Tag Archives: More or Less

A pathetic last gasp from the editor of More or Less on incapacity deaths

Biased Broadcasting Corporation: It seems the BBC's More or Less programme really is more interested in broadcasting the views of the Conservative Government than in providing a genuinely impartial public service.

Biased Broadcasting Corporation: It seems the BBC’s More or Less programme really is more interested in broadcasting the views of the Conservative Government than in providing a genuinely impartial public service.

I had another email from Richard Vadon, the editor of BBC Radio 4’s More or Less today – and it was absolutely pathetic.

I note that you have published my reply on your website without permission under those circumstances I will be making no further responses.

I have replied as follows:

“You never asked for any of it to be kept in confidence. Why should you wish it to be? You broadcast your programme happily enough but, now that you’re being asked to justify it in public, suddenly you have nothing to say.

“The public can judge you on that.”

I’ll let you know my own judgement right now: Pathetic.

Feel free to offer your own opinions via the BBC More or Less website.

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Is this saga More or Less over? VP blogger puts down BBC editor

This is the last (so far) episode in the More or Less saga: My response to the comments of the programme’s editor, Richard Vadon, regarding the segment on the programme covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Thank you for your very fast response to my further complaint. I think you have reacted a little too quickly, in fact, judging from the comments you make.

Firstly, allow me to remind you that I am the person who made the Freedom of Information request to which the DWP’s statistical release is an attempted response and about which all of the media discussion following that release – whether acknowledged or not – is based. I have been dealing with this matter for a little over two years so forgive me if I suggest that I may have a little more authority on the subject than Full Fact, Ben Goldacre or your team. Your opinion of those people is of no interest at all. They have all gone into this from the wrong angle and I am disappointed that you see fit to defend this.

I notice that in your further comments, you are selective about the points I raise and perpetuate certain vague references that were made in the programme. For example: “The figure that the DWP released is only a subset of those who have died…” Why did the DWP only release the figure in that way when the FoI request wanted the full picture? No investigation from your programme and no comment from you. Yet Mr Stephenson says the DWP was asked for information about the irrelevant “within two weeks of being found fit for work” point. Why not do the job properly?

Your comments about people who have been found fit for work are confusing. By virtue of having been refused benefit by the DWP – as I stated before – they are defined by the government as being just as likely (or unlikely) to die as the rest of the non-incapacity-benefit-claiming population. You are making a distinction that is not accepted by the law. Are you saying that the test is wrong to send these people out without benefits, possibly to their deaths? If so, then why not say that on the programme? If not, then what, exactly, are you saying?

I await your response to my other points.

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

The More or Less ‘incapacity deaths’ saga: This BBC editor’s comments may infuriate

This is from Richard Vadon, editor of More or Less, in response to my email earlier today, following up on my complaints about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

I am the editor of More or Less and my series producer Wes Stephenson has passed me your complaint.

 In your reply to his letter you say that a Full Fact article is discredited, that Ben Goldacre has got the wrong end of the stick and you describe More or Less as making a proper mess of the story. I am full of admiration for the journalism done by Full Fact, Ben Goldacre and for that matter Tim Harford and the More or Less team (although clearly I’m biased in the last case). These are all independent minded and award-winning journalists but your position is that we are all wrong. I’m not sure I can say anything that could change your mind but I will make a few points.

 I’m sorry if the reply has confused things about the 2380 deaths but the programme’s script couldn’t be more definite, “We’re clear: these 2380 people were declared fit for work, and then they died”.

 The reference to deaths after breakfast is making a simple correlation is not causation point. This is a regular theme in the programme and maybe could have explained in a fuller way. I’m sorry if you find the breakfast point in poor taste.

 You say:

 “the figure you provided is only a fraction of the total number of deaths and you have misled the public. It would have been far better for you to have said that the DWP has provided this figure but we don’t know how many have died after its self-imposed time limits. You didn’t.”

 The script does make it clear that the figures released are a subset of those who are died and the true figure is almost certainly higher:

 TIM: But we don’t actually have the data we need to say whether something alarming is happening to people we seeking some kind of disability assistance, but who’ve been declared fit for work.

 WES: No. We don’t. One of the reasons we don’t is that the figure that the DWP released is only a subset of those who have died after being declared ‘fit for work’ it only includes people who’ve been assessed as fit for work and who are still on Employment Support Allowance – so people who are appealing the decision for example. Those people who had been moved to other benefits such as Job Seekers Allowance and had then died wouldn’t be captured in this figure so the figure is almost certainly higher.  So we can’t come up with a proper death rate.

 The claim that “the ‘fit for work group” contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying” is not really contentious. When someone is found fit for work it does not mean they have been found to be in perfect health or even to be of average health.

 I was for five years the editor of Money Box and Money Box Live. I saw as the years progressed how we got more and more calls from people struggling with the Disability Benefit system. We covered the story many times and my presenter Paul Lewis always held the authorities to account.

 I am currently the editor of a Point of View on Radio 4 and agreed to broadcast this piece on disability benefit just before this year’s election:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05ns9mt

 I mention my previous history as an editor because I want you to understand that I believe the Government’s changes are an important issue. But I remain convinced by the final thought of the More or Less item that although it should be possible to come up with a much better figure, it’s hard to see how this sort of broad demographic information will ever tell us much about the question at issue – which is whether the test is fair.

