DWP finally release FOI data on Deaths after benefit refusal...

It's an absolutely disgraceful figure!
So damning for our so called caring society!

They should resign from government,
the desperation of poverty in the 21st century is a an honour that British politicians wear with pride!

It's a mirror report. If you don't mind I'll also enjoy my huge pinch of salt.

@tim2000s the figure is probably never going to be truly released, but for one thing a lot of very vulnerable people have been driven to despair and took their own lives as a result of the welfare reforms (including the bedroom tax). It's not a political issue and shouldn't be deemed so - it's just a reality. Very sad world we live in when we leave the sick and disabled and vulnerable people destitute. I am very upset and angry over the whole shambles. They even abolished the Independent Living Fund for people who are so severely disabled they're a step away from a hospital, care home or a coffin. Nuff said.

tim2000s said:

It's a mirror report. If you don't mind I'll also enjoy my huge pinch of salt.

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This was raised in parliament because of a change.org campaign.
The government were trying desperately not to release the figures and still despite questions in the house are fudging the issues behind the tragic figures!

This is not about politics, this about desperate people having nowhere to go and nothing to eat!

tim2000s said:

It's a mirror report. If you don't mind I'll also enjoy my huge pinch of salt.

Click to expand...

Oh dear, that won't do your blood pressure any good!

Terrible, absolutely terrible

Ian Duncan Smith did he claim he could live on £53 a week if he had to?

I used to work as a psychiatric nurse and know some people with enduring mental illness who eke out a living for themselves when they are well enough to do so, I also know many afflicted people who have no chance whatsoever of recovery or getting employment and these people are having to go through Atos assessments about their benefits and this is absolutely disgusting IMO.

Cumberland said:

Terrible, absolutely terrible

Ian Duncan Smith did he claim he could live on £53 a week if he had to?

I used to work as a psychiatric nurse and know some people with enduring mental illness who eke out a living for themselves when they are well enough to do so, I also know many afflicted people who have no chance whatsoever of recovery or getting employment and these people are having to go through Atos assessments about their benefits and this is absolutely disgusting IMO.

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Hi Cumberland,
I live with a disabled person, the wife, who has had to endure the humiliation of atos, or whatever it is called!
We had to go through the courts to get a judgment, making sure at least that her stamp is paid.
She cannot claim a penny, because of my pension. It is slightly above the limit for claiming benefits, and I do mean slightly above!
We have been to arbitration to receive something, they don't care! They have sympathies but can't do nothing. Nothing!

If the wife lived alone, she would get everything paid including getting adjustments needed for the house. Why are we punished for having a pension that we can't survive on?
I have had to return to employment, luckily, so that we can have a half decent living.

I know of many people struggling because of these cuts to the most needy! It is despicable!

I grew up in poverty, I was so disadvantaged, and I was lucky especially in this area to get myself out of poverty through work.

I've never claimed a penny off the government, paid my tax and national insurance, still am!

The wife is the same!

When we needed help, they weren't there for us!

Says it all really!

Please don't offer sympathy, I couldn't live with getting help from Tories!

I find that figure of 4000 meaningless without knowing the total number of people being assessed, working out the %, and comparing it with other mortality rates in the rest of the of the working age population, over time.

The nearest any of those articles have come to looking at that comparison is this, in the Independent and Mail articles:

'A DWP spokesman said: "The mortality rate for people who have died while claiming an out-of-work benefit has fallen over a 10-year period. This is in line with the mortality rate for the general working-age population.

But that still does not give the breakdown. Without it, the articles are ridiculous hyperbole.

Brunneria said:

I find that figure of 4000 meaningless without knowing the total number of people being assessed, working out the %, and comparing it with other mortality rates in the rest of the of the working age population, over time.

The nearest any of those articles have come to looking at that comparison is this, in the Independent and Mail articles:

'A DWP spokesman said: "The mortality rate for people who have died while claiming an out-of-work benefit has fallen over a 10-year period. This is in line with the mortality rate for the general working-age population.

But that still does not give the breakdown. Without it, the articles are ridiculous hyperbole.

