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What would YOU ask David Cameron in Public Prime Minister’s Questions?

27 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Austerity, Bedroom Tax, Benefits, Business, Cost of living, Democracy, Economy, Employment, European Union, Food Banks, Fracking, Health, Housing, Human rights, Justice, Law, Politics, Poverty, Privatisation, Trade Unions, UK, USA, Utility firms

≈ 41 Comments

Tags

Andrew Marr, association, austerity, BBC, bedroom tax, benefit, benefit cap, Coalition, companies, company, Conservative, David Cameron, dead, death, die, economy, Ed Miliband, employment, energy, firm, food banks, fracking, freedom, Freedom of Information, government, health, hedge fund, human right, Investment Partnership, Justice, kill, Labour, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mislead, misled, National Health Service, NHS, people, pmq, politics, price, Prime Minister's Questions, privatisation, privatise, public, quality, Royal Mail, sick, social security, speech, Tories, Tory, trade union, Transatlantic Trade, transparent, TTIP, unemployment, Vox Political, Wednesday Shouty Time, welfare reform, work


Mile-wide: Mr Miliband explained his idea to bridge the gulf between the public and the Prime Minister to Andrew Marr.

Mile-wide: Mr Miliband explained his idea to bridge the gulf between the public and the Prime Minister to Andrew Marr.

Ed Miliband engaged in a particularly compelling piece of kite-flying today (July 27) – he put out the idea that the public should have their own version of Prime Minister’s Questions.

Speaking to Andrew Marr, he said such an event would “bridge the ‘mile-wide’ gulf between what people want and what they get from Prime Minister’s Questions”, which has been vilified in recent years for uncivilised displays of tribal hostility between political parties and their leaders (David Cameron being the worst offender) and nicknamed ‘Wednesday Shouty Time’.

“I think what we need is a public question time where regularly the prime minister submits himself or herself to questioning from members of the public in the Palace of Westminster on Wednesdays,” said Mr Miliband.

“At the moment there are a few inches of glass that separates the public in the gallery from the House of Commons but there is a gulf a mile wide between the kind of politics people want and what Prime Minister’s Questions offers.”

What would you ask David Cameron?

Would you demand a straight answer to the question that has dogged the Department for Work and Pensions for almost three years, now – “How many people are your ‘welfare reform’ policies responsible for killing?”

Would you ask him why his government, which came into office claiming it would be the most “transparent” administration ever, has progressively denied more and more important information to the public?

Would you ask him whether he thinks it is right for a Prime Minister to knowingly attempt to mislead the public, as he himself has done repeatedly over the privatisation of the National Health Service, the benefit cap, the bedroom tax, food banks, fracking…? The list is as long as you want to make it.

What about his policies on austerity? Would you ask him why his government of millionaires insists on inflicting deprivation on the poor when the only economic policy that has worked involved investment in the system, rather than taking money away?

His government’s part-privatisation of the Royal Mail was a total cack-handed disaster that has cost the nation £1 billion and put our mail in the hands of hedge funds. Would you ask him why he is so doggedly determined to stick to privatisation policies that push up prices and diminish quality of service. Isn’t it time some of these private companies were re-nationalised – the energy firms being prime examples?

Would you want to know why his government has passed so many laws to restrict our freedoms – of speech, of association, of access to justice – and why it intends to pass more, ending the government’s acknowledgement that we have internationally-agreed human rights and restricting us to a ‘Bill of Rights’ dictated by his government, and tying us to restrictive lowest-common-denominator employment conditions laid down according to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a grubby little deal that the EU and USA were trying to sign in secret until the whistle was blown on it?

Would you ask him something else?

Or do you think this is a bad idea?

What do you think?

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Do YOU feel as prosperous as you were before the crisis?

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Austerity, Benefits, Business, Cost of living, Economy, Employment, European Union, Food Banks, Housing, Neoliberalism, People, Politics, Poverty, Trade Unions, UK

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

austerity, BBC, benefit, borrowing, bubble, David Cameron, dead, death, deficit, die, economy, Ed Balls, EU, Europe, exchange rate, expensive, export, food bank, G7, GDP, government, groceries, grocery, Gross Domestic Product, grow, Guardian, help to buy, housing, Huffington Post, Iain Duncan Smith, IMF, inflation, International Monetary Fund, Investment Partnership, John Mills, Keith Joseph, Lynton Crosby, Mandatory Work Activity, manufacture, manufacturing, Margaret Thatcher, national Statistics, neoliberal, Nicholas Ridley, office, ONS, peak, pre-crisis, prosper, purge, re-balance, sanction, shopping, Transatlantic Trade, TTIP, unemployment, union, Universal Credit, Workfare


[Image: David Symonds for The Guardian, in February this year.]

[Image: David Symonds for The Guardian, in February this year.]

