Information tribunal on deaths of IB/ESA claimants – next week

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'ad hoc', allowance, campaign, Cardiff, claimant, death, Department, DWP, employment, ESA, figure, FOI, Freedom of Information, harassment, IB, IC, Incapacity Benefit, Information Commissioner, law courts, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortality, Pensions, release, statistic, support, tribunal, vexatious, Vox Political, work

I have just sent out a ‘diary marker’ to press organisations, notifying them of the Information Tribunal that will be held in Cardiff next week.

Inevitably, there will be organisations I have missed – and I also want as much of the social media as possible to be aware of this and to be spreading the word. For that reason, I’m publishing the text of the press release below.

If you have a Facebook page, blog site, Twitter account or whatever, please feel free to use what follows and make sure people know that this is going on.

Diary marker

Tribunal – Law Courts, Cathays Park, Cardiff, April 23, 2014 at 10am

Incapacity benefits – deaths of claimants

A tribunal will decide whether the Department for Work and Pensions should be ordered to release its statistics on the number of people who have died while claiming Incapacity Benefit or Employment and Support Allowance, at a hearing next week.

The First-Tier Tribunal (formerly the Information Tribunal) will be hearing an appeal by Vox Political blogger Mike Sivier, against a decision by the Information Commissioner and the DWP to refuse a Freedom of Information request on the subject.

The DWP published an ‘ad hoc statistical release’ in July 2012, showing that 10,600 claimants died between January and November 2011. Of these, 3,500 – or 73 people every week – were either going through the assessment process or had been put in the work-related activity group, intended for people who were expected to recover within a year, when they died.

The revelation provoked outcry from people suffering from disabilities and long-term illnesses, and seems to have discouraged the DWP from continuing to publish the figures.

Mr Sivier made his request in June 2013, after learning that the DWP had refused previous requests. The department at first claimed there was no intention to release any further statistics, and the information would take a great deal of time and effort to gather and collate – this is not true. In fact, the DWP later admitted that it does hold the information, and could provide it within the cost limit.

The next excuse was that the Secretary of State, Iain Duncan Smith, accepted that there was interest in the figures and was considering how to publish them. This was claimed in August 2013. Since no plan to publish these time-sensitive figures after nearly nine months, we must conclude that, like the previous claim, it is not true. The figures are time-sensitive because it is important that the system be improved to prevent unnecessary deaths. Delays in publication mean the figures are unlikely to be used in that way.

Seeing that the DWP had brushed aside privately-made requests, Mr Sivier ensured that his was public knowledge by writing an article about it in his blog (at https://mikesivier.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/dwp-refuses-to-provide-information-on-esaib-deaths-what-is-it-hiding/). As an afterthought, he included a line encouraging readers to follow his example, if they believed the issue was important, reasoning that the DWP may give more weight to it if it was known that there was general concern.

The DWP refused the request, claiming it was “vexatious” under section 14(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Officers had visited the blog and concluded that the last line, “I strongly urge you to do the same. There is strength in numbers,” constituted a co-ordinated campaign of harassment against the department.

Mr Sivier believes this is nonsense and appealed to the Information Commissioner on this basis. But the Commissioner was persuaded by the DWP and upheld the decision, forcing Mr Sivier to take the matter to the tribunal.

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

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'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]

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.

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More statistical shenanigans from obstructive DWP

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'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

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.

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DWP’s shame: Facts reveal how ministers duped the press

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allowance, andrew dilnot, AoI Money, Atos, BBC, Belfast Telegraph, benefit, benefits, Business Standard, Channel 4 News, cheat, claim, conflate, Conservative, Daily Mail, Department, Descrier, disability, Disability Confident, disabled, DWP, employment, ESA, esther mcvey, Evening Standard, fiddle, figure, fit, fit for work, for purpose, fudge, Gloucester Citizen, government, health, Huffington Post, IB, iLegal, Incapacity Benefit, International Business Times UK, lie, Malcolm Harrington, mark hoban, Metro, migrate, Migration, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Mirror, Pensions, people, politics, press, Press TV, Professor, release, self employ, sick, SME Times, social security, statistic, Sue Marsh, support, tax credit, The Times, Tories, Tory, uk statistics authority, unemployment, unfit, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work, work capability assessment

Lest we forget: We know that, on average, 73 people died every week between January and November 2011 – after undergoing the DWP work capability assessment administered by Atos. Who knows how many are dying now?