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The number of people being assessed has increased multiple times since the Labour government brought it in in the early noughties. It now includes every disabled person since the Tories came in. The number is in the hundreds of thousands!
The cuts have hit the most vulnerable and the most disadvantaged!
The whole attitude towards the benefit system is about stopping giving to those needed rather than helping them!

nosher8355 said:

The number of people being assessed has increased multiple times since the Labour government brought it in in the early noughties. It now includes every disabled person since the Tories came in. The number is in the hundreds of thousands!
The cuts have hit the most vulnerable and the most disadvantaged!
The whole attitude towards the benefit system is about stopping giving to those needed rather than helping them!

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But without clear evidence, in the form of comparable figures, that is also hyperbole.

(Noshy love, you know me well enough to understand that i am not picking a fight with you!)

Brunneria said:

But without clear evidence, in the form of comparable figures, that is also hyperbole.

(Noshy love, you know me well enough to understand that i am not picking a fight with you!)

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I'm certain that I would never pick a fight with you Brun!
I've been married too long to go there.

I have intimate knowledge of the system, having been through the whole experience.
It is unnecessary and humiliating, the government does not believe your GP, your specialist, yourself! The key reason why it is a sham in every way that it exists, is that there is no jobs for these people no matter the disability. The reason it exists is to stop giving benefits even if they pass the intrusion into their health! Even if the person being assessed has no chance of being employed, no employer would hire them.
It exists, to help the bean counters in Whitehall look as though the country and politicians are doing something about benefit cheats. Whilst it is about moving money from the disadvantaged to the rich. The disadvantaged do not have a voice inside the government, the rich do. It's all about where the tax dollar goes.

But the real embarrassment about the atos system is the government believes them!
The assessors are not doctors, specialists, clinicians, or diagnostic technicians.
They are ex nurses or been within medicine!

And to top it off, they get paid for getting disadvantaged people off benefits, as a bonus!

I don't believe that stats, or even how many people have died is the issue, but to let one die is morally wrong. Too let that many, (if true) is ******** on a scale that should be everybody's concern. Because who's next? The old. The young. The unemployed?

Oh yeah, these have been targeted as well!

The fact the powers that be have tried every trick in the book to hide the figures to not have the figures released to not be honest and open with the public says it all really.

I signed the change.org petition to get the government to release the figures.
4000 people is 4000 too many regardless of how many people are assessed.
This is only the number that has died, not the number who have no income because of wrong assessments
The next figure I would like to see is how many appeals and how many win appeals.
As a person who lives with a hidden disability (not diabetes but that's bad enough) how can a 20 minute interview assess anyone,
How can these interviews ignore letters from Gps and consultants and decide they know better.
It is a disgrace to one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we don't care for disabled or elderly.
We live in a country that has no compassion then wonder why other countries hate us, we have lost our moral compass stamping over the most vulnerable to get our own selfish way

The 4000 figure is incorrect; was taken out of context.

Source:
https://fullfact.org/factcheck/economy/fit_for_work_deaths_ESA-47588

Full Fact, the independent, non-partisan, factchecking charity.

We check claims made by politicians, the media and pressure groups, and stop misinformation spreading by pressing for corrections.

We separate the facts from the spin and present our findings and sources so that you can judge the claim — and our factcheck — for yourself.

“2,600 benefit claimants die within weeks of being ruled fit for work”

The Daily Mail, 27 August 2015

“More Than 4,000 Died Within Six Weeks Of Being Deemed ‘Fit For Work’, Reveal Government”

The Huffington Post, 27 August 2015

“Over a two-year period, 2,380 people claiming employment and support allowance (ESA) died within a fortnight of being told they were deemed able to work and so would lose the benefit.”

The Times, 28 August 2015

Yesterday the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) released data on the deaths of benefits claimants in Great Britain.



It was widely reported that thousands of people died within weeks of being found “fit for work” and losing their benefits.

This is wrong.

Within weeks of ending a claim, not within weeks of an assessment

The figures show the number of people who had been found “fit for work”, and who died within weeks of their claim ending. They cover the period from late 2011 to early 2014. It’s likely that in many of these cases, the person dying was why the claim ended.

A claim quite naturally ends when a claimant dies. The data being used here is collected every two weeks for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claimants and longer periods for other benefits.