Britain has returned to prosperity, with the economy finally nudging beyond its pre-crisis peak, according to official figures.

Well, that’s a relief, isn’t it? Next time you’re in the supermarket looking for bargains or mark-downs because you can’t afford the kind of groceries you had in 2008, you can at least console yourself that we’re all doing better than we were back then.

The hundreds of thousands of poor souls who have to scrape by on handouts from food banks will, no doubt, be bolstered by the knowledge that Britain is back on its feet.

And the relatives of those who did not survive Iain Duncan Smith’s brutal purge of benefit claimants can be comforted by the thought that they did not die in vain.

Right?

NO! Of course not! Gross domestic product might be up 3.1 per cent on last year but it’s got nothing to do with most of the population! In real terms, you’re £1,600 per year worse-off!

The Conservatives who have been running the economy since 2010 have re-balanced it, just as they said they would – but they lied about the way it would be re-balanced and as a result the money is going to the people who least deserve it; the super-rich and the bankers who caused the crash in the first place.

You can be sure that the mainstream media won’t be telling you that, though.

Even some of the figures they are prepare to use are enough to cast doubt on the whole process. The UK economy is forecast to be the fastest-growing among the G7 developed nations according to the IMF (as reported by the BBC) – but our export growth since 2010 puts us below all but one of the other G7 nations, according to Ed Balls in The Guardian.

And it is exports that should be fuelling the economy, according to JML chairman John Mills in the Huffington Post. He reckons the government needs to invest in manufacturing and achieve competitive exchange rates in order to improve our export ability.

“Since most international trade is in goods and not in services, once the proportion of the economy devoted to producing internationally tradable goods drops below about 15 per cent, it becomes more and more difficult to combine a reasonable rate of growth and full employment with a sustainable balance of payments position,” he writes.

“In the UK, the proportion of GDP coming from manufacturing is now barely above 10 per cent. Hardly surprising then that we have not had a foreign trade surplus balance since 1982 – over thirty years ago – while our share of world trade which was 10.7 per cent in 1950 had fallen by 2012 to no more than 2.6 per cent.”

All of this seems to be good business sense. It also runs contrary to successive governments’ economic policies for the past 35 years, ever since the neoliberal government of Margaret Thatcher took over in 1979.

As this blog has explained, Thatcher and her buddies Nicholas Ridley and Keith Joseph were determined to undermine the confidence then enjoyed by the people who actually worked for a living, because it was harming the ability of the idle rich – shareholders, bosses… bankers – to increase their own undeserved profits; improvements in working-class living standards were holding back their greed.

In order to hammer the workers back into the Stone Age, they deliberately destroyed the UK’s manufacturing and exporting capability and blamed it on the unions.

That is why we have had a foreign trade deficit since 1982. That is why our share of world trade is less than one-third of what it was in 1950 (under a Labour government, notice). That is why unemployment has rocketed, even though the true level goes unrecognised as governments have rigged the figures to suit themselves.

(The current wheeze has the government failing to count as unemployed anyone on Universal Credit, anyone on Workfare/Mandatory Work Activity and anyone who whose benefit has been sanctioned – among many other groups – for example.)

You may wish to argue that the economy is fine – after all, that’s what everybody is saying, including the Office for National Statistics.

Not according to Mr Mills: “The current improvement in our economic performance, based on buttressing consumer confidence by boosting asset values fuelled by yet more borrowing, is all to unlikely to last.”

(He means the housing bubble created by George Osborne’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme will burst soon, and then the economy will be right up the creek because the whole edifice is based on more borrowing at a time when Osborne has been claiming he is paying down the deficit.)

Ed Balls has got the right idea – at least, on the face of it. In his Guardian article he states: “We are not going to deliver a balanced, investment-led recovery that benefits all working people with the same old Tory economics,” and he’s right.

“Hoping tax cuts at the very top will trickle down, a race to the bottom on wages, Treasury opposition to a proper industrial strategy, and flirting with exit from the European Union cannot be the right prescription for Britain.” Right again – although our contract with Europe must be renegotiated and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership agreement would be a disaster for the UK if we signed it.

But none of that affects you, does it? It’s all too far away, controlled by people we’ve never met. That’s why Balls focuses on what a Labour government would do for ordinary people: “expanding free childcare, introducing a lower 10p starting rate of tax, raising the minimum wage and ending the exploitative use of zero-hours contracts. We need to create more good jobs and ensure young people have the skills they need to succeed.”

And how do the people respond to these workmanlike proposals?

“You intend to continue the Tories’ destructive ‘austerity’ policies.”

“The economy isn’t fixed but you broke it.”

There was one comment suggesting that all the main parties are the same now, which – it has been suggested – was what Lynton Crosby told David Cameron to spread if he wanted to win the next election.

