The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has finally published its first set of figures that show how many disabled people who receive universal credit are being found fit for work after an assessment.
It has taken more than four years for ministers to make good on their promise to publish statistics showing how claimants of universal credit are dealt with by the work capability assessment (WCA) system.
Former DWP ministers such as Therese Coffey and Chloe Smith repeatedly argued that it would be too expensive to produce official statistics showing how many disabled claimants of universal credit have been put through the WCA, what level of benefit they received following their assessment, and how many were being found fit for work.
The Office for Statistics Regulation told DWP last year – following a complaint by Disability News Service – that its failure to publish universal credit WCA statistics left “a gap in the information available” and that there was a “wealth of evidence around the need for transparency around Universal Credit WCA statistics”.
The first set of the quarterly “experimental” figures dates back only to April 2019, but it shows that a total of 1.9 million universal credit WCA decisions had been made by February 2023.
Of those decisions, 16 per cent found claimants were fit for work, with 19 per cent of claimants found to have limited capability for work (LCW), and 65 per cent said to have limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCWRA), the equivalent of the employment and support allowance (ESA) support group.
The figures show significant monthly fluctuations in the proportion of those found fit for work, particularly during the pandemic.
In April 2019, just 12 per cent of claimants who were put through a WCA were found fit for work, but three months later that had risen to 25.5 per cent.
At the height of the second wave of the pandemic, in January 2021, just 2.1 per cent of claimants were found fit for work after a paper-based or telephone assessment.
The latest month’s figures, for February 2023, show 63.8 per cent of claimants were found to have LCWRA, and 16.6 per cent were fit for work.
Meanwhile, the latest figures showing the results of initial WCAs for ESA claimants show 65 per cent were placed in the support group, 12 per cent placed in the work-related activity group, and 22 per cent found fit for work, in the three months to December 2022.
Professor Ben Baumberg Geiger, from King’s College London, who has spent 15 years researching the disability benefits system, wrote in a blog that DWP’s previous failure to publish the figures had made it “almost impossible to understand what has been happening to benefits disability assessments over the past few years”.
He said it was “astonishing” that it had taken so long to publish them.
He put the new universal credit figures together with the latest ESA statistics and showed that the proportion of all claimants found fit for work after a WCA had fallen by between 15 and 20 percentage points since 2014-18, when it was between 30 and 40 per cent.
Since mid-2021, he says, the proportion of ESA and universal credit claimants found fit for work after a WCA has been “steady” at about 15 to 20 per cent.
Further figures on universal credit claimants and WCAs will be released in phases, including information on decisions according to conditions and impairments, outcomes of mandatory reconsiderations and appeals, and clearance times.
Asked if ministers were content with the proportion of disabled people found fit for work under the universal credit WCA system, a DWP spokesperson declined to comment.
But the spokesperson said in a statement: “We recognise the limitations of the work capability assessment in assessing people’s potential, which is why we set out radical reforms at the budget to scrap the assessments completely.
“We know that one in five people on an incapacity-related benefit would like to work at some point in the future, but fewer than one in a hundred move into employment every month.
“Our changes will ensure the system focuses on what people can do rather than on what they cannot and give disabled people the confidence to try work without the worry of losing their benefits.”
Disabled campaigners have raised serious concerns about the government’s plans to scrap the WCA, which will hand responsibility for deciding if a disabled person has to carry out work-related activity to work coaches, who would be likely to have no healthcare qualifications.
Meanwhile, the latest figures from the tribunal service show that, between January and March 2023, 68 per cent of personal independence payment appeals found in favour of the claimant.
The proportion of successful appeals peaked at 80 per cent in the first quarter of 2020-21 but has generally been at about 70 per cent, or higher, since 2018.
Picture: Therese Coffey (left) and Chloe Smith
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