DWP has acknowledged that one of the key statistics it has used to justify radical change to disability benefits ‘gives a distorted picture’, six months after Left Foot Forward pointed it out.
The Department for Work and Pensions has acknowledged that one of the key statistics it has used to justify radical change to disability benefits ‘gives a distorted picture’.
One of the main ‘stylised facts’ that the DWP has used to make the case for aggressive reform of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) has been that the caseload increased by 30% over the last eight years- a phenomenon which a DWP source described as ‘inexplicable’.
Last year the Department’s use of this figure was challenged by the Broken of Britain. I analysed the underlying data for Left Foot Forward in February and came to similar conclusions, arguing that the Department’s failure to take obvious explanatory factors into account meant that the use of the 30% figure was misleading.
In particular I stressed the built-in growth of DLA receipt among people over retirement age (the ‘maturing’ of the system, an intended feature of its design) and demographic change, which accounted for more than half of the growth.
DWP has now repeated this analysis using more recent and detailed figures. These give a slightly lower overall increase of 29% to the DLA caseload from 2002/3 to 2010/11, but more importantly, DWP now accepts the need to take into account the factors it had previously neglected.
The department says:
‘There have been substantial increases in receipt per head among those aged 65 and over as a result of the ‘maturing’ of DLA. This distorts the overall picture of growth. [our italics]’.
Correcting for this factor reduces the figure to 23%. Correcting for demographic change reduces it further, to 16%.
The table shows how the growth in caseload breaks down between age groups, demographic change and change in rate of DLA receipt, comparing the Left Foot Forward estimates from February with DWP’s estimates.
Despite the differences in timeframe in the two analyses, the results are very similar: only 44-45% of the total increase remains once the factors we raised are taken into account.
It may be wondered why, if only 44% of the change remains after controlling for these factors, the rate of growth only falls from 29% to 16%. But the 16% figure is the growth rate for the under 65 caseload (controlling for demographic change), while the 44% figure is the share of total growth accounted for by under-65’s.
While it is welcome that the Department now recognises the inadequacies of its earlier statements on DLA caseload growth, the publication of this analysis at this late stage is a matter of concern, for two reasons.
The first is the stress the government has placed on the 30% figure as evidence of major flaws in the system requiring radical reform: the consultation document on DLA reform stated:
“In just eight years the numbers receiving DLA has [sic] increased by 30%. The complexity and subjectivity of the benefit has led to a wider application than was originally intended.”
With the Welfare Reform Bill having already passed its report stage in the Commons and due to go to the Lords in September, government surely needs to explain how the downward revision from 30% to 16% affects the case for its proposals.
The second reason for disquiet is this: government is engaged in radical cuts and reforms to disability benefits, including a reduction in caseload and expenditure by 20% against projections for 2016 and the abolition of DLA and its replacement with a new system, Personal Independence Payment.
Yet it now appears that prior to deciding on these ambitious projects, DWP failed to carry out the most rudimentary analysis of the changes in DLA caseload which reform was supposed to address.
The sort of analysis we published in February, and which DWP appears only now to have undertaken itself, represents a minimal requirement for any serious consideration of welfare reform.
The government would appear to have launched itself into a radical programme of change affecting millions of disabled people without troubling to understand the first thing about the benefit it claims to be reforming. One has to ask whether this sort of amateurishness would be tolerated in any other major area of government spending.
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204 Responses to “DWP admits disability reform based on dodgy figures, as reported by Left Foot Forward”
Kevin Richards
Come on DWP get your facts right- DWP admits disability reform based on dodgy figures, as reported by Left Foot Forward http://t.co/rrdEyCB
DavidG
I’m becoming more and more convinced that there is a major problem with DWP’s ability, or perhaps desire, to conduct research independent of pre-determined outcomes. A couple of weeks ago they released ‘DWP research report 763: attitudes to health and work amongst the working age population.’ (http://www.dwp.gov.uk/newsroom/press-releases/2011/jul-2011/dwp094-11.shtml)I’m not a statistician or sociologist/anthropologist, but I do have enough of a background in operational research and survey techniques to know when something smells, and I was holding my nose against the waft of something rotten in DWP-land before I was past the first couple of pages. There’s every sign that the survey at the core of the report was designed to confirm pre-determined conclusions rather than conclusions being driven by the survey, they admit up front it was done to provide evidence to support Dame Carol Black’s ‘Review of the health of Britain’s working age population – 2008’ with its dogma that work is good for you come what may (my spine would beg to differ).
Even if you decide that isn’t the case, there are staggeringly obvious problems with the survey design. What reasonable scientist, subject to independent peer review, would base almost the entire set of conclusions of the survey on hypothetical scenarios revolving around attitudes to back-ache and depression, the two most mis-understood and systematically under-estimated disabilities in contemporary society. And this for a report that explicitly states it will be used in designing reform of the disability benefit system.
You can read my analysis of the problems in the report at http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com/2011/08/conclude-then-survey-dwp-at-their.html
DavidG
I missed a space and munged the link to the DWP Report in post 7, see http://www.dwp.gov.uk/newsroom/press-releases/2011/jul-2011/dwp094-11.shtml
Which reminds me that that link is to the press release, which shows DWP beginning to twist the findings even further, with a claim that 80% of people believe work is good for you, without any of the caveats that the report itself attaches to that figure.
Mr. Sensible
Finally they admit it…
The DWP and right-wing press are all in it together.
DavidG
Interesting to read this in conjunction with today’s criticism of DWP statistical reporting by the head of the UK Statistics Authority as reported at http://fullfact.org/blog/dwp_statistics_authority_esa_benefit-2918