I wrote a very quick response which I shall publish shortly. In brief, I thought this was an arrogant response from somebody who considered it beneath him to have to defend his decisions to a member of the public.

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Second complaint to BBC re: More or Less segment on incapacity claimant deaths

This is my reply to Wesley Stephenson (senior producer, BBC Current Affairs) following up on his response to This Writer’s complaint about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Dear Mr Stephenson,

Thank you for your email of September 14 in which you have attempted to defend your programme against my complaints about it. Please accept my apologies for the slight delay in responding – I had to take a step back and calm down a little after reading your comments, and also had to attend to other matters.

On consideration, the most striking element in your response is the claim that your piece “was about the way the press and particularly The Guardian had reported it”. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Guardian piece refers quite clearly to the fact that the DWP released its information in response to Freedom of Information requests. Any reporter worth the name, investigating the veracity of such a report, would naturally look into the nature of those requests, in order to determine the value of the response from the DWP – and only then would they turn to the media reports in order to decide whether they were accurate or not.

What you have done is engage in an extremely offensive game of ‘Chinese whispers’. “The Guardian said this about the DWP figures but we’ve looked at them and they say that.” Of course, none of what you’re saying matters one jot if the DWP’s figures haven’t properly answered the original Freedom of Information request – and they haven’t. The Information Commissioner’s Office is currently investigating why the DWP deliberately failed to follow the terms of the Decision Notice that was issued at the end of April.

What you are telling me is that, rather than investigate the substantive issue, you have chosen to reinforce a distortion that supports the Conservative Government’s line. That is very clear from your reference to the discredited Full Fact article. But even that article mitigates against you, now that the DWP’s own comments have been added in.

They begin: “Once found FFW [Fit For Work] an ESA [Employment and Support Allowance] claim ends” so anybody who died within two weeks of their claim ending, after being declared “Fit For Work” would also die within two weeks of that finding – or as near to that period as makes no difference. In any case, your comment that “We don’t know whether the 2,380 claimants died after being declared “fit for work” is nonsense because the Freedom of Information request – which you didn’t bother to check – specifically wanted “the number of IB and ESA claimants who have died since November 2011 [up to the date of the request, May 28, 2014]. Please break that figure down into the following categories:… b) Those that were found fit for work”. The fact that they died after being declared “fit for work” is the only reason they are mentioned at all.

Your claim that “The ESA claims of 2,380 people with a ‘fit for work’ decision didn’t necessarily end because they were declared ‘fit for work’ but they will have also have ended because they died” is nonsense. The DWP itself stated quite clearly that the claim of anybody with a ‘fit for work’ decision ends immediately that decision is recorded.

You mention that “people will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed”, which is a further indication that you really should have read my Freedom of Information request, the Information Commissioner’s decision notice and the DWP’s response. My request goes on to call for figures relating to “those who have had an appeal completed after a Fit for Work decision”. The DWP provides a figure of 1,340 individuals in this category. What we don’t know – because the DWP was, again, deliberately vague about it (and we can say this is deliberate because there was nothing to stop the DWP from clarifying, as it is now being forced to do) – is whether those who appealed are included in the 2,380 or whether they should be added to that number, so those of us who have been checking the figures properly are saying that 2,380 is the minimum number of ESA claimants to have died after being found fit for work, while the maximum is 3,720.

Add in the number of IB/SDA claimants and that figure rises to a maximum of 4,010 incapacity benefits claimants (ask Nick Dilworth about that – I’m on very good terms with him) – but there is a question mark hanging over whether even that may be done, because adding the total number of deaths of people on IB/SDA together with those on ESA produces a greater number of deaths, in the relevant years, than the DWP’s own combined death figure. It seems that, according to the DWP, you can die twice. Would you like to investigate that, perhaps?

Looking back at the DWP’s comments on the Full Fact page brings us to your error in claiming that “people will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed”. The DWP states: “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.” THERE IS NOTHING IN MY FOI REQUEST THAT PERMITS THE DWP TO REMOVE THESE CLAIMANTS FROM THE FIGURES. The request calls for the number of claimants who have died between November 2011 and May 2014, including all those who were found fit for work. Don’t you wish you had checked that? Mandatory Reconsideration was introduced in October 2013 to ensure that claimants who had been found fit for work would have been cut off from ESA while the reconsideration was taking place and would have had no other form of income. How would they have survived? The fact that they were removed from the figures is extremely suspicious. You could have reported this. You didn’t.

“If the claimant goes on to appeal the MR [Mandatory Reconsideration] decision then the ESA claim is reopened,” the DWP continues. This is correct. But we all know that Mandatory Reconsideration was designed to cut down the number of appeals (the question being whether it does so by ensuring the deaths of the claimants) and in any case, as I have already mentioned, there is a further category in my FoI request to cover claimants who have made appeals.

The DWP continues: “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.” If you had asked me, I would have been able to tell you that the relevant part of the original FOI request was for “those who have an appeal pending”. For some reason the DWP did not want to separate this group out from the rest, and asked me to change it to “those who have had an appeal completed after a FFW decision”. You could have asked why the DWP did that. You didn’t.

