Unemployment drops - but where are the figures shifting to?

3 Responses to “Unemployment drops - but where are the figures shifting to?”

1. SirBigWig on March 19th, 2008 4:07 pm

   We should just abolish the benefits system. They don’t put up with these lazy arse scroungers in the States. Why is it places like Merthyr Tydfil can have a third of the community on benefits? We have all these bone idol cretins claiming our taxes whilst simultaneously importing foreign workers from Poland and elsewhere.

2. J Midgley on March 21st, 2008 7:07 am

   Hrgirl,

   The incapacity benefit figures have been falling since May 2005. More on the numbers game follows……

   The Welfare Reform Numbers Game

   The Welfare Reform Act which introduces the Employment and Support Allowance later this year is based on the lie that there are too many people on Incapacity Benefit. The lie is best illustrated with respect to David Blunkett’s comment on the increase in claimant numbers between 1979 (790,000) and 2005 (2.7 million):

   Incapacity Benefit like its predecessor Invalidity Benefit required a sufficient history of NI contributions and most importantly a history of paid NI contributions. This rule prevented the mass transfer of the then pre-existing sick and disabled claimants when Invalidity Benefit came on stream, if you were already incapacitated you would not be paying NI contributions through employment. Invalidity Benefit was to be a benefit for new claimants only.

   Short term claimants stay on IB for something under two years on average and set the initial baseline equilibrium figures when Invalidity Benefit was introduced in the mid seventies. However around 10-15% of new claims of the NI based benefit were long term claimants who stayed on for an average of about 15-20 years. This meant that every year from its inception the Invalidity Benefit caseload increased by many tens of thousands until equilibrium was reached in the mid nineties when almost as many claimants were leaving the benefit as were joining. Thereafter the equilibrium caseload contained a much higher proportion of long term claimants. Invalidity Benefit was designed so that there would be a year on year increase as new long term claimants, typically the more serious chronic cases, were admitted to what was then a new benefit. Long term claimant types were being admitted to this benefit instead of being put onto the alternative of Supplementary Benefit.

   A further effect on the claimant count was the increasing number of people paying the necessary NI contributions since 1979. This happened for three main reasons:

   a) An increasing number of women in the workforce throughout the eighties.
   b) The then Conservative government lowering the real NI payment threshold.
   c) The real increase in the workforce numbers since the mid nineties.

   These factors had the effect of increasing the numbers paying NI contributions by 65%. Hence an additional 65% of the workforce could claim IB when they got sick rather than Supplementary Benefit (which was later to become Income Support).

   A third factor in the numbers game is that Blunkett did not compare the numbers claiming Invalidity Benefit with the numbers claiming Incapacity Benefit; currently around 1.8 million. Instead Blunkett compared the numbers claiming Invalidity Benefit with the numbers claiming incapacity benefits! He surreptitiously added on all other sick and disabled people on Income Support by Reason of Incapacity and Severe Disablement Allowance! In leaving out the comparison figures for those on Supplementary Benefit who were sick and disabled in 1979 he compared chalk with cheese and conned the British Public.

   The lie about the claimant count has become the public perception encouraged by the gutter press that the trebling of numbers on “the benefit” represents a work avoidance strategy by a group of lazy fakers. It has become the starting point for “informed debate” throughout the media from the bleeding heart liberalism of Poly Toynbee to the mindless bigotry of the basest tabloid. It is the basis of future Department of Work and Pensions policy and the benefit “expert” David Freud’s decision to recommend paying billions upon billions of tax payer’s money to dubious private companies to get these sick and disabled people back to work, even though most claimants leave incapacity benefits within a short time anyway. The caseload flow is such that a million people leave the various incapacity benefits every eighteen months (replaced by similar numbers of new claims). When ESA comes on stream private companies are going to be paid a fortune to accomplish what is going to happen anyway!

   The apparent rise in the number of sick and disabled people within the benefits system is nothing more than a change in the visibility of sick and disabled people to the benefits system. It has occurred as a result of the introduction of purpose designed benefits and in particular the national insurance gateway to Invalidity Benefit and later Incapacity Benefit. The renaming of Income Support (for incapacitated people) as Income Support by Reason of Incapacity added many hundreds of thousands to Blunkett’s claimant count without the addition of a single new claimant to the benefit roles.

   The Welfare Reform Act is based upon a lie, a lie which remains unquestioned and uninvestigated by “informed” journalists and political commentators throughout the media. The Act’s purpose would seem to be not as declared.

   We know that the Employment and Support Allowance which arose from the Welfare Reform Act will reduce the incapacity benefits caseload by denying access through the new and tougher Work Capability Assessment (WCA). In removing more than half a million from the benefit roles at a stroke (without actually doing anything to help these people to find work) the WCA will take the government a good way towards its one million claimant reduction target, a target that has already been reduced by over one hundred thousand by the demographics of incapacity benefits over the last few years. The DWP are already claiming success for these inbuilt changes and has removed these numbers from its benefit reduction target. It seems that by far the greater part of the reduction in claimant count is not to be accomplished by the much advertised ”helping of the sick and disabled to find work” but simply by denying or removing the various sickness and disability benefits from them.

   Of course the Government is not proposing to reduce our national insurance contributions or taxes as a result of denying benefit to sickness benefit claimants. Instead they are offering a much reduced chance of claiming on our national insurance payments in the event of illness or disability while simultaneously they pay private provider companies untold fortunes to accomplish the inevitable.

3. hrgirl on March 25th, 2008 4:44 pm

   Wow - thanks for this response - what an impressive way to prove what I said about not knowing what to believe in terms of Government statistics. It makes me really depressed though that none of the changes you hear about in the news are actually to do with people who cannot work or have no work but are more to to with spin and politics. Perhaps I’m just very naive when it comes to this sort of thing.

   I’d really like to know what you think about the types of back to work schemes like the one at Nissan that I wrote about last week?

   Great comment - more like this please!

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