far greater than even he had assumed, it vanished into the mists of moderation, not just referred to their normal moderators, but booted up the stack to some sort of uber-moderation. And today they've decided it's 'defamatory' and wiped it entirely.

I talked about 'deliberate distortion of the truth' in the preceding paragraph, but the English language has a shorter term for it, we call it lying, and that's the term I used to sum up what Chris Grayling, the DWP, and Labour before them were doing. And that seems to be where the BBC has a problem. It's easy to demonstrate that the DWP press releases deliberately distort the truth and that they reflect Chris Grayling's deliberate attempts to mislead the public, because he's made exactly the same assaults on us verbally, and that means that my statements are no less than the truth and in the public interest, which therefore cannot be defamation. It is in fact exactly the same conclusion reached by Mark Easton's article. But Auntie Beeb is apparently scared to allow the logical conclusion of its own article to be stated aloud, just as it is scared to enforce its own obligation, both moral and legal, to take a stand against disablism.

So here's that truth that is no longer fit for the BBC, unedited and in my own words:

There's the start of a good article here. I say 'the start' because the reality is even more outrageous than Mark paints it and certainly bears little relation to the twisted 'facts' of the DWP's propaganda -- this is the second four day weekend in a row where they've launched an assault on disabled people, you might almost think they were scared of informed debate...

The truth is that I probably became one of those statistics for withdrawn claims last year. I'm disabled with several different spinal injuries and chronic pain syndrome (and maybe some other stuff -- disability is complicated). When I was finally made redundant, after 4 years of fighting to keep my job and taking my ex-employer to an Employment Tribunal for disability discrimination, I tried claiming JSA, but JCP can't cope with you if you're disabled, can't cope with you if you're highly qualified and god help you if you're both. So in the end, after complaints to ministerial level and abject apologies, JCP asked me to move to ESA.

So I put in my application and laboured through the massive ESA50 form, taking about 9 hours to complete it, and that for someone with considerable writing skills and the ability to explain themselves concisely and clearly. Then came the ATOS WCA assessment. ATOS had been warned in advance that I needed an adjustable chair to have any hope of getting through the assessment, inability to sit for any time, or stand, or sometimes even lie down without severe pain being at the core of my disability, my inability to work and therefore my entire claim. No chair. So we abandoned the assessment at the cost of a wasted trip and considerable pain. But the pain continued to increase even after I got home and I spent the next week not knowing even what day it was, the months after wandering around in a daze from the doubled level of painkillers. In the meantime ATOS called me in for another assessment, but it was months before I was well enough to catch up with my mail and only on receiving a letter four months later telling me my claim had been cancelled was I able to chase through the system and find that ATOS had told DWP I had failed to attend the WCA, carefully omitting to mention their failure to provide the required reasonable adjustment.

Common sense prevailed, with the definite sense from DWP of 'God, not another ATOS cock-up!', and my claim was reinstated. My second WCA was barely better than the first -- the details can be read on Where's the Benefit -- but the ultimate result was that I was placed in the ESA WRAG as clearly not currently fit for work.

And yet for several months, possibly even to this day depending on how the reinstated claim was handled, I would have been one of those statistics for withdrawn claims, supposed evidence of fraudulent intent. It was only my bullheadedness and refusal to give up that got me through, ATOS threw every obstable in my path, and for many disabled people, physically disabled as well as mental, the sheer stress of a claim, the utter contempt for disabled people visible in inaccessible forms, inaccessible centres and the contemptuous manner of the medical professionals will result in claims being withdrawn by people with every right to be placed in the WRAG or even the Support Group.

On top of the claims withdrawn due to the stress placed on claimants, we then need to add those JSA claimants parked onto ESA for a week or two because they are temporarily unable to look for work due to illness, even if they're expected to recover long before the assessment, and certainly not to pass the assessment if their illness lasts that long. Or people in employment who have exhausted SSP but will soon recover. Or people with genuine claims who unexpectedly improve. Or people made redundant for narrowly specific medical reasons, say being medically unfit to hold a PSV license, who are required to file for ESA rather than JSA, even with a disability so narrow that they are guaranteed to fail the WCA, even though there's a good chance of them finding another job before the assessment and withdrawing their claim.

The numbers of withdrawn claims aren't evidence of people attempting to defraud the system, that's Chris Grayling and the DWP (and Labour before them) deliberately lying in order to mislead you. The numbers of withdrawn claims are in fact evidence of the system working precisely as designed. The evidence for this is readily accessible, on disability sides, charity sites, advocacy sites, but the Tory Rags, and now it seems the BBC as well, can't be bothered to do basic research and just run with Grayling's hate-filled spite.

