Misleading Stories

Esther McVey, our new minister "for" disabled people, claims in this BBC article that:

there were a lot of misleading stories about the impact of welfare reforms on disabled people.

And

too often under the current system we are wasting money on overpayments where people's conditions have changed, with £630m a year on DLA alone.

According to these official DWP figures on page 14 the total annual overpayment is £240 million, less than half of McVey's claim.

Of that £240 million, only £60 million is lost to fraud. If your circumstances change and you fail to notify the DWP that is benefit fraud.

The amount of overpayments because someone's condition has changed has got to be less than £60 million a year because that £60m includes not only people whose condition has changed, but the outright false claimers too. Now; who exactly is it spinning misleading stories?

I once calculated that reassessing all DLA claimants annually would cost around £247,456,000. £247 million on reassessments is a hell of a lot more "taxpayers money" than losing less than £60m a year to fraud.

Then there's the fact that a hell of a lot of people don't get indefinite DLA awards. People with conditions that might get better get limited term awards. It's only people with incurable conditions like mine that get indefinite awards. Declan Gaffney once explained how at any given time there will always appear to be a greater percentage of people with indefinite awards, but many, many people get limited term DLA and the implication that everyone's got a lifetime award for a temporary condition is just a tall tale. Or a "misleading story".