Let’s have some more of the DWP’s Full Fact reply, as it is relevant to yours: “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.” This would, of course, have been within the two-week ‘scan’ period the DWP mentioned but in any case is irrelevant to the terms of the FoI request, which merely required that claimants had died after a FFW decision.

Back to the DWP: “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.” Quality-assured or not, the information has been published – by the DWP, after a delay of between 15 months and three years and nine months. It is not unreasonable to expect the DWP to have managed some kind of quality assurance during that time – especially as the DWP has spent at least two years assuring members of the public that the figures would be published. Considering the period of time we’re discussing, they could even have provided ASMRs – the ONS provides a very handy methodology for doing just that which means it could have been done overnight and checked within a week. You could have asked about that. You didn’t.

DWP again: “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.” It is interesting that the DWP admits it only published information on “those where death is believed to be the reason for the claim ending”, which was not any part of the terms of my FoI request – or anybody else’s. The DWP was instructed (by the Information Commissioner) to provide information on all claimants who died from the beginning of December 2011 to the end of May 2014, after a FFW decision. The end of the claim – as I keep having to point out – is utterly immaterial.

You can see, therefore, that the Full Fact article is also utterly immaterial to the issues at hand. In fact, considering the fact that it has been quoted by Conservative MPs including the Prime Minister, it is hard to believe any claim that it was not written to support the claims of the Conservative Government and therefore your own reliance on it is also suspicious.

Let’s look at your claim that “at no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve the the FoI request”. In the piece, Mr Harford goes into what he describes as a “subtext” that the claim is unfair – “that the people who are being tested and then pronounced fit to work are either so ill that they promptly die or perhaps the strain of being forced into work has hastened their deaths”. It’s sloppy reporting to say people were being forced into work because – as you should know – the jobs simply aren’t there for them; they were being forced to seek work that, the evidence indicates, they weren’t fit enough to carry out. But that’s a side-issue. The fact that Mr Harford suggests a subtext implies that this was behind the initial request that forced the DWP to publish the figures – whether you mentioned it or not. As I said in my complaint, there was nothing in my request to suggest such a thing; in essence Mr Harford and the More or Less team made it up.

On whether the number of deaths was “bigger than we would expect”, you say “it was fair to give the figure for the number of people receiving ESA who had died, to give a sense of the size of the number that had been reported” – but this figure is not accurate. The request was for the full number of deaths after being found ‘fit for work’ – didn’t I already mention Mark Wood, who died of starvation, months after his own FFW decision? Where does he fit into these DWP statistics? He doesn’t, does he? How many other people like Mr Wood are there, who have been omitted from the figures because their deaths happened after the end of the DWP’s self-imposed claim end date period? Remember, the DWP was asked to include ALL deaths; this shows that the Department chose to omit – how many? I don’t know. I wanted to. The DWP refused to provide that figure in what I understand is “contumelious disregard” of the Information Commissioner’s decision. So the figure you provided is only a fraction of the total number of deaths and you have misled the public. It would have been far better for you to have said that the DWP has provided this figure but we don’t know how many have died after its self-imposed time limits. You didn’t.

Your claim that “the ‘fit for work group’ contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying” is contentious, to say the least. By definition, people who receive a FFW decision have been told that they are no more likely to die than the average – because they are now to be included among the general population and not among people whose conditions mean they should receive incapacity benefits. Your line, “Just because people are deemed fit for work doesn’t mean they should only have an average chance of death” is unintentionally hilarious. Didn’t you stop to think that ALL the people you mentioned – men, people with lower qualifications and older people – are all included in the wider working-age population who have never claimed incapacity benefits and are therefore among those with an “average” chance of death? I’m a man, and fairly close to the older age range mentioned, but in the nearly-two-weeks since your programme aired, it seems I’ve managed to avoid death. That’s not a miracle.

You mention the Ben Goldacre article, but he got the wrong end of the stick too. DWP didn’t give “the right answer to the wrong question” – it gave the wrong answer to the question it was given.

Now, to return to the second paragraph of your letter, given the number of inaccuracies I have identified above, can you see that the comment that “thousands of people die after breakfast”, in context, was in extremely poor taste? Yes, the piece said that “we know nothing about how or why they died” but stating that “thousands of people die before breakfast” implies – before anything else is even said – that the controversy over these figures is a storm in a teacup. It isn’t.

I think it might be useful to tell you a little about possible future developments. As the DWP’s response to my FoI request was so poor, I have written to the Information Commissioner, requesting enforcement of the terms of the request. The Commissioner is investigating why the DWP has only provided information up to February 2014, rather than May, and also why the DWP – after giving an undertaking to provide the full figures for people who died after being found fit for work, has failed to do so. My suspicion is that the Department will say it did not provide numbers for people who died after its ‘scan’ period because it does not hold them. In that case, why offer them in the first place? The DWP never made any objection to any of the wording of the FoI request, other than that which I’ve already mentioned about appeals pending/concluded.

Finally, you may wish to consider the following, alarming, evidence I received yesterday from the Information Commissioner’s solicitor, who writes: “The Act is only concerned with recorded information and not whether the information which is recorded is accurate, logical or consistent with other information.”

