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”
Deborah Fenney
RT @leftfootfwd: DWP admits disability reform based on dodgy figures, as reported by Left Foot Forward http://t.co/ZnwZnOe
Why did DWP delay releasing new data until after welfare reform bill cleared Commons? | Left Foot Forward
[…] Yesterday we reported how in research published on Monday, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) finally acknowledged that one of the key figures it has been using to make the case for cuts to disability living allowance gives ‘a distorted picture’ . […]
Chris Salter
RT @BrokenOfBritain: DWP admits disability reform based on dodgy figures | Left Foot Forward http://t.co/uOYFoVU #ppnews
Crimson Crip
RT @BrokenOfBritain: DWP admits disability reform based on dodgy figures | Left Foot Forward http://t.co/uOYFoVU #ppnews
DavidG
@Mason Dixon and 11:
Another good point. When I use the Tabulation tool to generate a time series of ESA claims by Assessment Phase it runs up to November 2010, which is the latest released data and 2 years in if I have my ESA history correct. The data does indeed show 593,930 claims and 316,420 of them (53%) still in Assessment Phase. Some of that must represent people in the appeal tribunal queue, but even that is disturbing.
To try and get a better breakdown of what that meant I did Duration of Claim by Phase of Claim, and, looking at the November 2010 quarterly breakdown, we see that there are again 316,420 people still in assessment phase, but we can now see that of those only 132,990 are still in the first 3 months of their claim within which Assessment Phase should complete, 65,620 are in the second three months of their claim (where we would expect some spillover), 66,040 have had claims lasting between six months and a year, 49,450 people have a claim still in Assessment Phase more than a year into the claim, and 2320 are still in Assessment Phase more then 2 years into their claim.
But all of this is in direct contradiction of DWP’s latest quarterly report on ESA (the ‘75% are Faking’ one), which supposedly covers the same dataset and says only 1% of claims are still in Assessment Phase (with no further breakdown provided). There’s definitely a problem with one of these sets of figures, 1% is not the same as 53% within normal margins of error!
On a separate note, I can’t help thinking the headline on the Tabulation Tool Web Page: ‘Create Your Own Statiistics’ is one the authors of DWP press-releases have taken to heart 😉