Very few of the comments under the Guardian piece have anything to do with what Balls actually wrote; they harp on about New Labour’s record (erroneously), they conflate Labour’s vow not to increase borrowing with an imaginary plan to continue Tory austerity policies… in fact they do all they can to discredit him.

Not because his information is wrong but because they have heard rumours about him that have put them off.

It’s as if people don’t want their situation to improve.

Until we can address that problem – which is one of perception – we’ll keep going around in circles while the exploiters laugh.

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‘It is cheaper to help people die rather than support them to live’

13 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Austerity, Benefits, Corruption, Cost of living, Health, Human rights, Law, People, Politics, UK

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

abuse, archbishop, assisted dying, atrocities, atrocity, burden, canterbury, care, Carey, convenience, convenient, depress, die, disabilities, disability, disabled, euthanasia, fail, financial, former, function creep, George, help, inherit, Justin Welby, live, Lord, Lord Falconer, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Mo Stewart, palliative, pay, rights, sick, suicide, support, Switzerland, terminate, Vox Political


Lord Carey: He may be demonstrating the amount of thought he has given to what unscrupulous people will do with his "change of heart".

Lord Carey: He may be demonstrating the amount of thought he has given to what unscrupulous people will do with his “change of heart”.

A “change of heart” by a former Archbishop of Canterbury over ‘assisted dying’ has dismayed at least one campaigner for the rights of people with disabilities.

Mo Stewart has been researching and reporting what she describes as the “atrocities” against the chronically sick and disabled in the UK for the last four years. She said Lord Carey’s decision to support legislation that would make it legal for people in England and Wales to receive help to end their lives would “play right into the hands of this very, very dangerous government”.

Justifying his change of position, Lord Carey said: “Today we face a central paradox. In strictly observing the sanctity of life, the Church could now actually be promoting anguish and pain, the very opposite of a Christian message of hope.

“The old philosophical certainties have collapsed in the face of the reality of needless suffering.”

The Assisted Dying Bill, tabled by Labour’s Lord Falconer, would apply to people with less than six months to live. Two doctors would have to independently confirm the patient was terminally ill and had reached their own, informed decision to die.

But Mo Stewart warned that the proposed legislation, to be debated in the House of Lords on Friday, would be subject to ‘function creep’, with unscrupulous authorities taking advantage of people with depression in order to relieve themselves of the financial burden of paying for their care.

“If this law is granted, what will be deemed a possibility for the few will, very quickly I fear, become the expected for the many,” she wrote in a letter to Lord Carey which she has kindly provided to Vox Political.

“It’s cheaper to help people to die rather than support them to live.

“There is a catalogue of evidence demonstrating that, in those countries where assisted dying is permitted, very often those taking their own lives are suffering from a clinical depression and leave our world to resist the perception that they are a burden to loved ones.

“I am stunned that you would use your voice to try to permit this to happen in the UK.”

She pointed out that medicine is an inexact science and policy changes such as this could have an enormous detrimental impact: “My own webmaster, who is now desperately ill with possibly only weeks to live, was advised he had less than six months to live over four years ago.

“Until very recently, he still enjoyed a high quality of life with his wife, family and friends; a life that could have been removed four years ago” had the Assisted Dying Bill been law at that time.

“What this debate is demonstrating is the failure of guaranteed high quality palliative care in the UK, that makes those with a life-limiting diagnosis feel that self termination is a reasonable solution,” she warned.

“If palliative care was at the peak of quality and access then there would be no need to ever consider such a Bill for this country, as those who wish to access self termination are usually living in fear of the possible physical suffering they may need to endure. This is a highway to clinical depression when quality of life is deemed to have disappeared with diagnosis.”

The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has described the Bill as “mistaken and dangerous” and Mo said she believed he had explained the dangers well.

He said: “This is not scaremongering. I know of health professionals who are already concerned by the ways in which their clients have suggestions ‘to go to Switzerland’ whispered in their ears by relatives weary of caring for them and exasperated by seeing their inheritances dwindle through care costs.

“I have received letters from both disabled individuals and their carers, deeply concerned by the pressure that Lord Falconer’s bill could put them under if it became law.”

Mo Stewart’s letter concludes: “In the real world, this Bill – if passed – would, I have no doubt, lead to abuses where some were actively persuaded to self terminate for the convenience, and possibly the inheritance, of others.

“It’s really not a very long way away from an assisted dying bill to an assisted suicide bill.”

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Educating Dr Litchfield – a few facts about the Work Capability Assessment

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Austerity, Benefits, Employment and Support Allowance, People, Politics, UK

≈ 31 Comments

Tags

allowance, benefit, benefits, committee, death, die, disability, disabled, Dr, employment, ESA, fatality, health, House of Commons, Incapacity Benefit, letter, Malcolm Harrington, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Mo Stewart, Paul Litchfield, Pensions, people, politics, Prof, sick, social security, support, unum, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work, work capability assessment


Dr Paul Litchfield.