Mark is an honourable exception (though needs to dig a little deeper), but when did journalists lose the ability to do basic research and turn into government propaganda mouthpieces?

#BADD2011 Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, when bloggers around the world get together to blog against the disablism that makes life so unnecessarily difficult for disabled people. Sadly, this year those of us in the UK are operating in a target-rich environment, able to turn our focus on not just individuals and the odd organisation, but media en masse, the Civil Service, politicians, and, most notably, our Prime Minister, David Cameron.

That Cameron’s government is hostile to disabled people is no great revelation, we have been subject to a string of bigoted press releases from the Department of Work and Pensions under his henchman, Chris Grayling, ever since they got into power. The structure of the press releases: data without context, damning headlines that are all too easily shown to be false; even their timing, the last two immediately before four-day weekends to prevent any organised response or reasoned debate, all too readily betray the deliberate intent to smear disabled benefit claimants, and all disabled people alongside them, as feckless scroungers, swinging the lead to avoid working a single real day in their lives. That the Tory Rags should run so eagerly with the ‘story’ isn’t surprising, after all their core readership of Little-Englanders aren’t happy without a minority to hate, but lately even the BBC seems to be falling for the government line. There are scores of analyses out there of the data and the twisted way that the press releases are put together, several of us here on WTB have taken them apart, so have other disabled campaigners, charities, advocacy groups and so on. A journalist wouldn’t even have to exert themselves, the story of the government distorting facts to demonise a minority will put itself together all too readily, but no, Auntie Beeb is reduced to recycling disablist government propaganda, hateful, twisted headlines and all. When did the BBC forget how to do basic research?

Now to a (minute!) degree we can excuse this kind of behaviour from Cameron and Grayling, they’re modern politicians, what the Romans might have considered infames, persons of low moral character, just like pimps and those who ran stables of gladiators, who can’t be expected to aspire to the same standards of behaviour as decent, respectable folk. But Cameron and Grayling aren’t putting out the press releases from the DWP on their own, they are helped in their bigotry by full-time Civil Servants who put together the data, the misleading interpretations, and the twisted headlines for them; who carefully see to it that the Press Releases don’t include the context necessary to understand what the figures really mean and the failures in government policy that they reveal. Civil Servants aren’t supposed to lower themselves to the standards of their ministers, the Civil Service code binds them to a standard of behaviour and restricts their ability to engage in party political behaviour on behalf of their minister, or others, or themselves. That code is summed up in four words: Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality.

The truth is that the disablist press releases began before the Con-Dem government came into power, and that DWP policy has actually remained consistent across two different governments; pushing ESA as the solution to all ills and painting those on IB as deliberate fraudsters outwitting the system with fake disabilities. The reality of ESA’s failure, its harsh descriptors that deliberately and calculatedly fail to account for the reality of many disabilities - to the point that even some the ‘health care practitioners’ who have sold their professional integrity for 30 pieces of silver have complained it is almost impossible for them to score people with cancer or MS as anything other than fit to work, the parody of fairness that is the ATOS-operated WCA, the ludicrous surreality of the access-all-areas ‘imaginary wheelchair’, all are carefully whitewashed out of the picture presented in DWP press-releases. So we have to conclude that there is a cadre of DWP personnel who aren’t just working on these press-releases because they have been told to, but who have actively bought into the ESA and WCA ‘reforms’ and are working to drive them on, no matter who they have to mislead and no matter how many facts they have to twist to do that. And yet these are Civil Servants, subject to the Civil Service Code. Do their actions display Integrity? Well, no, because they’re displaying deliberate deceit. Honesty? No, deliberate falsehoods don’t really count as honest. Objectivity? No, the truth about ESA is there to be seen, but they are busy sweeping that under their subjective carpet, eyes blinded by their own particular interpretation of what is best for the country (and disabled benefit claimants be damned). Impartiality? Well, they are following the same path under two different governments, but that path isn’t one a reasonable person would consider impartial, in fact they might consider it to be very partial indeed. So there we have it, not for DWP civil servants Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality, but Deceit, Falsehood, Subjectivity and Partiality.

No, it’s not good enough and someone needs to sweep out this nest of vipers from the core of disability policy. But, and it’s an awfully big, elephant in the corner kind of but, the Prime Minister, Chris Grayling, the DWP and the media couldn’t get away with this kind of behaviour if they knew that they were operating in a society hostile to disablism. Yet there they go, stabbing us in the back at every chance, actively convincing people that we are legitimate targets for their bigotry. What does that say about our society? What does it say about what is wrong with our society?