Sunak faces verdict on misleading ‘fit for work’ stats, just days after his Labour tax row ‘lies’

The statistics regulator will rule tomorrow on whether the prime minister misled voters around the growth in disabled people found not fit for work, just two days after the same watchdog promised to investigate his claims about Labour’s tax plans.

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) is to release a statement today (Thursday) on claims made by Rishi Sunak during Tuesday’s leaders’ debate that Labour’s spending plans would result in a £2,000 tax rise “for every working family in this country”.

OSR is particularly examining the claim that the figures were produced by “independent Treasury officials”, with Labour figures accusing Sunak of lying after the Treasury’s permanent secretary told the party the figures were not produced by the Civil Service.

But before this row erupted, Disability News Service (DNS) had already been told that OSR would deliver its response tomorrow to three complaints made about claims made by the government around disability benefits, including one lodged by DNS in March.

At least one of the complaints relates to claims made by the prime minister.

The DNS concern, currently the oldest outstanding complaint on the regulator’s issues log, relates to figures repeatedly used by Sunak about the number of disabled people being found not fit for work.

The prime minister first used these figures in his main Conservative party conference speech last October.

He repeated them in March in an interview with the Sunday Times.

And he repeated them again in a major speech on social security at the Centre for Social Justice in April (pictured).

Sunak said in April: “In 2011, 20 per cent of those doing a work capability assessment were deemed unfit to work.

“But the latest figure now stands at 65 per cent. That’s wrong.

“People are not three times sicker than they were a decade ago.”

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which will have briefed him on the figures, will have been aware that they were deeply misleading.

Like his fellow ministers, and many media commentators, Sunak ignored the fact that the 2011 figures reflected the early years of the WCA, before its most serious flaws were exposed.

It took years of research and activism by disabled people and allies to expose the links between the WCA and hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths of claimants, and to force DWP ministers to ease the harshness of the assessment*.

That eventually made it less arduous to qualify for the employment and support allowance support group and avoid work-related conditions for those not fit for work, although the assessment process is still deeply-flawed and continues to be linked to serious harm and deaths.

DNS lodged a complaint with OSR on 11 March, and the regulator told DNS in April that it had “contacted the team in 10 Downing Street for information on the sources behind the figures quoted by the prime minister”.

When DNS approached OSR for an update the following month, it was told by the regulator: “As we have looked into your case, there have been other statements made by ministers on the topic of out-of-work disability statistics.

“We want to consider them together and respond in their full context. We will update you with our findings on this.”

DNS contacted OSR again on 31 May, after Sunak had called a general election, and pointed out that the complaint about the WCA figures was now the oldest outstanding concern on its issues log.

The regulator then confirmed that it would be publishing a statement on Friday 7 June on “recent statements on disability benefits and out-of-work statistics”.

It later clarified that this statement would be used to “respond publicly to three claims”, one of which was the DNS complaint.

Another appears to relate to claims made by work and pensions secretary Mel Stride in April that disabled people claiming personal independence payment (PIP) receive “thousands of pounds a month”.

Stride also claimed – wrongly – that PIP was “a benefit that has not been reviewed for over a decade”, when in fact there were two high-profile independent reviews of the PIP assessment process, with the first published in 2014 and the second reporting in 2017, just seven years ago.

When he was questioned about this in parliament, by Labour’s Neil Coyle, he appeared to add a further untruth, telling him: “It is the case that there has not been a fundamental review of PIP on the basis that that has subsequently led to a change in that benefit.”

But Stride’s own green paper makes it clear that the government made significant changes to PIP after the two reviews.

The green paper says: “We have continued to implement the recommendations of the independent reviews as we strive to shape PIP into a modern and dynamic benefit.”

*The Department, DNS editor John Pring’s book on DWP and how its actions led to countless deaths of disabled people in the post-2010 era, will be published by Pluto Press on 20 August. Visit the DNS website before publication for a 50 per cent discount 

Picture by Simon Walker/No 10 Downing Street

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