How can the government’s new ESA specialist claim he knows nothing about all the deaths?

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Dr Paul Litchfield, here pictured giving evidence at another committee meeting – so it’s probably another load of tripe.

An evidence session on Employment and Support Allowance and Work Capability Assessments was held by the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee on Wednesday – and was notable for the fact that the ‘expert’ hired to review the system claimed to know nothing about the thousands of deaths taking place because of the current system.

Dr Paul Litchfield OBE was hired to take over from Professor Malcolm Harrington to carry out the fourth annual independent review of the assessment process. It seems Prof Harrington was replaced amicably, but evidence has come to light that he was not happy with political decisions that ran against his findings.

A claim that the government was taking “appropriate steps” in areas singled out for improvement by Prof Harrington was disproved when it was revealed that almost two-thirds of the 25 recommendations he made in his year one review were not fully and successfully implemented.

The government also claimed, repeatedly, that Prof Harrington had supported the migration of Incapacity Benefit claimants to ESA. When fellow blogger Sue Marsh contacted him for confirmation, he responded: “I NEVER—repeat–NEVER agreed to the IB migration. I would have preferred that it be delayed but by the time I said that, the political die had been cast. I then said that I would review progress of that during my reviews. The decision was political. I could not influence it. IS THAT CRYSTAL CLEAR?”

The vehemence of his response suggests some friction with his former employers at the very least – and over “political” decisions.

Now we have Dr Litchfield, who claims to have no information about the staggering number of people who have died after going through the assessment system he is being paid to review. Doesn’t that seem – at the very least – a little odd?

He could have, at least, looked up the government’s own statistical release ‘Incapacity Benefits – Deaths of Recipients’ from July 2012. It is long out-of-date and pressure on the government for fresh figures has been stonewalled for two years, but it does show that 10,600 people died between January and November 2011 – including an average of 73 people every week, when the system claimed they were still being assessed or should be getting better. These figures are believed to be inaccurate measures as the government does not monitor deaths of people who have been refused the benefit – the vast majority of claimants.

It seems we are dealing with another Tory yes-man, hired not to improve ESA, but to make it and the government look good.

Dr Litchfield’s attitude is revealed on the video record of the meeting, which is available on the Parliament UK website, starting two hours, 11 minutes and 41 seconds into the recording.

Committee member Debbie Abrahams (Labour) had just received a Tweet stating: “Litchfield doesn’t want to come out and say scrap WCA because 10,600 dead or he’ll be out of a job, slime bag.”

Turning to Litchfield, she said: “I’ve just been contacted by someone who is commenting on the number of people that are dying every week as a result of being found fit for work after an assessment. I don’t know if you’d like to comment on that?”

The response – from the man who is supposed to have every scrap of information about ESA, let us remember – was as follows: “I don’t have any information of that type; I haven’t seen numbers on that. Clearly every case would be a tragedy.”

That is infuriating for campaigners – one of whom contacted Vox Political and stated: “The wicked toad said he had no knowledge of the deaths. What a lie, how evil – it’s common knowledge, it’s DWP’s own figure, it’s been brought up many times in House of Commons debates… They should sack him and not believe a word he says… no impartiality whatsoever.”

It seems the tragedy, in this case, is the hiring of Dr Litchfield.

Thanks to Katy Marchant for flagging this up.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Have 230,000 sick and disabled people been wrongly knocked off-benefit and forgotten?

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Claimants for inactive benefits and the economically inactive – inactivity benefits: This chart shows claimants of Employment and Support Allowance, and Incapacity Benefit (the red dots), compared with survey figures for the economically inactive owing to long-term sickness.

After all the government’s efforts to kick people off long-term sickness benefits, the number of claimants has risen – but statistics seem unable to account for nearly a quarter of a million people.

Even though Atos and now other private assessors are working hard to meet increased reassessment targets for Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance, the government is paying out more money on these benefits – to around two million claimants.

This is a surprise for an administration that has been merrily throwing people off-benefit since it came into office, but it raises an important question: What has happened to those people?

In its January labour market report, the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion said; “The number of the economically inactive who were long-term sick or disabled rose by 40,000… as did the benefit figure. The rise in the benefit figures shows ‘early estimates’ of benefit numbers.