This means, of course, that all of the information provided by the DWP may be complete and utter nonsense – moonshine, intended to confuse and diorientate the public in order to keep us further from the facts. That would explain the discrepancy between the number of deaths recorded for all incapacity claimants and those for IB/SDA and ESA when added together. If you had investigated this matter properly, you might have been able to ask some searching questions about this, too. But you didn’t.

I await your response to this with, I have to admit, diminishing hope. You’ve made a proper mess of it so far.

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

BBC More or Less response to first complaint about ‘incapacity deaths’ programme

This is the email from Wesley Stephenson (senior producer, BBC Current Affairs) to This Writer’s complaint about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Thank you for getting in touch about our piece on ‘Fit for Work deaths’ I have read your complaint and feel that there are some misunderstandings about the programme.

1.       Your objection to the comment that ‘thousands of people die after breakfast’ I believe is misguided. This points out the error that can be made with the deaths figure that correlation somehow infers causation. We did not suggest that there is no link just that we don’t know if there is a link and caution should be taken at interpreting the figures otherwise. This was made clear in the piece when I said “We know nothing how or why they died. It could have nothing to do with the fit for work decision; they could be accidents or unrelated illnesses. Or they could be directly related. There is no way of knowing just by looking at the 2,380 deaths figure.”

2.       You suggest we do know that people died within two weeks of the decision to declare them fit for work. I believe this is a misreading of the figures that stems from the way the DWP chose to present them. We don’t know whether the 2380 claimants died after being declared ‘fit for work’. The figures do not tell us this information. The ESA claims of 2380 people with a ‘fit for work’ decision didn’t necessarily end because they were declared ‘fit for work’ but they will have also have ended because they died. People will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed. We checked this before transmission and you can see a similar clarification close to the bottom of this piece from Fullfact.org.  https://fullfact.org/factcheck/economy/fit_for_work_deaths_ESA-47588

3.       You say in your complaint that “While the point that we don’t know how these people died is correct – this is because the DWP deliberately fails to record causes of death, which is a contentious matter in its own right – this seems to be making a false claim about my Freedom of Information request. There was nothing in it to suggest that I thought the figure that the DWP provided would prove its responsibility for any deaths that took place. Why was Mr Harford suggesting that there was?” At no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve with the FOI request. The piece was about the way the press and particularly the Guardian had reported it.

4.       The question of whether these deaths is ‘bigger than we would expect’ – we made clear here that we didn’t have the ASMRs for this particular set of people and therefore couldn’t make a proper comparison but it was fair to give the figure for the number of people receiving ESA who had died to give a sense of the size of the number that had been reported.

5.       Your assertion that it’s false to say that those declared ‘fit for work’ may be more likely to die than the general population is not borne out in the figures. The death rate for the working age population is an average. The ‘fit for work group’ contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying. Men are more likely to die than the average, people with lower qualifications are more likely to die than average, older people are more likely to die that average these groups are all over-represented in the people who are deemed fit for work. Just because people are deemed fit for work doesn’t mean they should only have an average chance of death.

6.       As you say in your complaint you say that these deaths are ‘likely to be the tip of a very large proverbial iceberg’. This is possible although we can’t say that this will be the case however the programme did point out that 2380 certainly wasn’t the total number of people who had died after being declared fit for work as it only took in a subset of those people declared fit for work.

As Ben Goldacre pointed out in his piece (https://storify.com/bengoldacre/how-dwp-has-confused-everyone-by-releasing-the-rig) no matter where we look we haven’t got enough information to know and until the DWP release the ASMR for those people declared fit for work we cannot reach any meaningful conclusions.  Also Nick Dilworth (who I spoke to before writing the piece) says that DWP figures are not meaningful  http://ilegal.org.uk/thread/9144/death-statistics-idss-obfuscation-answer.

I will publish my response shortly.

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Chinese whispers from BBC’s More or Less over benefit claimant deaths

Chinese Whispers: The message might be clear at the start, but by the time YOU get to hear it, it has been hopelessly mangled [Art: Daina Mattis].

Chinese Whispers: The message might be clear at the start, but by the time YOU get to hear it, it has been hopelessly mangled [Art: Daina Mattis].

Remember the BBC’s hopeless mangling of the issues over the DWP’s incapacity benefit claimant death statistics on the radio show More or Less? Here’s a reminder if you’ve forgotten.

It turns out that the segment in question was created, not to examine the DWP’s vague, confusing and altogether opaque choices regarding what information to provide, but to respond to reports about the issue in other media, such as The Guardian.

Instead of proper reporting, we were given a game of Chinese whispers! The Guardian said this about the DWP figures but we’ve looked at them and they say that.” Of course, none of what either the newspaper or the radio show are saying matters one jot if the DWP’s figures haven’t properly answered the original Freedom of Information request – and they haven’t.

This Blog can report on the mess because Yr Obdt Srvt wrote a strongly-worded complaint, as promised at the end of the earlier article, and received a reply on September 14. It has taken until now for me to recover my temper enough to provide a rational commentary on what it said.

I had not realised that More or Less had chosen to avoid the substantive issue in order to belittle The Guardian. Did any of you, who listened to the programme, understand this to be the case? I had to find out in the response to my complaint by Wesley Stephenson who, in addition to being the so-called expert to whom presenter Tim Harford referred in the piece, is also a senior producer at BBC Radio’s Current Affairs department.