If a claim ends between collection dates without the date of the end of the claim being recorded, then the DWP has to ‘estimate’ a date for the end of the claim between the two sets of records. If an ESA claimant died within 14 days of the estimated date, then they are recorded as a claimant who died and ended their claim for that reason.

rules changed so that ESA stops as soon as a decision is made and before people can appeal they have to go through a new stage of mandatory reconsideration by DWP. ESA is not paid again unless or until an appeal is lodged with medical evidence.)

Different outlets use different figures on the same topic

More than one set of figures was used in the press. The Mirror stated that 2,650 benefit claimants died shortly after being assessed as fit for work.

They reached this figure by adding the 270people who died claiming Incapacity Benefit (IB) and Severe Disablement Allowance (SDA) after being assessed fit for work to the 2,380people claiming ESA.

The Huffington Post stated that more than 4,000 people died within six weeks of being found “fit for work”. This counts some people twice. The 4,000 figure takes the overall number of people found “fit for work”, then adds the number with a completed appeal following a “fit for work” decision. But people who appealed their decisions are already included in the overall total and the two can’t be added in this way. The “within six weeks” part of the story relates to claimants of IB and SDA.

Mortality rates matter

If 2,380 people on ESA were found fit for work from late 2011 to early 2014, and all 2,380 subsequently died in the process of challenging that decision, that would indicate that something was almost certainly going wrong in the assessment process.

But if 2 million people were found to be fit for work, there would be less concern that the assessment process was going wrong; one in 1,000 dying could just be the result of the ‘normal’ level of accident, misfortune and sudden illness.

If we want to know if people found fit for work are more likely to die than the general population, then age-standardised mortality rates would let us make that comparison while adjusting for differences in age and gender.

Unfortunately, the DWP has not published an age-standardised mortality rate for those found “fit for work”. They may not be able to do so; publishing a mortality rate for people who were found fit for work would require information about people no longer claiming benefits who died during the time period in question.

What they might be able to do is find a mortality rate for people who left ESA and remained within the benefits system. However, this would miss the people who left the benefits system entirely. Using this figure to infer a mortality rate for the entire group found fit to work could be problematic if there are systematic differences between those who leave the benefits system and those that remain within it.



Correction 30 Aug 2015

The article orginally said that: “If someone is found fit for work, they can appeal the decision, and continue to receive ESA during the appeal process.” That’s true of some of the people in the figures, but after October 2013 an additional stage of mandatory reconsideration by DWP was added before appeal during which people do not get ESA, as is now explained above.

Update 30 Aug 2015

We added “on ESA” to the first paragraph of the section Mortality Rates Matter. The section was intended to be discussing ESA specifically, and it is mentioned in the last paragraph, but this wasn’t clear.

Update 9 Sep 2015

This article was quoted by the Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s Questions today.

For that reason, we have added the full, slightly technical, written explanation of the figures we obtained from DWP, which may be useful to others trying to understand them:

Once found FFW [Fit For Work] an ESA [Employment and Support Allowance] claim ends so anyone who died during a mandatory reconsideration period would not be classed as being in receipt of ESA at the time of death and should therefore not be included in the figures. If the claimant goes on to appeal the MR [Mandatory Reconsideration] decision then the ESA claim is reopened.

Therefore anyone who died during an appeal period (whichever stage of the appeal process they are in) would be classed as being in receipt of ESA at the time of death and would be included in the table 2.3 figures.

In response to your third question, yes it is possible that someone may not have appealed the FFW decision and due to time required to update the system they were still in receipt of ESA when they died.

It should also be noted that, as detailed in the publication, the data in tables 2.3 to 2.6 (and table 1) should be viewed with some level of caution as the figures are derived from unpublished information and have not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard.

I can confirm that the figures to which you refer include people who died up to 2 weeks after their ESA claim ended i.e. those where death is believed to be the reason for the claim ending, as specified in the publication. The FFW decision may have occurred at any point in the preceding period.

The weekend after publication we received feedback that the article had misunderstood who was included in these figures. Following our feedback process, the Director reviewed the article and research—including our exchanges with DWP—over the weekend and concluded that the article was accurate and accurately reflects what DWP itself told us and others that the figures meant. We sought this written confirmation at the end of the weekend, and received it later that week.