Today the DWP finally released its press release claiming that huge numbers of people who wanted Employment and Support Allowance have been found fit for work instead.

Interestingly, the DWP story differs from that published by the BBC, even though the corporation must have used a version of the press release provided to it in advance.

In the BBC story, released on Saturday, “More than a million others withdrew their claims after interviews” – but the DWP press notice, released today, claims “More than a million others withdrew their claims before reaching a face-to-face assessment”.

In addition, the DWP release features a long section on its Disability Confident roadshow, and there is another statistic which claims that the proportion of disabled people in work has reached 45 per cent.

Disability Confident, designed “to encourage more employers to hire disabled people”, “to showcase the talents of disabled people and highlight their tremendous value to the British economy” is, on the face of it, a good idea.

But I wonder if it isn’t a smokescreen to hide how the DWP is pushing thousands of disabled people into saying they are self-employed and taking tax credits rather than ESA, in order to fudge the figures and make it seem as though good work is being done.

Vox Political reported on this before ,and it is worth adding that the BBC itself ran the original report that work advisers were pushing the jobless into self-employment.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive…

Of course, the best source of ESA-related statistics is on the iLegal site where the figures behind the press release have been picked apart by an expert who doesn’t have a vested interest in saving ministerial face.

They show that an average of 83 per cent of the 1,078,200 Incapacity claimants who were assessed qualified for ESA between October 2012 and May last year, while 88 per cent of the 1,332,300 ‘repeatedly assessed’ were re-qualifying.

While the DWP and the BBC have claimed 1.8 million people have magically disappeared from the Incapacity/ESA claimant count, the DWP’s own figures confirm that overall numbers have reduced by only 156,630 since May 2010.

The iLegal article makes it clear that “the claimant count is far from a static number; each month thousands of claimants come on and off all benefits”. But it seems clear that the BBC/DWP figure is a conflated total, simply adding up all new claims – rather than claimants – from 2008 onwards.

This is exactly why UK Statistics Authority chief Andrew Dilnot chastised the government after the Conservative Party released an almost-identical press release last year, using then-current (but still inaccurate) figures and not mentioning Disability Confident.

Let’s go back to the number of people found ‘fit for work’ after assessment. Has everybody forgotten the hammering that the government took during a debate on Atos’ handling of the Work Capability Assessment, exactly a year and a week ago today? If you have, don’t worry – you can read all about it here.

The debate demonstrated time after time that the work capability assessment, as devised by the DWP’s Conservative ministerial team and run by its employees at Atos, was not fit for purpose; that the overwhelming majority of those who had been found ‘fit for work’ were nothing of the sort; and that “this is a government that is perfectly happy with a system that is throwing thousands of sick and disabled people to the wolves”.

The government refused to listen. Then-Employment minister Mark Hoban (standing in, conspicuously, for Esther McVey, who was minister for the disabled at the time) said the independent reviews conducted by Professor Malcolm Harrington had identified areas of improvement and appropriate steps were being taken.

This claim was false. Out of 25 recommendations made by Professor Harrington in his year one review alone, almost two thirds 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?”

I’d say so – to everybody but the Coalition government.

Now:

A good reporter at the BBC would have had all this information to hand. They would have known that the work capability assessment was extremely controversial and had been shown, many times, to be unfit for purpose. They would have known that the government had been slapped down by the UK Statistics Authority after releasing an almost-identical press release last year. They absolutely should have known that other reporters in the same organisation had revealed that the DWP had been pushing disabled people into claiming they were self-employed in an effort to cook the books.

With all that information to hand, it begs the question: Why did they then go ahead with the propagandised misrepresentation of the facts that appeared on the BBC News website on Saturday?

And, before reporters at Business Standard (“A million Britons found lying for illness benefits“?), the Belfast Telegraph, International Business Times UK, Metro, The Times, Channel 4 News, Press TV, Descrier, SME Times, AoI Money, The Mirror, Gloucester Citizen, Huffington Post, Evening Standard, and especially the Daily Mail, whose article was hysterical in both senses of the term, allow me to ask…

What’s your excuse?

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