If the digits are right I suspect the firgure, whatever the source, is in 87,000 not close to a million.

Another link to the same information:

www.itv.com/news/update/2013-03-30/nearly-1-millio.../

I know from first hand experience of two people who claimed unemployment benefit rather than work. Okay, not the same benefit, but telling.

If the figures are based on minister's 'claims' viewed though the prism of a Daily Mail report (yes, the paper is relevant) then I'd be even more sceptical.

Okay, fair point, the paper is relevant. Not the lying Mail, it was the Sunday Times.

The facts, based on stats from the Tribunal Service, are that 40% of cases that appeal the assesment on conversion from Incapacity Benefit are sucessful. There is further published and pending research by distinguished academics that further illuminate those raw numbers and the effects of advice and assistance for claimants.

Yes, I've seen the 40% figure. That suggests either the tests or the appeals are flawed. Research results would be interesting.

Tribunals are not private organisations paid to produce certain results and Tribunals are staffed with experts, so I don't see how the appeals could be flawed. I find it troubling we're paying physio therapists to over-rule NHS General Practitioners who we also pay for.

You missed this story;

www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f4bd06b4-76a1-11e2-ac91-00144fe...6

Regarding GPs, I do not trust them to provide accurate assessments. It is well known that people can get expensive cosmetic surgery, which is non-essential, by harassing the GP, until they give in to get a quiet life. And a lot of people get certificates, or whatever they are called, to justify sick leave from work, for similar reasons.

I am unable to find any support for your claim that ATOS only get paid if someone is found to be able to work, which is what you imply.

I don't have an FT subscription so I can only see the headline. The point is do you trust GPs any less than a privately employed physio therapist?

No need to be so angry. You stated that the minimum requirement is a physio, and now you keep talking as if they are all physios, which is it?

I've met former soldiers, injured in Northern Ireland, signed off by the Ministry of Defence who've been found 'fit for work' by these unqualified jokers who look as though they're on a gap year. For me the opinions of military doctors counts for more than those of 24 year old physios.

With so little detail it is impossible to comment.

I am unable to find any support for your claim that ATOS only get paid if someone is found to be able to work, which is what you imply.

Well the Government - or Atos - aren't going to say it that bluntly are they?

So your evidence is?

It seems clear to me though that the whole point of 'welfare reform' is to pay out less money. The previous Government set this reform up because they wanted less people claiming the benefit. It therefore stands to reason any private company tasked with implementation is seeking to reject claims before they've even assessed them, because it's naturally in their interests.

So this is a guess on your part?

It's the age old payment-for-results dynamic.

No need to be so angry. You stated that the minimum requirement is a physio, and now you keep talking as if they are all physios, which is it?

Not sure why you took my comment to be angry. I don't have access to Atos' personnel files but I know the minimum requirement is a physio. Most probably are physio because surely no serious, ambitious doctor will be wasting their time doing benefit assessment work for the Government.

Well, it seems that they outsource to the NHS. So it would have been cheaper to get the NHS to do it in the first place. I wonder if the NHS bring in contract staff. Ha ha.

So this is a guess on your part?

When they were awarded the contract the Government claimed they wanted 1 million less people claiming incapacity benefit. It is surely in the private contracters interests to deliver the results the customer wants, is it not?

Aha, so it is an assumption. You criticise ATOS for poor standards, but you judge them on the basis of guesses.

Yes you're right in cases when an application for the Incapacity Benefit replacement is refused on medical grounds, Tribunals overturn the ruling in 40% of cases and instruct the DWP to pay out the benefit. It might be more if everyone actually knew they had right to appeal - many don't. If your system works then your appeal success rate should be very low, a single digit. Anything with a 40% overturn rate is clearly flawed.

87,000 does sound more realistic.

I already said these reforms started under the last Government and the ITV article - and indeed practically every media article on the matter - failed to mention that. Leif has himself described Grant Shapps as a con man in the past so I don't know why Leif attached any weight to his claims in that ITV article. I wouldn't risk buying a cup of tea from the man, he's just got one of them faces.

The journalism is incredibly lazy and we shouldn't even be starting threads citing that ITV article - or ones like it - as evidence of anything. I defend the freedom of the press because I believe an independent press' best virtue is it holds politicians to account. The fact the vast majority of our media hates the idea of any human receiving a state benefit and so fell for Shapps' story - and accidentally praised Labour in the process - damages my faith in that free press.

It clearly works though. The snappy headlines of people dropping claims as the Coalitions reforms kick in certainly sells papers and makes people read it, especially on the day many other benefit changes come in. It seeps into the national conciousness just nicely. Hell Leif isn't completely stupid and it even fooled him into believing it and opening a thread on it.

