Government has inflated the fit for work figures

The government inflated estimates of people on a disability benefit subsequently found to be ‘fit for work’, a Labour MP has said, suggesting cases are much more widespread than is actually the case. Work and pensions select committee member Sheila Gilmore MP said she has received an admission from employment minister Esther McVey that the official figures are “not clear” and had secured a promise to “ensure greater clarity in future”. The Labour MP for Edinburgh East queried the government figures on 27 September. She said the response this month from the minister conceded that the government had effectively inflated the numbers found to be fit for work while receiving Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). This was because only fit for work assessments overturned through a formal tribunal process were removed from the headline figures. Cases overturned in an informal “reconsideration” process used prior to these formal appeals were still lumped in with the ‘fit for work’ group. Sheila Gilmore said: “Up to now we thought that the assessment was getting about 1-in-10 fit for work decisions wrong – far too many in most people’s eyes – but now we know the government have been fiddling the figures, the reality could be much, much worse.” She added: “It now turns out that informal appeals to officials – as opposed to formal ones to judges – were being taken into account. This has clearly masked the true extent of the failings in the ESA assessment process,” noting that the revelations suggest “that rather than trying to fix the test to reduce the number of incorrect decisions, ministers’ priority is to fix the figures to downplay the extent of the problem.” Fit for work figures, normally the subject of a high profile government news release, were omitted from the latest quarterly government statistics, published in October. The real figures show the overwhelming majority of ESA recipients are genuinely not fit for work due to ill-health or disability.