I had written: “While the point that we don’t know how these people died is correct – this is because the DWP deliberately fails to record causes of death, which is a contentious matter in its own right – this seems to be making a false claim about my Freedom of Information request. There was nothing in it to suggest that I thought the figure that the DWP provided would prove its responsibility for any deaths that took place. Why was Mr Harford suggesting that there was?”

In response, I got: “At no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve with the FOI request. The piece was about the way the press and particularly The Guardian had reported it.”

Chinese whispers. The public wasn’t going to get the facts about the FoI – just some interpretations of what the DWP had chosen to provide, whether it related to the FoI or not.

Any reporter worth the name, investigating the veracity of such a report, would naturally look into the nature of those requests, in order to determine the value of the response from the DWP – and only then would they turn to the media reports in order to decide whether they were accurate or not.

What Mr Stephenson told me is that, rather than investigate the substantive issue, he had chosen to reinforce a distortion that supports the Conservative Government’s line. A reference in his email to the discredited Full Fact article on the subject, which was quoted by David Cameron in Parliament, supports this conclusion.

So the nit-picking subject of the More or Less piece, as with the Full Fact piece, is not the number of people who died at any time between December 2011 and May 2015 after being found “fit for work” by the DWP (as my FoI request demanded). Instead it is about whether they died within two weeks of being found fit for work – a question which is entirely immaterial to the issue at hand.

No doubt Messrs Stephenson and Harford, along with those responsible for the Full Fact farrago and anyone else who has chosen to misreport the issue, are lining up to receive honours for their services to the Conservative Party.

What a shame they ignored their duty to serve the public and betrayed us instead.

I’ll be publishing the full text of the More or Less email to me, along with my reply, so you can read the whole saga and see where they went wrong for yourselves.

ADDITIONAL: The editor of More or Less, Richard Vadon, has now written to defend his programme. You can read his email here – see if your conclusions match mine. I will also be publishing my reply.

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

More drivel, less fact from the BBC on incapacity benefit deaths

Mark Wood: He died of starvation several months after his ESA was stopped without warning by the DWP. The BBC's More or Less report ignores the fate of people like Mr Wood - their deaths are considered to be of no interest when evaluating the performance of the Conservative Government.

Mark Wood: He died of starvation several months after his ESA was stopped without warning by the DWP. The BBC’s More or Less report ignores the fate of people like Mr Wood – their deaths are considered to be of no interest when evaluating the performance of the Conservative Government.

If its reports on the deaths of state benefit claimants are any yardstick, nobody should trust the BBC’s More or Less programme as anything other than a propaganda wing of the Conservative Government.

“Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life”, states the blurb on the radio programme’s web page. But More or Less has form for broadcasting drivel and, sadly, the reality of last Friday’s report on the DWP’s recent statistical releases fell far short of acceptable journalistic standards.

Mr Harford started by saying the programme’s inbox “nearly exploded” after The Guardian announced that thousands had died after being found fit for work – then set the tone for the whole report by saying “thousands of people die after breakfast but that doesn’t mean that breakfast is to blame”.

This is a false argument – a bad analogy. People die all the time, for any number of reasons; it is whether they became more likely to die after being wrongly classified as fit for work that concerned the people who so overburdened the More or Less inbox.

“But The Guardian clearly thought it was on to something here,” continued Mr Harford, implying that it wasn’t. Who pays this man’s wages?

Quoting the lower-bound statistic of 2,380 people being found fit for work, and mentioning that the story had been picked up by many newspapers and websites, Mr Harford turned to Wesley Stephenson for an expert opinion. I’m not sure what credentials Mr Stephenson has for doing so – they don’t seem to have been mentioned in the piece.

This gentleman admitted that the facts were correct – as provided by the DWP in response to my now-infamous FoI request of May 2014 – adding that being found fit for work disqualifies a claimant from Employment and Support Allowance.

Mr Harford tried to fog the issue by relating it to a previous report in which people were said to have died after being kicked off-benefit when in fact (in fact? It was a claim by the DWP that was not supported by factual evidence) they had died and their claim had ended. But to his credit, Mr Stephenson said, “In this case, these 2,380 people were declared fit for work, and then they died.”

Now the report goes off-track. Mr Harford asked: “Did they die shortly after being declared fit for work, because that’s what The Guardian said?”

The response – “We don’t know” – is entirely wrong. Stephenson continued: “Originally The Guardian said these people died within two weeks of assessment but it has since published a correction. The DWP release, having looked at that, it doesn’t contain that information.”

He was making a mistake. The DWP release states quite clearly that 2,380 people with a WCA decision of “fit for work” flowed off-benefit with a date of death at the same time, meaning (if one checks the small print) “those whose date of death is up to 14 days after the claim end date for ESA”. We have already established that claims are ended when people are found “fit for work”, and it seems unlikely that anyone would argue that any time within two weeks of that isn’t “shortly after”. Therefore they did, indeed, die shortly after being declared fit for work.

Mr Harford then goes into what he describes as a “subtext” that the claim is unfair – “that the people who are being tested and then pronounced fit to work are either so ill that they promptly die or perhaps the strain of being forced into work has hastened their deaths”. Forced into work? Sloppy reporting; they were being forced to seek work that, the evidence indicates, they weren’t fit enough to carry out.

