Disabled couple snooped on and accused of fraud by the DWP

potatolord said:
The rise in economically inactive working age people in the last few years was stark.
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Not sure I'd describe a 0.5 percentage points increase as stark, especially when it's remains below the OECD average and the UK consistently had one of the lowest 15-64-year-old inactivity rates among G7 economies.

But sure, you go on your "gut feeling" and assume "a lot of people got onto sickness benefits who really shouldn't have" and that you find it "difficult to believe that, all of a sudden, UK chronic health outcomes got very bad." because, i guess, sick people are easy targets.
 
Jack_green said:
From a quick look at caring and the rules, You also need to minus carers as they could be overlapping unemployed or retired or others and would definitely push up the count with repeated numbers. Also carers could be classified as working for the NHS because it saves the NHS.

Correct me if I am wrong about carers allowance. As I have zero knowledge of the working between carers and other benefits.
However, they provide service that the NHS or council should be providing. I think it should not be counted.

Now with the above information the numbers would look even lower.

Others what does that mean?

We now established it is not as bad as they say. It seems it is a blame game rather than taking responsibility for MPs running of the country.
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A lot of carers don't get carers allowance either because they don't "qualify" (the criteria is strict and designed to say no), they don't realise they can, or they are secondary carers - you can only claim carers allowance for one person even if the person being cared for needs 24/7 265 day care.

It's worth noting that once you start actually counting carers as doing "work" you start having to worry about paying them for that "work" and all the other legal implications, such as maximum safe working hours (many are doing it 24/7), pay rates (at best it's currently at about £2 an hour), and holiday etc leave.

A single carer currently usually saves the government somewhere between 800-1600 a week if their efforts were to be done by paid third parties at commercial rates, the government relies on the fact that the carer is usually a family member who will do it mainly for love and will do it regardless of the effect it has on their own health/personal life (which can have the effect the carer then becomes ill/needs more help later in life due to the effects and stresses).

robfosters said:
What gets me about carers allowance is that you can’t get it if you earn over £139 a week.
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Yup

And IIRC it only counts overnight hours that you are actively giving care.
So it doesn't matter that you need to be available and within range to give care all night, and might get called 3 or 4 times for 15 minutes a time, meaning your sleep is extremely disturbed, it only IIRC counts that time that you are actively assisting, it also ignores the fact you can't do anything else in that time or that it ruins you for the next day and gets worse the longer it goes on.

I've said before when my mother was ill with Alzheimer's it took 3 of us to care for her*, as she needed someone available 24/7 and for most of the last 12 months that she was at home that meant someone in the same room, or at night awake in the next room listening out for her as she tried to get up without her sticks (instant fall, massive risk of a broken hip/head injury).
It utterly ruined my father's health, and did a number on my own and my brother, we've still basically got certain sounds that trigger an immediate response 7 years later because of the alarms etc we used to help monitor if she started to get out of bed at night, or was pressing a button to call for help** (before she got too bad to remember that).


*We barely managed it on a semi staggered shift system, but there were times when all 3 of us would be up at 2am trying to deal with her/clean up.

**Before we knew what it was, and when she was "only" suffering from "delirium from a water infection" we gave her a little hand bell. Neither my brother or I can relax playing certain games now because it turns out that bell is very close to a stock sound effect in RPG's and we're basically conditioned to respond to it.
 
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Murphy said:
Not sure I'd describe a 0.5 percentage points increase as stark, especially when it's remains below the OECD average and the UK consistently had one of the lowest 15-64-year-old inactivity rates among G7 economies.

But sure, you go on your "gut feeling" and assume "a lot of people got onto sickness benefits who really shouldn't have" and that you find it "difficult to believe that, all of a sudden, UK chronic health outcomes got very bad." because, i guess, sick people are easy targets.
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The figures I saw showed the increase was particularly large for younger people claiming sickness benefits, from memory.

Fig 4 here describes the increase in long-term sickness as "larger than expected"- it's an order of magnitude greater:

Population changes and economic inactivity trends, UK: 2019 to 2026 - Office for National Statistics

Experimental statistics estimating how the changing age-composition of the population is affecting economic inactivity.
www.ons.gov.uk

I'm making the point that, at a guess, it is a procedural or system error- rather than your guess that my motivation was simply that "sick people are easy targets".

The alternative would be that, suddenly, there was an increase in long-term sickness within the UK, ten times higher than the expected increase. That's possible, but seems unlikely. Again, I could be wrong, and evidence might show that in years to come

Without clear evidence for the reason for that increase it's reasonable for me to guess and, as with any guess, I may be wrong.
 
potatolord said:
The figures I saw showed the increase was particularly large for younger people claiming sickness benefits, from memory.

Fig 4 here describes the increase in long-term sickness as "larger than expected"- it's an order of magnitude greater:

Population changes and economic inactivity trends, UK: 2019 to 2026 - Office for National Statistics

Experimental statistics estimating how the changing age-composition of the population is affecting economic inactivity.
www.ons.gov.uk

I'm making the point that, at a guess, it is a procedural or system error- rather than your guess that my motivation was simply that "sick people are easy targets".

The alternative would be that, suddenly, there was an increase in long-term sickness within the UK, ten times higher than the expected increase. That's possible, but seems unlikely. Again, I could be wrong, and evidence might show that in years to come

Without clear evidence for the reason for that increase it's reasonable for me to guess and, as with any guess, I may be wrong.
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Long covid?