Dr Paul Litchfield.

Ignorance is most definitely not bliss for Dr Paul Litchfield.

The man was hand-picked by the Coalition government to review its hated Work Capability Assessment system of handling Employment and Support Allowance claims, amid rumours that previous incumbent Professor Malcolm Harrington had been unhappy with political decisions that ran against his findings. But he delivered a woeful performance to the House of Commons’ Work and Pensions committee last month.

He claimed 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, totalling 10,600 between January and November 2011 – that’s 220 per week or three every four hours. “I don’t have any information of that type; I haven’t seen numbers on that. Clearly every case would be a tragedy,” he said.

Clearly this expert has yet to gain access to some very important information!

Fortunately, help is at hand.

In advance of the fifth and final review of the WCA, lead researcher and disabled veteran Mo Stewart has written to offer him the benefit of four years’ detailed research evidence.

“The lacklustre 4th review of the WCA left a great deal to be desired,” she told Vox Political. “Now, with the news that Litchfield worked with Unum Insurance on the Technical and Consultative Working Group involved with the creation of the WCA, it can’t be too much of a surprise that Litchfield claims that the WCA had been designed ‘…with considerable rigour’.”

Mo Stewart’s lengthy letter to Litchfield has been distributed to a long list of distinguished experts and professionals, and it will be interesting to see if Dr Litchfield takes the time to respond and to react to the detailed research evidence Mo exposed – evidence that has been frequently quoted during welfare debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons over the past three years.

You can read her letter for yourself, because Mo has sent Vox Political a copy. Just click on the link here.

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Government assessment delays are causing deaths – are ministers trying to shift blame?

08 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits, Disability, Health, People, Politics, Poverty, UK

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

Annette Francis, assessment, BBC, benefit, blame, committee, company, Conservative, contempt, death, delay, Department, die, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DLA, government, health, Iain Duncan Smith, Liverpool Echo, Mike Penning, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minister, Parliament, Pensions, people, Personal Independence Payment, PIP, politics, private, profit, public, Question Time, sector, service, Sheila Gilmore, sick, social security, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work, work capability assessment


He knows he's in trouble: Mike Penning, staring down the hole in his claims about Atos.

He knows he’s in trouble: Mike Penning, staring down the hole in his claims about Atos.

The Liverpool Echo has reported the death of a woman who had been ordered to claim the new Personal Independence Payment – and was then denied any benefit payments for six months.

At the same time, we have learnt that disabilities minister Mike Penning has been caught giving false evidence to a Parliamentary committee on the way contracts for the assessment of disability benefits have been awarded.

The two are not unconnected, it seems.

Annette Francis was found dead at her home in Garston on May 22. She had been suffering severe mental illness but had not received a single penny of disability benefit for six months, since the Department for Work and Pensions had stopped her claim for Disability Living Allowance and told her to apply for PIP.

She did so – but was still waiting for her first payment at the time of her death. She leaves an 11-year-old son, who is currently in the care of his great-aunt.

Problems with the private companies that carry out work capability assessments for benefits including PIP and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) were discussed with disabilities minister Mike Penning in December last year – right around the time Ms Francis’s DLA was being cut off.

He told the Commons Work and Pensions Committee that problems with the firm carrying out the assessments – Atos – were created because it was not possible to make a profit on the contract it signed with the previous Labour government.

He said: “We are picking up the mess behind that.”

If he was telling the truth, he didn’t pick it up quickly enough. But it seems more likely that he was lying.

According to Sheila Gilmore, a Labour MP who sits on the Work and Pensions committee, “he is not entitled to access advice given to the previous Government on the assumptions Atos made as part of their tender”. In that case, he could not possibly have been aware of the terms under which Atos was employed by Labour and was therefore lying to his fellow MPs.

Readers of this blog know that – unless rectified by a timely apology and correction – this is an offence for which any MP may be expelled.

So we are left to ask which situation is worse – one in which a woman has died because a private company carrying out a public service was upset that it couldn’t make a profit, or one in which she died because the same public service has been unforgivably delayed while the private company and the government have been arguing about how much profit it should make?

Either way, unless Penning gets his apology and correction sorted out quickly, he should be booted out of Parliament in disgrace.

His boss is Iain Duncan Smith, who will be appearing on the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday. Do you think this will get a mention?

Neither do I.