“Do we know anything about why these people died?”

While the answer is correct: “No… It could have nothing to do with the fit for work decision. They could be accidents, they could be unrelated illnesses – or they could be directly related, but there is no way of knowing, just by looking at the 2,380 deaths figure,” this seems to be making a false claim about my Freedom of Information request. There was nothing in it to suggest that I thought the figure that the DWP provided would prove its responsibility for any deaths that took place.

However, the fact that these people had been claiming a state benefit on the grounds that they were too ill to work and then died shortly after being refused that benefit, coupled with the fact that the DWP tried to hide the fact of these deaths for more than three years after the start of the period they cover, indicates that ministers have serious questions to answer regarding the causes of these deaths. Doesn’t it?

Mr Harford moved on to what he calls “the first rule of More or Less: Is 2,380 people a big number – bigger than we would expect?”

“Well, maybe, but it’s far from obvious. Over the same period, 80,000 people died while they were still on incapacity benefits, and in England and Wales as a whole, about a million people died.” This is another bad analogy – they’re deliberately not comparing like-for-like. Many of the people who died while they were still on benefits were likely to die because – of course – they were seriously ill. They cannot be compared with people who had been refused benefit and then died because – by the DWP’s standards – they were not in the same situation.

If these reporters had looked at the work-related activity group – ESA claimants who are expected to recover enough to return to work within a year of claiming, the number of people in that group over the calendar years 2012-13 rose by nine per cent, from 545,000-596,000 people, but the number of deaths in that group rose by 24 per cent, from 2,990 to 3,720. These were people who were supposed to be getting better, remember. Over the period covered by the FoI request, these 6,710 were joined by another 490 to total 7,200.

Looking at the population as a whole, the chance of anybody dying within the years covered was 0.19 per cent so, to take the work-related activity group in 2013 as an example, of 596,010 people, the expected death rate would be 1,081. In fact it was 3,720. That’s a statistically significant amount that the presenter of More or Less was trying to hide.

Even more to-the-point is the fact that the 2,380 deaths only includes those who passed away within the DWP’s two-week ‘scan’ period after their benefit claim was closed and ignores anyone who died even one day after the end of that period. Mark Wood, for example, died of starvation several months after the DWP stopped his ESA claim. How many more died in similar circumstances? It seems likely that the 2,380 known deaths may be just the tip of a very large proverbial iceberg.

As it happens, my FoI request posed exactly this question; it asked for the number of people who had died after being found fit for work between the beginning of December 2011 and the end of May 2014 – the whole period, not just two weeks around the closure of their claim. As the DWP has now withdrawn its objection to my request, it now stands liable to provide the full figures or be in contempt of court.

Moving on, Mr Harford asked whether people who had been found fit for work have been dying at a higher rate than the rest of the working-age population, “ooh – or even better, if these data were standardised to take account of people’s age and sex”. What a crawler. He knows the DWP has put out Age-Standardised Mortality Rates covering incapacity benefit claimants and he wanted to make it clear that he thinks they are a good idea, even though the rest of us know that they were only put together in order to make it seem that fewer deaths have been happening, when in fact they have been increasing.

“That would be absolutely marvellous, wouldn’t it?” enthused Mr Stephenson slimily, before going on to mention the DWP’s ASMR release, along with the fact that such figures have not been prepared for the group under discussion. This is hardly surprising – the ASMR release was created to convince people of a lie that deaths are decreasing, while ASMRs for people found fit for work would require the DWP to tell us the full number of deaths that have taken place, rather than just those that happened within a couple of weeks of the fit for work decision.

Stephenson did mention that the death rate for people on every type of incapacity benefit was four times higher than the rate among the population at large, but qualified his comment by saying: “That’s not really surprising, because these people are too ill or too disabled to work.” Does this lack of surprise include those in the work-related activity group, who are expected to get better? Does it include people in the assessment phase, many of whom may be denied the benefit or put into the WRAG? Does it include those in the mysterious ‘Unknown’ phase of ESA – for people who are only receiving NI credits – where the death rate has skyrocketed while the population has plummeted? Perhaps it’s more surprising than he – or the programme’s makers – want us to believe!

At least he had the decency to admit that “we don’t have the data we need to say whether something alarming is happening to people who are seeking some kind of disability assistance and then get declared fit for work.”

He also, rightly, admits that part of the reason for this is that the death figure doesn’t include people who have been moved onto, for example, Jobseekers’ Allowance.

But he said: “Even if we could, we would expect the ‘fit for work’ group to have a higher death rate than the working population, even if the government’s test is scrupulously fair and accurate. These people have other characteristics that are correlated with a higher mortality rate – they’re older, more likely to have low qualifications, more likely to be men, and more likely to have had low-paid jobs in the past, and of course, they’re making a claim for assistance, so even if they are fit for work, that doesn’t mean they’re in perfect health.”

There is so much wrong with this that it seems likely he was reading from a DWP press statement. Why would we expect somebody marked ‘fit for work’ to be more likely to die? The government has said they should be grouped with the wider population that has a much lower average death rate – that’s the whole thrust of the report up until this point. The claim that their other characteristics make them more likely to die is utterly unfounded for the reason that had just been reported: The DWP has not provided any information on the characteristics of that group.

