Sickness benefit claimants are more than twice as likely to die than get a job
Shocking ‘back to work’ results for people claiming all kinds of sickness benefits in Great Britain over a 4 year period show that just 37,770 obtained a ‘job outcome’, whereas in just over a two year period over 81,000 people died whilst claiming sickness benefits between December 2011 and February 2014.
These figures make a laughing stock of Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) and his wildly distorted claims to be helping the sick and disabled back in to work. In May 2010 Duncan Smith announced his flagship ‘Work Programme’ on the misleading premise that it was fit to revolutionise welfare for the 21st centrury. Amongst claims made by the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions were specific statements setting out how his reforms would see sickness benefit claimants on their way in to work, Duncan Smith has consistently claimed that the key to lifting people out of poverty is to get them in to employment. In regular parrot fashion he reminds us how ‘work always pays’, – really?
IDS is all talk, none of his promises come to fruition, it’s all empty meaningless rhetoric.
Source: Serious flaws in government’s statistics? | ilegal
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Hmmm figures 81000 died you bet theres more deaths than that figures back to work how many were stacking shelves yep you cant trust dwp jcp figures
well done mike i’m surprised IDS has not employed you as your the very best where figures are involved and they you understand the pitfalls of welfare reform where as IDS does not
you need to stand as a mp somewhere and before long your’l be in the lords as the man who understands facts and figures
I don’t want to be in the Lords!
As for my knowledge of the figures – it’s as much a case of knowing where to find them as it is of understanding them. We have Nick Dilworth at iLegal to thank for this article.
the lords part was a joke mike as i know that your none to keen on that place
I’m the same but it is important none the less someone like you are i get put there if a proper debate is to be had on the REALITY’S of life and not the fiction
most odd that of out of hundreds of mp’s and lords there are only a few like ourselves who understand the full picture
very interesting if correct. But the employment stats dont have the equivalent dates. How does mike know their time period ?
That would be: “How does Nick Dilworth know their time period?” And the answer is that he used the government’s tabulation tool. If you click on the link, you can see the figures yourself. Note also that the article states very clearly that the employment figures cover FOUR years, while the death figures cover slightly more than TWO years.
See also the original article.
Incredible by any standards…except Tory Standards! I hope the UN Team is made aware of this! I wonder if Mike is one of their confidential interviewees, I certainly hope so, though understand that it is all done in secrecy.
As I recall the definition for ‘working’ was 6 months for JSA, and 3 months for ESA. So the Employment Programme only had to get someone into any type of work for 12 weeks to collect their “premium” which could be up to £14K per person. As IDS himself is so keen on saying, that’s a very perverse incentive…….so it would be an interesting FoI to find out how much has been paid to these parasites for these 37,770 ‘sucesses’.
I would like to know how many of these 37,770 were still in employment after the 12 week period, how many had to re-claim ESA (and thus endure WCA cycle again), but most of all , we need to know how many died after being put into work.
The old IB used to allow you to re-enter work, but retain your claim so that if it didn’t go well you could return to IB without having to re-claim. It allowed some part-time work without loss of benefit. IB was a more sensible, humane, and cheaper system by far than the replacement ESA.
I was on Incapacity Benefit and went onto JSA. I got myself a job without any help from the Work Programme I was put on. I didn’t pass the probation period due to bullying and will now have to go back onto JSA. The 1st I’d heard from my Work Programme advisor in months was to see how my job was going. Telling them I’d lost it, knowing they won’t get a Government pay out is the only silver lining in this. The Work Programme advisors failed me and keep their jobs – I was bullied out of mine through no fault of my own, without any support.
I also meant to add that when I was previously on JSA I did some freelance work, which was the only work I could get, and when I declared it it would mess up my Housing Benefit claim – which was re-assessed as the DWP automatically told them I was working; I was never financially better off for doing this work as it was deducted from my benefit (even if I did the work on one day or week they divide the month’s amount by 4 to get a weekly amount – even though I didn’t work over 4 weeks…why they won’t let you keep what you earn if it’s over the weekly JSA amount, so they don’t pay you any benefit that week instead, I don’t know); and I’ve spent the last 2 Christmases without money because the DWP wouldn’t believe I wasn’t working all the time, as I had no payslip to prove it! Still wondering about this ‘making work pay’ business…