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Case proven? Government stays away from benefit deaths tribunal

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits, Democracy, Disability, Employment and Support Allowance, Health, Justice, Law, People, Politics, Poverty, UK

≈ 73 Comments

Tags

abusive, aggressive, allowance, assessment, BBC, benefit, benefits, Blackadder, campaign, co-ordinated, Coalition, commenter, complaint, Conservative, dead, dead letter, death, Democrat, Department, die, disability, disabled, disrupt, distress, double standard, DWP, employment, ESA, figure, FOI, Freedom of Information, government, harassment, harm, health, ICO, ill, Incapacity Benefit, Information Commissioner, Jonathan Ross, language, Liberal, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortality, number, obsessive, Pensions, people, politics, protracted, Russell Brand, Samuel Miller, serious purpose, sick, social security, statistic, support, Tories, Tory, tribunal, vexatious, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work, work capability assessment


Seen to be done: The tribunal took place at the Law Courts in Cardiff (pictured), in public - which allowed friends of Vox Political to hear the case.

Seen to be done: The tribunal took place at the Law Courts in Cardiff (pictured), in public – which allowed friends of Vox Political to hear the case.

The Information Commissioner’s Office and the Department for Work and Pensions have highlighted the weakness of their own case for hiding the number of people who have died while claiming sickness and disability benefits – by failing to turn up at a tribunal on the subject.

They had the opportunity to explain why mortality statistics for people claiming Employment and Support Allowance since November 2011 have been suppressed, at a tribunal in the Law Courts, Cardiff, yesterday (April 23).

But, rather than be grilled on the reasons for their decision by a judge, a specialist in this area of law, and a ‘lay’ person (representing the opinions of right-thinking members of the public), they chose to stay away.

The tribunal had been requested by Vox Political‘s Mike Sivier, after he made a Freedom of Information request for access to the information – and it was refused on the grounds that it was “vexatious”.

The Department for Work and Pensions said he had written an article about his request on the blog, containing the line, “I strongly urge you to do the same. There is strength in numbers.” According to the DWP, this line constituted a co-ordinated, obsessive and protracted campaign of harassment against the department.

One line in a blog article, added as an afterthought – an obsessive campaign designed to “disrupt” the workings of the DWP. It’s ludicrous.

The DWP claimed it had received 23 requests that were similar or identical to Mike’s, in the days following his own, and inferred from this that they were from other members of this fictional campaign. Mike has only been able to track down evidence of seven such requests and, of them, only one mentions him by name. Without a tangible connection to Mike or Vox Political, the case is not made out – and one connected request does not constitute a campaign.

In fact, Mike’s own request was made after he read that a previous request had been refused – that of disability researcher and campaigner Samuel Miller. Mr Miller had published this fact in the social media and expressed that he was “furious” about it, and this inspired Mike to write his own request. Who knows how many other people did the same in response to Mr Miller? Yet he has (rightly) not been accused of starting any conspiracy.

Mr Miller’s original request has now received a reply, after the Information Commissioner’s office ruled that it had been mishandled by the DWP. This reply contained the wrong information and Mike urged Mr Miller to point this out. Clearly Mr Miller’s claim is not being treated as vexatious, even though it has inspired others to follow his example – as Mike’s article shows that he did. The contrast in treatment betrays a clear double-standard at the DWP (and the Information Commissioner’s office, after appeals were made to it in both cases).

Perhaps it is because of this fatal flaw in their logic that neither the ICO nor the DWP saw fit to send representatives to the tribunal. This left the floor free for Mike to make his own case, with nobody to speak against him or cross-examine him. Tribunal members asked questions, but these were entirely helpful in nature – allowing Mike to clarify or expand on his argument.

So the claim that the number of similar requests, received soon after the blog article appeared, indicated a campaign against the DWP was refuted with the simple observation that the subject was of topical interest at the time, because of what had happened to Mr Miller. Mike said an appropriate comparison would be with complaints to the BBC over the now-infamous radio show involving Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. The corporation received only a couple of complaints from people who listened to the show at the time, followed by thousands from people who heard about it later. Mike asked: “Were all those thousands of complaints vexatious in nature? Were they the result of organised campaigns against Messrs Ross and Brand? Or were they genuine expressions of horror at behaviour they considered to have gone beyond the pale? The BBC accepted the latter choice because logic mitigates in its favour.”

The claim that abusive or aggressive language exhibited by blog commenters indicated harassment that was likely to cause distress to members of the DWP was batted away with the argument that nobody from the department would have seen it if they had not gone looking for it (after reading the FOI request from a Vox Political reader who referenced the blog).

Mike said it would be “like a social landlord gatecrashing a residents’ association meeting, listening to the grievances of the tenants and then saying they are harassing him and he’s not going to service any of their requests for repairs. That is not reasonable”.

The DWP had claimed that actioning the 24 requests it insisted on connecting with Mike’s “could impose a burden in terms of time and resources, distracting the DWP from its main functions”, but Mike showed that this was not true, as an email to the ICO, dated October 21, 2013, makes clear: “We can confirm that the Department does hold, and could provide within the cost limit, some of the information requested.”