Take, for example, the claim that they are more likely to die because they are more likely to be men. The average age at which a male UK citizen dies is in his seventies – not while he is working-age at all. Similarly, the comment that they are making a claim for assistance, and therefore aren’t likely to be in perfect health, also runs against a narrative we’ve been hearing from the government and its supporters for the past five years or more – that people who claim these benefits but fail are shirkers and skivers who are perfectly fit and healthy but just want something for nothing. Remember when the Tories were tubthumping about ending the “something for nothing” culture?

Now we’re being told that these skivers are actually more likely to die because they’re ill – in which case they should be on benefit after all. Which is it, DWP?

All those involved in this mockery of a report should apologise ashamedly for this travesty; this attempt to cover up the facts – not just to those of us who had to listen to their tripe but also to the many thousands of people who have died while claiming, or having been cut off from, social security benefits. Reports such as this are an insult to their memory.

The BBC may expect a strongly-worded complaint from me in the very near future. If you wish to do the same, the More or Less website provides a feedback form here.

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

‘More or Less’ on the ESA deaths: MORE stupidity, LESS accuracy

Inaccurate: This meme - and others like it - provided an inaccurate interpretation of DWP statistics that the Torygraph and the BBC have seized, using them to hide the real issue. Thousands of ESA claimants are still dying every year but the DWP refuses to say how many. Why not? As David Cameron himself has said many times, "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear."

Inaccurate: This meme – and others like it – provided an inaccurate interpretation of DWP statistics that the Torygraph and the BBC have seized, using them to hide the real issue.
Thousands of ESA claimants are still dying every year but the DWP refuses to say how many. Why not? As David Cameron himself has said many times, “If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear.”

BBC Radio 4’s More or Less promised a feature on the long-discussed deaths of people claiming Employment and Support Allowance in its programme on Friday – and delivered five minutes of drivel that is an insult to the intelligence of anybody concerned.

As a reporter, I am staggered that the BBC has had the bare-faced cheek to patronise us in this manner.

The feature (which may be downloaded here – it’s the August 29 edition) took as its premise claims made on the social media that 10,600 people have died within six weeks of being declared ‘fit for work’ by Atos assessors.

There are several issues with this. Firstly, this claim is two years out-of-date. Many more are likely to have died since then but the figures are not available because the Department for Work and Pensions has refused to release them. Secondly, the claim is inaccurate, based on a misunderstanding of the DWP statistical release ‘Incapacity Benefits: Deaths of recipients’ published in July 2012.

We already know that the claim was inaccurate. Why is the BBC determined to rake over these old coals?

For the sake of the BBC and anyone else who is similarly hard-of-thinking, let’s go back to what the statistical release actually says.

Officially – according to the DWP – the 10,600 deaths were of people leaving ESA with a recorded date of death, between January and November 2011. The government document made it clear that “data on the number of ESA claimants who have died following a ‘fit for work’ decision is not available, as the Department does not hold information on a death if the person has already left benefit”. Efforts to persuade the DWP to change this policy and follow up ‘fit for work’ decisions by checking on claimants’ health at intervals afterwards have been refused at all times.

Therefore we may safely conclude that the number of deaths of ESA claimants is probably many times greater than official figures suggest.

In the Now and Then piece, the Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers, enlisted to provide some spurious relevance to the show’s finding, said: “The DWP say they don’t keep records of the number of people who died after their benefits were cut off because that’s irrelevant to them; it’s no longer their problem. So we don’t have the full figures.” This is correct.

The trouble is, it is the DWP’s problem – and it’s certainly a problem for the rest of us – because anyone who has died in this way almost certainly did so as a consequence of the loss of their benefit! The news media has been riddled with stories of these people over the last few years, and we can be sure that the volume of known stories is a fraction of the true number of cases.

Back to the statistical release: Of the 10,600, the government said 2,200 died when their assessment had not been completed. This clearly suggests that the assessment process had failed these people – they died before they were able to access the support they needed.

A further 1,300 were in the Work Related Activity group. This suggests that they had been placed in the wrong group and should have been in the Support Group.

Finally, 7,100 were in the Support group. The statistical release states that “those in the Support Group receive unconditional support due to the nature of their illness, which can include degenerative conditions, terminal illness and severe disability”. However, just three paragraphs above, the same release states that the information it provides relates to people “whose latest WCA [work capability assessment] date (or activity towards assessment) was before the end of November 2011”.

This means that people in the Support Group do not receive “unconditional support” at all – they have to undergo periodic reassessment, at irregular intervals (due to the nature of the assessment process – you never know when they’ll get round to you again). This meant that people with degenerative conditions, terminal illness and severe disability are subjected to the stress and anxiety of having to face a flawed assessment system – rigged to find them ‘fit for work’ if at all possible – at any time. Stories in the press about people with terminal cancer (the most famous example) being forced back to work can only have increased this stress, making the possibility of early death more likely.

That is the situation. Now let us examine what the BBC had to say about it.

The More or Less feature is inaccurate from the start.

It states: “In 2011, existing Incapacity Benefit and Income Support claims were replaced with something called Employment and Support Allowance.” In fact, ESA was introduced by the previous Labour government on October 27, 2008 and while IB and IS claims were not migrated until 2011, it would be wrong to think that the deaths under discussion were of the migrated claims in isolation.