Oh wait the first bullet point


"
  • The increase in economic inactivity volumes between 2019 and 2022 among those aged 16 to 17 years and 60 to 64 years is almost completely explained by the increase in population in these age bands.


Nvm you said working age ignore me
 
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Actually yeah that'd a good point. Covid knocked back huge amounts of nhs treatment so lots of people who would have been treated and back to work are still long term sick waiting on surgery etc

If we didn't have private physio at work I'd have been off sick a lot more than I have been.
 
Jack_green said:
The system and it's propaganda are being designed to destroy and to just pump out lies.

Why, To hide the complete mismanaged state and to focus away from those in the right areas who have been stealing from the tax payer.
One example

inews.co.uk

Housing crisis quango Homes England is 'gravy train' dogged by secrecy, insiders claim

Former insiders have told of 'waste and money spent on the wrong things' such as 'rock concert away-days and lavish hotels'
inews.co.uk inews.co.uk
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I remember the issue with London banning motorcycles from bus lanes after it being OK for years.

Then doing a study and then refusing to release the report, fighting FOI requests fighting court battles till eventually tfl was forced to release it, motorcycle deaths had gone up 13% after the change. The rule was quickly changed back after it was public

But they fought that for years at a huge cost to the tax payers and for what? Not like they were getting held Accountable for those dead people. They just didn't want the embrassement, they where happy for 13% extra deaths a year, very year going forward as long as it didn't have to mean admiting they were wrong
 
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Tefal said:
Long covid?

Oh wait the first bullet point


"
  • The increase in economic inactivity volumes between 2019 and 2022 among those aged 16 to 17 years and 60 to 64 years is almost completely explained by the increase in population in these age bands.


Nvm you said working age ignore me
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Long covid is possible.

The page does say this:
"When examining the main health conditions of those reporting long-term sickness as their main reason for inactivity, we can see that the increase is largely caused by an increase in "mental illness and nervous disorders" in younger age groups and an increase in "other health problems or disabilities" and "problems connected with back or neck" for older age groups. "

One thing I did notice from that graph was a big drop in carers over the same period. I guess it's possible some of those moved across?
 
Jack_green said:
They will miss out on main reasons like adjusting data to look the many variables that would influence the finished information.
They will just count numbers from the raw data but not investigated further which is wrong.
Like population increases, lag in NHS treatment, level of poverty and increase in level of poverty. All and more would influence the numbers.
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ONS are pretty scrupulous in their data handling.*

You have to count raw data. If it's "number claiming sickness-type benefits", that's a simple number. You can then break it down by age, region, over-time and so on..

Trying to correlate with other data gets annoying, fast. Nor least as differing methodology of collection and processing can make that hard.

Adjusting data is a dark art. Statisticians get all excited and shouty about that one.


*I don't work for ONS!
 
Jack_green said:
Here is the link, not hard to research the quote.
commonslibrary.parliament.uk

The UK aid budget and support for refugees in the UK in 2022/23

The UK spent £3.7 billion, or 29% of its aid budget, supporting refugees in the UK in 2022. This drew criticism from aid groups. What is the Government response?
commonslibrary.parliament.uk commonslibrary.parliament.uk
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Be a lot easier if people bothered to provide a link to what they're supposedly directly quoting from instead of getting in a huff when people ask for it.
potatolord said:
I'm making the point that, at a guess, it is a procedural or system error- rather than your guess that my motivation was simply that "sick people are easy targets".

The alternative would be that, suddenly, there was an increase in long-term sickness within the UK, ten times higher than the expected increase. That's possible, but seems unlikely. Again, I could be wrong, and evidence might show that in years to come

Without clear evidence for the reason for that increase it's reasonable for me to guess and, as with any guess, I may be wrong.
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Occam's razor tells me that a recent pandemic that has a long lasting effect on certain people, combined with more than a decade of running down public services that's resulted in record NHS waiting lists is a more likely explanation than your mysterious "procedural or system error-".
 
Murphy said:
Be a lot easier if people bothered to provide a link to what they're supposedly directly quoting from instead of getting in a huff when people ask for it.

Occam's razor tells me that a recent pandemic that has a long lasting effect on certain people, combined with more than a decade of running down public services that's resulted in record NHS waiting lists is a more likely explanation than your mysterious "procedural or system error-".
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Or the actual pandemic closing wards and contributing to long waiting lists further exacerbated by unreasonable pay demands by doctors again closing wards and operating theatres leading to even longer waiting lists. .
 
SpellowHouse said:
In passing, MP's should not be allowed secondary jobs. I would not mind the 90K but that's just the start. The average politician can earn a lot more for second and third jobs.
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You'll have to start a new thread for complaints about MP's, not just because the mods will deem it as derailing the thread but it will have about a billion posts by the end of the day!
 
Murphy said:
Be a lot easier if people bothered to provide a link to what they're supposedly directly quoting from instead of getting in a huff when people ask for it.

Occam's razor tells me that a recent pandemic that has a long lasting effect on certain people, combined with more than a decade of running down public services that's resulted in record NHS waiting lists is a more likely explanation than your mysterious "procedural or system error-".
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Occam's razor is just a fancy way of saying your guess.
 
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