So long as we keep doing that, they'll keep writing it.

I find it amusing how you keep accusing me of providing no evidence, when the only evidence you've put forward is something in the Sunday Times (which you appear to hold in untouchably high esteem) and a very lazy, poorly written ITV article quoting a conman. You have to do better than that before you can accuse me of not backing up my argument.

• And I think I saw quotes on the BBC news web site too. Shapps was a con man, but being a minister is different.

Just because the BBC quote Grant Shapps doesn't mean what he's said is correct. The BBC quoted Tony Blair telling us Saddam Hussein could nuke London inside 45 minutes.A conman becoming a minister (they haven't given him a portfolio for fear of him nicking it) doesn't mean he's no longer a conman.

• he is briefed by civil servants, and held to account by parliament.

So was Gordon Brown, do you afford him the same leniency?

• You have given no evidence for those remarks.

I've provided plenty of evidence for my critique of the ITV article and don't feel the need to say it all again.

• They don't hate people receiving state benefit. They hate fraud.

I'll resist the temptation to ask for evidence of that remark and merely point out that actual benefit fraud - according to Govt figures - is far lower than most opinion polls suggest the public think it is.

If you want evidence, here is a YouGov poll showing the public believes 27% of the welfare budget is paid due to fraud; d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docu...f

Here is the official Nov 2012 DWP release stating 0.7% of welfare payments are due to fraud; statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/fem/nsfr-final-2911...f

Why do the public believe it's 27% rather than 0.7%? Is it because the entire civil service machine falsifies data on an olympic scale or is it because the tabloids throw benefit related stories down our throats every day? Is all this rage really over just 0.7%? It was 0.8% in 2009/10 in case you were thinking it was much higher under Labour.

Far from billions being lost due to fraud, billions are actually being left unclaimed according to this BBC article quoting official DWP data; www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17139088

• Daily Mail which is a hate rag with low standards of journalism. the Sunday Times does not fit that bill.

The Sunday Times is still News International. Don't let their internet paywall con you into thinking it's anything more than The Sun in a pretty frock.

• ...lovely cuddly deeply caring and really really nice leftie liberals say that the number of people who fraudulently claim benefit is tiny, and the nasty evil baby eating fox murdering self centred Tory toffs say the opposite.

I don't really care what either of them say because I don't form my opinions based on anything any newspaper or Westminster joker says. I'm more interested in official Government data when forming my opinions on these matters. That official data shows the fraud rate for Disability Living Allowance to be just 0.5%, despite Conservative MP Esther McVey's claim via twitter that it's 'Britains most abused benefit.'

I got that figure from page 14 of this Government report; research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/fem/fem_apr10_mar11.p...f

Obviously one thing these figures will never show is how much fraud hasn't been detected because it....hasn't been detected, so it's impossible for you, me, the Government or the newspapers to know. We both know people who are probably right on the edge of eligible (or even over it) for certain welfare payments, but they won't be in these fraud statistics because they've never been caught.

I'm not saying there's no debate to be had or that no cuts should be made to anything, I'm just saying most mainstream journalism on the matter is incredibly lazy and the Westminster circus are just a total joke. I barely ever trust a word out of any of their mouths.

What an aggressive and emotional rant. Do you feel better now?

There was nothing aggressive in what I said and you seem to be confusing emotional with providing statistical evidence. You have asked me at least five times in this thread to provide evidence to back up my point of view, when I finally did so you wrote it off as looking at the world in precise, clinical, black and white terms and an emotional rant. It's the typical response of someone who simply doesn't want to hear it.

You ask for evidence, but when said evidence doesn't fit your viewpoint you suddenly declare evidence doesn't matter, because evidence is just too clinical, too black and white. Make up your mind.

I theorise most people start with an opinion and then seek to justify it. People will work hard to discredit opposing evidence in a way they don't work hard to discredit whoever agrees with them. People cling to their starting point like a climber clings to the clifftop and they'll defend it at most costs. I do it myself by usually refusing to read anything which opposes my view on 'global warming.'

When compiling the statistical evidence for my post I thought I'd give my theory a test. I said to myself 'if he comes back with a dismissive post, discrediting my evidence as an emotional rant while defending his viewpoint with the odd anecdote then I know I'm dealing with an impossible person.' I was hoping you wouldn't prove my theory right. I dispair.

You only started this thread because you've already decided all disabled people are frauds, so even a very information-light ITV article quoting a renowned conman is good enough for you. It was quoting Government ministers, you said, as though they're never wrong. You then tell me you must be right because the Sunday Times agrees with you, because they never lie. Oh no, never. I then responded with official Government data and opinion polling - far more reliable than anything Grant Shapps says - and you write it off as irrelevant.