Nevertheless, the ICO had upheld the claim, saying on November 27, 2013: “For the DWP to respond to all of the requests, it is not simply a matter of sending an email to 24 people. There is a requirement to collate the information, consider exemptions under the Act which may apply, provide a formal response and then, if necessary refer the decision to an internal review…. The Commissioner considers that 24 requests on the same topic in a few days could represent… a disproportionate use of the FOIA.”

In his speech to the tribunal, Mike responded: “It is reminiscent of the line in the TV sitcom Blackadder The Third, when the title character, butler to the Prince Regent in Georgian times, demands a fortune in order to buy votes in a by-election for a ‘tupenny-ha’penny place’. Challenged on the amount, he responds: ‘There are many other factors to be considered: Stamp duty, window tax, swamp insurance, hen food, dog biscuits, cow ointment – the expenses are endless.’” He said the ICO’s claim “smacks of desperation”.

One aspect that worked in Mike’s favour from the start was the fact that both the DWP and the ICO have accepted that there is a serious purpose to his request – publication of figures showing how many people have died while claiming ESA. This is important because the assessment regime for this benefit has been heavily criticised as harmful to claimants and the government has claimed that it has made changes to decrease any such effect. The only way the public can judge whether this has worked, or whether more must be done to prevent unnecessary deaths, is by examining the mortality statistics, but these have been withheld. This is the matter at the heart of the request and the fact that the ICO and DWP acknowledge this is a major element in Mike’s favour.

Perhaps realising this, the ICO tried to claim that the intention was changed by the volume of requests submitted: “The purpose of the totality of the requests as a whole may have gone beyond the point of simply obtaining the information requested and may now be intended to disrupt the main functions of the DWP.”

It is not reasonable to suggest that the purpose of an action changes, just because other people carry out the same action within a similar time-frame. Mike put it this way: “Millions of people make a cup of tea in the advertising break after Coronation Street; would the Information Commissioner suggest that this was a campaign to overload the national grid?”

With nobody on hand to provide the ICO/DWP side of the case, the hearing ended at around midday, after Mike had been speaking for two hours. He was grateful to be supported by his McKenzie friend, Glynis Millward, who provided help and advice, and by a group of Vox Political readers who attended to hear the case.

Now the bad news: No decision was handed down on the day. The tribunal judge explained that the panel must now think about the issues raised and discuss their findings. He said they would aim to provide a full, written decision within 21 days.

It is interesting to note that Mr Miller has acted on Mike’s advice and has been advised that a revised response to his request should be with him soon.

If this response contains updated information under the same headings as the original ‘ad hoc’ statistical release provided by the DWP in July 2012 (and from which we derived the 73-deaths-per-week figure that shocked so many people at the time), then a decision by the tribunal to release the same information may seem redundant. In fact, it is possible that the DWP may provide the information to Mr Miller, simply to spite Mike.

But this would be yet another misunderstanding of what this case is about. Mike doesn’t care who gets the mortality statistics first; for him, it is not about who gets to say they were the one who forced the government into submission – this is about getting the information out to the public, so the people can decide whether ESA does more harm than good.

The tribunal’s decision will still be important as it will establish whether the DWP – and other government departments – will be able to manipulate the principles behind the Freedom of Information Act to avoid providing politically inconvenient information in the future.

In Mike’s opinion, a decision in the government’s favour would effectively turn the Act into a dead letter.

So – for now – the long wait continues.

But it is nearly over.

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Freedom of Information tribunal on benefit deaths – April 23

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits, Disability, Employment and Support Allowance, Health, People, Politics, Poverty, UK

≈ 74 Comments

Tags

allowance, assessment, benefit, benefits, campaign, dead, death, Department, die, DWP, employment, ESA, fit for work, FOI, Freedom of Information, Group, harassment, IB, ICO, Incapacity Benefit, Information Commissioner, judge, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortality, Pensions, Reform, support, tribunal, vexatious, Vox Political, work, work-related activity, WRA


Vox Political may seem a little quiet over the next 30 hours or so. This is because the site’s owner, Mike Sivier (that’s me), will be travelling to Cardiff to take the Information Commissioner and the Department for Work and Pensions to a tribunal.

The aim is to secure the release of mortality figures – death statistics – covering people who were claiming Incapacity Benefit or Employment and Support Allowance during 2012.

Figures for later dates were not part of the Freedom of Information request that forms the basis of this action (submitted back in June 2013, nearly a year ago), so it is unlikely that these will be forthcoming. The hope is that the tribunal will judge in favour of the information being released, ensuring that further requests cannot be blocked by the DWP.

The government’s claim is that a single-sentence, off-the-cuff line at the end of a Vox Political article about the FoI request constitutes a co-ordinated, protracted and obsessive campaign of harassment against the DWP, and for that reason the request is vexatious.

It is utterly ridiculous. It brings the DWP and the Freedom of Information Act into disrepute. Yet it is enough to prevent this valuable information from being published.