“The rise in both ESA/IB claimants and in the comparable survey measure is a surprise given continued IB reassessment. The impact of IB reassessment on the total claimant numbers appears to be negligible as yet, although there remains some way to go with assessments and (particularly) appeals. This factor will need to be watched closely.”

You see, the expectation was for the figure to be much lower. We know from the DWP itself that benefit reassessments have been taking place at a rate of 11,000 per week, and the assessors have been finding 68 per cent of claimants ‘fit for work’.

This means that in the last year, the work capability assessment will have found 389,000 people ‘fit for work’ and kicked them off-benefit. Around 40 per cent of them – 155,600 – are likely to have appealed, in which case they will still be on the system.

So the number of claimants would have dropped to 1,806,600. We now have 2 million claimants. Some of them will be brand new; some of them may be re-claims. We don’t know how many.

The fraud rate is 0.7 per cent. Assuming all those people have given up pretending to be sick/disabled, that means 1,634 people correctly had their benefits cut off, while 231,766 were treated unfairly by the assessors

This suggests that a number between 191,766 and 231,766 people have been wrongly knocked off the books. Where are they?

Is there a fault in this logic? Or is this figure the reason the Coalition government, Department for Work and Pensions, and Iain Duncan Smith in particular will not release the mortality figures, showing the number of people who have died within six weeks of assessment/reassessment?

We don’t have enough information to know for sure, but the implications are terrifying.

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New threat to UK economy as Calamity George vows to give it “110 per cent”

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110 per cent, Atos, austerity, Bank of England, benefit, claimant, claimants, Coalition, Daily, death, deaths, debt, Department for Work and Pensions, disabled, DWP, Easing, George, jobseeker, Jobseekers, national, oppression, oppressive, Osborne, Quantitative, suicide, tax, Telegraph, Treasury, Workfare

According to the Telegraph, George Osborne has promised that the Coalition will give “110 per cent attention” to boosting the economy after the Bank of England admitted there will be no growth at all this year.

He’s like a child trying to appease Mum and Dad: “I’m sorry we’ve got nothing to show for the last two years but we’ll give it 110 per cent from now on!”

I have a doubt about that. Not about his sincerity; about his ability.

He says he’s got the deficit down – but did he do it in the right way? I suspect the thousands of disabled benefit claimants who’ve lost their benefits in the Atos* debacle would say no – as, I’m sure, would all those who committed suicide because they could see no way to carry on living after the DWP cut them off, on advice from Atos. That’s not good government – that’s oppression.

The tens of thousands of jobseekers who were unfairly cut off from their benefits because the DWP’s correspondence about Workfare was badly written would probably have something to say about this as well. Not only is the correspondence bad but Workfare itself is oppressive to the jobseeker and terrible for the economy! It makes no economic sense at all to supply businesses with workers for free when they should be taking on employees to do the job and paying them a living wage – part of which would then come back to the Treasury in taxes, boosting the economy and reducing national debt at the same time.

It is clear that the “austerity” agenda has done nothing for the economy. That’s no surprise. If you cut the money going into a project – be it a business concern or a public service – you’ll have cash left over, sure – but you won’t have made any profit; you’ll have made a saving. The two things are not the same and you can’t build the economy by saving money. In fact, as far as both business and public services are concerned, you’re dismantling the very machinery you need, in order to rebuild!

Finally, perhaps somebody could explain to me why the Bank of England has been so obsessed with Quanititative Easing? As far as I can tell, all this has done is provide the banks with billions of pounds of free money. What have they done with it all? They’re not lending it, as intended. My understanding was that the money has been used to buy big houses in, is it Portland Street? And on fixing up those houses. I’m willing to stand corrected on that if anyone knows better and the point is that the only organisations that have benefited from the money are the banks themselves – the very organisations that caused the economic mess in the first place (carry on about Labour’s lack of regulation if you like but the bare fact is that the bankers all made their own choices and it turned out that those choices were wrong).

According to the Telegraph, George Osborne’s going to give the economy 110 per cent. If it improves by 110 per cent (impossible, as the maximum percentage of anything is 100) we’ll be in exactly the same place we are now – because 110 per cent of nothing is still nothing.

*According to a commentator on Sue Marsh’s excellent Diary of a Benefit Scrounger blog, ATOS means “Authorised To Organise Slaughter”.