Of the people I knew who claimed unemployment benefit, 50% were scroungers

So you've decided 50% of claimants nationwide are the same? If my list of official Government data is irrelevant, then personal anecdotes are not even worth discussing. You seem to have based your view of the entire nation based on a handful of people you've met and if that's how policy is being decided in Whitehall then the nation has no chance and no hope.

they made no attempt to find work despite being fit and healthy. But officially that is not fraud e.g. claming and working.

For what it's worth; claiming while not trying to find work is classed as fraud, but if they've never been caught then obviously they won't be in the statistics - as I very clearly said. By it's very nature, undetected fraud is impossible to estimate, even for you.

I was hoping to move this debate away from 'my mate claimed while not trying to find work so anyone who agrees with me is right' and into more sensible ground. However that's apparently an emotional rant, so I give up.

Edited by jamie745 on 03/04/2013 at 18:04

My intention was to turn the debate away from - to shamefully quote David Cameron - punch and judy politics and onto a debate based on fact, rather than rhetoric. I'm trying to explain how the welfare reform debate isn't a simple case of stopping fraud, it's more fundamental than that. It's about turning eligible people into ineligible ones. It's about moving goalposts and about what the system should and shouldn't be doing.

Case in point is this story about the woman who gave up a well paid job because she supposedly gets £70k in benefits. The headline is disengenious as they mean you'd need to earn a £70k salary to have - after tax - what she receives, but there's still a serious point behind it; should a fully qualified chartered accountant be able to view staying at home as the best option? To me the system seems to help you if you're willing to completely give up, but if say you're a married couple and one of you loses your job, you get very little on the basis the other is still working.

There is a debate to be had, I was just trying to turn it away from tabloid stories of fraud.

I've never agreed with people having children when they know they can't afford them. I see Osborne, in an attempt to add to his burgeoning popularity has tried to twist the Philpott story round to an anti-welfare rant. Apparently we should have a debate on whether the state should fund the lives of people like him, well that's a short debate; no we shouldn't, but we'll be funding him at a cost of £36k a year in Prison for the rest of his life. Child murderers generally need even tighter security inside as well, if the guards let the other inmates at him they could save us a few quid.

When the concept of 'Child Benefit' and access to larger social housing if you have more children was all devised, nobody foresaw people having children purely to get the money and bigger homes. It just proves scumbags will always exploit a good thing. The inventors of the internet didn't set it up to commit identity theft, but that's how scumbags use it. Think of the guys 10 odd kids who are still alive, they'll now grow up in foster care and the likelyhood is 8 of them will end up no better than him. That's the tragedy.

Rich people evading paying their taxes or bankers taking massive bonusses payed from the public purse?

People are protesting about perfectly un-illegal tax avoidance, rather than clear cut cases of evasion. Multinationals have been transferring profits to lower tax countries for over 30 years, it just took some public spending cuts for people to notice. Strictly speaking the 'bankers bonuses' aren't paid from the public purse, the banks generate an awful lot of money but they shouldn't have been bailed out. Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan described the bailouts as something which 'in years to come will be viewed as a generational offence' and I have to agree.

Dropping the tax from 50 to 45% for people who have already more money than they need is not the best example in my o[pinion.

I have no problem with the Government reducing the top rate of income tax because history shows a clear trend of tax revenues going down when tax rates go up. It's well meaning to say we'll 'tax the rich to take care of the poor' but if it results in Switzerland raking in tax revenue rather than the UK, who are we helping then? I won't deny it looks bad politically, especially as it takes effect on the same day as benefit changes.

The 50p rate only came into effect in 2010, it was left as a political mantrap by Gordon Brown who knew full well he'd lose the election and that an incoming Conservative administration would be forced to reduce it. If Osborne had any brain cells he'd have cut it in his 2010 'emergency budget' back down to 40p and got the agro out of the way early.

This bedroom tax will backfire on the Coalition like the poll tax did for Margaret Thatcher.

I don't think so. The poll tax was an actual tax to be levied on all people, so it had the effect of instigating mass rebellion. This 'bedroom tax' isn't actually a tax, it's a reduction in housing benefit for people in social housing with spare bedrooms. Hardly as catchy as the poll tax. An actual tax always generates more anger than a benefit cut, so as much as the Daily Mirror want this to spill onto the streets I don't think it will.

Speaking of Mrs Thatcher....

Ahh the Iron Lady.

May she rust in peace.

The important points, based on statistics from the Tribunal service, are that 40% of situations that attract the assesment on transformation from inability advantage are quite a bit of sucessful . . . . . . . .

Mods,

It would seem that Mr Elan's somewhat cryptic responses were a prelude to some lovely SPAM....