It is important to have the data in the public domain, as a yardstick by which the government’s so-called ‘reforms’ to the benefit system may be judged. Between January and November 2011, 73 deaths were recorded every week, just among people in the work-related activity group of ESA and those going through the assessment process. The government does not monitor the progress of people it has marked ‘fit for work’ and thrown off-benefit altogether, and this group is four times as large as the WRAG, meaning the death toll could be anything up to five times larger than we understand at the moment.

The government has claimed that it has been implementing changes designed to make ESA serve its claimants better. An increased death rate will disprove that. Of course, a lowered death rate would support the government’s position but, if this were the case, it is logical to expect the government to have publicised it widely without any prompting.

This is why tomorrow’s tribunal is important.

People are dying every day and nothing will be done to stop it unless the severity of the situation is made clear.

Let’s all hope we get the result we need.

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My St George’s Day bid to kill the ESA/WCA ‘dragon’

28 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits, Cost of living, Disability, Employment and Support Allowance, Health, Law, Media, People, Politics, Poverty, UK

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

'ad hoc', allowance, benefit, benefits, blog, burden, campaign, dead, death, Department, die, disability, disabled, dragon, DWP, employment, ESA, Facebook, figure, FOI, Freedom of Information, government, Group, harassment, health, IB, ICO, Incapacity Benefit, Information Commissioner, mainstream, Media, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortality, number, organisation, Pensions, people, personal, politics, release, sick, social, social security, St George, statistic, support, suppress, Twitter, vexatious, Vox Political, WCA, website, welfare, work, work capability assessment, work-related activity, WRAG


Confrontation: Let's hope the FoI tribunal ends as well for Vox Political as his encounter with the dragon did for St George. [Image: bradfordschools.net]

Confrontation: Let’s hope the FoI tribunal ends as well for Vox Political as his encounter with the dragon did for St George. [Image: bradfordschools.net]

Vox Political is going to court.

A tribunal on April 23 – St George’s Day – will hear my appeal against the Information Commissioner’s (and the DWP’s) decision to refuse my Freedom of Information request for details of the number of people who died while claiming Incapacity Benefit or ESA during 2012.

The aim is to find out how many people died while going through the claim process, which is extremely stressful for people who are – by definition – ill or disabled; and also to find out how many have died after being put in the work-related activity group of Employment and Support Allowance claimants, as these are people who should be well enough to work within a year of their claim starting.

The Department for Work and Pensions has guarded these figures jealously, ever since an ‘ad hoc’ statistical release in 2012 revealed that, every week, an average of 73 people in the above two categories were dying.

According to the rules of the process, these were people who should not have come to the end of their lives while going through it. Clearly, something had been going wrong.

The DWP has strenuously denied this, and has made great efforts to promote its claim that it has improved the process.

But when at least two individuals asked for an update to the ‘ad hoc’ release at the end of 2012, all they received in return was delay and denial.

That’s what prompted me to make a very public FoI request in mid-2013. I published it on the blog and suggested that readers who felt the same way should follow my example.

The DWP claimed that this meant I had co-ordinated a campaign of harassment against it, and answering all the requests it received would create a severe burden on its already-taxed resources. It refused my request, claiming that it was “vexatious”.

In its own words, the DWP is an extremely-large, customer-facing government department with 104,000 employees. It is claiming that it received 23 requests that were similar or identical to mine in the period after my blog post – but I have not seen these and it is possible that this is inaccurate.

Severe burden? Campaign of harassment? It doesn’t seem realistic, does it?

I reckon I have a good chance of winning this – which brings me to the next issue: Winning is only part of this battle.

It won’t mean a thing if nobody hears about it.

Vox Political is a small blog. Agreed, some articles have been read by more than 100,000 people (presumably not all DWP employees) and hundreds of thousands more will have heard of them – but these are rare, and there are more than 60 million people in the United Kingdom.

If I win, I’m going to need help to get the information out to the public. I can’t rely on the mainstream media because they tend to support the government and may suppress the information. Having said that, I do intend to put out press releases and give them the opportunity to do the right thing.

But I also want to hear from people on the social media who want to help get this information out – either on blogs, organisations’ websites, personal websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. It doesn’t matter how many people follow you; if you want to help, please get in touch.

Please also feel free to suggest people or places that might help if contacted.

Reply using the ‘Comment’ box at the bottom of the article. I won’t publish your details but will use them to create a list of participants.

When I receive a verdict from the tribunal, I’ll put out an announcement and we’ll have to see how much noise we can make.

This is a chance for the social media to show what they can do.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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More statistical shenanigans from obstructive DWP

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in Benefits, Conservative Party, Disability, Employment and Support Allowance, Health, Politics, UK

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

'ad hoc', allowance, benefit, death, Department, die, DWP, employment, ESA, figure, FOI, Freedom of Information, IB, Incapacity, mortality, Pensions, release, request, Samuel Miller, SDA, Severe Disablement Allowance, statistic, support, work


131109doublespeak

Should we be pleased that the Department for Work and Pensions has finally graced a Freedom of Information request about the number of people who have died while claiming incapacity benefits (including ESA) with a response?