“Claimants were made to undergo a Work Capability Assessment to determine whether they were entitled to the new allowance and how much money they might get. Now some critics complain that these assessments are stacked against claimants. Seriously-ill people are being dismissed as malingerers by Atos Healthcare and having their claims denied. And in the middle of this argument, up pops the truly shocking finding that 10,600 people have been cut off from this vital benefit and then died within six weeks.”

Two things: Firstly – THAT IS NOT THE FINDING! See the analysis of the statistical release (above). Secondly – the claim is two years old; it was made when the statistical release was issued back in July 2012 and debunked shortly afterwards. Why is More or Less covering this old news when it could be asking relevant questions?

One has to ask why the programme enlisted help from – of all people – Daily Telegraph blogger Tom Chivers. He published a controversial piece about the Atos deaths on July 9, proceeding from the same – wrong – starting-point as More or Less. His argument is irrelevant because it does not relate to the problem.

In the broadcast, Chivers compounded the error with further inaccuracies: “In July 2012 there was a Freedom of Information request about how many people died within six weeks of their benefit claim ending,” he blithely spouted. WRONG. Here is the request, copied verbatim from the DWP’s statistical release and pasted here:

Information request: Can you please provide me with the number of ESA claimants who have died in 2011?

Can you please break down that number into the following categories:

  • Those who are in the assessment phase
  • Those who have been found fit to work
  • Those who have been placed in the work related activity group
  • Those who have been placed in the support group
  • Those who have an appeal pending

(This is the format I have used in both of my own, subsequent, FoI requests on this matter, and I believe Samuel Miller’s was phrased the same way. The DWP has sidestepped all three.)

There is nothing about any six-week period after the claim ended. The request is about ESA claimants who died during 2011 – no more, no less.

Chivers accurately quotes a paragraph from the response which mentions the six-week time figure. He goes on to say that he found it questionable and checked it with the DWP. What he then tells us suggests that the fault lies with the Department for Work and Pensions, for deliberately failing to directly answer the direct questions that had been put to it.

“They said no – actually there is a rather weird, obtuse meaning of it, which they mean it was six weeks either side of this thing – there was a six-week period either side of the death and that was when the claim ended.”

What?

That has nothing to do with the original request! If they died, they died!

“A lot of these people would have died, and then the claim ended shortly afterwards because they were dead,” Chivers said, as though it excused the DWP of any wrong-doing. All he was doing was reiterating the problem – that people have been dying while claiming ESA!

Presenter Tim Harford then chimed in: “So what the DWP are doing here is, they take a snapshot, they see a certain number of people are making a benefit claim and are alive, and then six weeks later they take another snapshot and they discover that these people are no longer making a benefit claim, and these people are no longer alive?”

NO!

This would make a nonsense of the DWP’s statistical release from 2012. It covers a period from January to November 2011, inclusive. That’s 11 months, not six weeks! No ‘snapshots’ were taken – it was a running total showing all deaths during the c.48 weeks covered, not the sum of two ‘snapshots’ taken six weeks apart. In fact, the DWP should be grateful for this because 10,600 deaths within six weeks comes out at 1,767 deaths per week, rather than the 220 maximum that some of us have been suggesting.

Not content with producing a statement of utter nonsense, Harford decided to confuse the listening public with a completely different interpretation within minutes of the first: “So 10,600 claimants didn’t die six weeks after their claim ended; 10,600 claimants died within the same six-week period as their claim ended – not the same thing at all.” Correct – it’s not even the same thing you said moments previously, Tim.

And it still isn’t accurate! Look at the top of this article again. The DWP made it perfectly clear that it does not monitor what happens to people after their claim ends – these are all people who died while claiming the benefit, who should have been receiving the maximum amount of care possible, but didn’t.

That is the issue More or Less should have been investigating. That is why the show, Harford, Chivers and the BBC have failed us so appallingly.

The perpetrators of this atrocity decided to end with some unbearably smug platitudes – to show how completely they have misunderstood the situation, it seems.

From Chivers: “What this comes down to, as far as I’m concerned, is just a dreadful piece of communication by the DWP. This fairly, well, not simple but not complicated piece of information has been translated into 10,000 people dying within six weeks of being callously removed from their benefits.”

Wrong! Thanks to a few inaccurate memes, Chivers has tried to translate the DWP’s information into something it is not, diverting attention away from the real problem.

People are still dying – on a daily basis – because of the way the Department for Work and Pensions has decided to handle claims for incapacity benefits. It is a national scandal.

Remember: Those 10,600 deaths cover a period of just 11 months, ending nearly three years ago. How many have died since then? Has the number escalated or decreased? If More or Less had done its research, it could have been reporting on the biggest genocide of the British people by their own government since the Harrowing of the North.

Instead, we got this from Tim Harford: “So the moral of this story: It’s always worth asking what a statistic is really counting, rather than assuming we know.”

Really? What a shame Mr Harford did not practise what he was preaching.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

Join the Vox Political Facebook page.

Buy Vox Political books and help our mission to
reveal the true – horrifying – extent of the ESA deaths!

Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:

HWG PrintHWG eBook

The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

SWAHTprint SWAHTeBook

Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(
but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:

Donate Button with Credit Cards