No.

Disability campaigner Samuel Miller was the recipient of this kindness, bestowed only after he called in the Information Commissioner to demand it.

Needless to say, it doesn’t provide the information that was requested; it doesn’t even conform to the dates in his request.

Mr Miller had asked: “Can you please provide me with the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants who have died so far in 2012 only? I wish to bring to your attention that http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/adhoc_analysis/2012/incap_decd_recips_0712.pdf is outdated, as it only provides mortality statistics up to November 2011.”

This referred to the now-infamous ‘ad hoc’ statistical release of mid-2012 which showed that an average of 73 people whose assessments were not complete or who had been put in the Work-Related Activity group of ESA had died every week between January and November 2011.

It was an update of this figure – derived from ‘Table 3’ of the ‘ad hoc’ report – that Mr Miller wanted, but the DWP has not given him that. He got an update of ‘Table 1’, entitled ‘IB/SDA and ESA off-flows with a date of death recorded at time of benefit off-flow”.

This covers the period of the financial year 2011-12, and therefore misses out eight months of the period with which Mr Miller’s request was concerned.

It covers all Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance and ESA claims for that period and does not differentiate between them, so it is impossible to work out the number of ESA claimants who died between December 2011 and March 2012, which is the extent of the new period covered.

It also registers a drop in deaths from the previous financial year – from 41,750 to 39,860 – against a rise in the number of people losing benefit – from 728,740 to 949,330. If we were to try to use these figures, we would be claiming an average of 764 deaths per week (down from 800 the year before).

The DWP would be able to say there had been a drop in the number of deaths, and would have been able to ask why we have been complaining.

But these figures are an evasion.

As already mentioned, they are not relevant.

They do not cover the period following November 2011 to the end of 2012, and they do not differentiate between claimants who were receiving as much support as the state could give, and those the state said should be fit for work within a year or were still being assessed.

The new figures are, to be blunt, useless.

The DWP would claim that it has provided the information Mr Miller wanted but this is not true. His request was made in November 2012, for up-to-date statistics, and even the material provided to him only runs to the end of March in that year.

Mr Miller has put in a new request seeking figures for WRAG and Support Group deaths for 2011-12. Unfortunately he appears to have missed out the statistics for those who have died during assessment. If he receives a response (and I doubt it), it will again run to the end of March 2012 only, and will not give us an average we can compare with what we got from the ‘ad hoc’ release.

My opinion is that the DWP will continue to guard these numbers jealously until ministers are forced to give them up.

Let’s all hope this happens after my information tribunal takes place, sometime between now and mid-May.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Concern over union leader’s sudden death

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Mike Sivier in People, Trade Unions

≈ 33 Comments

Tags

aneurysm, Bob Crow, dead, death, die, expenses, fraud, George Osborne, heart attack, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, MP, pay rise, RMT Union, Vox Political, Whips Cross University Hospital


140311crowIs anyone else just a little uneasy about the sudden death of RMT Union leader Bob Crow?

He died early this morning (Tuesday, March 11), according to the union, at the age of 52. Apparently he had suffered an aneurysm and heart attack, and passed away at Whipps Cross University Hospital.

Only yesterday, he had been widely reported as having spoken out in support of the controversial plan for an 11 per cent pay rise for MPs.

He said they should be “paid adequately” so they could have “decent accommodation”, and to ensure that those who are not independently wealth are not deterred from public service, according to the BBC.

Mr Crow was rumoured to earn £145,000 himself, against which the MP pay rise to £74,000 seems meagre. He has been criticised by the Conservative Party for continuing to live in council accommodation instead of buying his own house and, taken in this context, his words yesterday take on extra meaning.

Was he commenting on the way MPs who have been exposed after committing financial irregularites have continually excused themselves by saying they needed the money? Our Parliamentary representatives have been in the news almost constantly since 2009, accused of expenses fraud, or discrepancies to do with their second homes. Even part-time Chancellor George Osborne had a flutter – using taxpayers’ money to make £1 million on a house and land in his constituency, that he claimed he was using for professional purposes (this claim has never been substantiated).

He was definitely saying that people with pupblic service responsibilities need the wherewithal to carry out those duties without exposing themselves to financial hardship – and it would be hard for MPs to criticise his own living arrangements after he had spoken up for theirs.

Also, it is entirely possible that he was looking ahead to a post-2015 Parliament with far fewer Conservative MPs. In this context, it would be a (rare) unselfish act for the current ruling parties in Parliament to approve a pay rise for their opponents!

Now he is dead, and perhaps there is nothing suspicious about it.

Perhaps.

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