Reblogged fronm Work Test Whistleblower:
Wishful Thinking
I was a bit embarrassed yesterday when I realised I hadn't grasped a very important aspect of the WCA fiasco.
I came across an article about benefits on the ConservativeHome website written by Peter Hoskin and I followed some of the links. The thing I hadn't properly grasped before was how specific politicians' predictions had been about the size of number of people they expected to take off Incapacity Benefit, once the WCA programme got into full swing.
In 2006 in A new deal for welfare: Empowering people to work the DWP said "We should aspire to reduce the number of incapacity benefit claimants by one million over the course of a decade".
By 2009 the Sunday Times and Peter Hoskin were reporting that the Tory idea was to get 1.5 million people (out of about 2.5 million) off IB within 12 months of taking office.
In 2010, the new-in-post Secretary of State was quoted as saying "I want to move 1.5 million off incapacity benefit by 2014".
The strange thing is that these predictions - of huge percentages of claimants who would be found fit for work - were being made before the fully-formed WCA programme had even started. Although the WCA was introduced in 2008 for new claims, it was substantially rejigged and made more stringent after the Coalition came to power in 2010, and only then was it employed to gauge millions of established IB recipients against the new benchmarks.
Now you might just say "Well, making empty forecasts is what politicians do" and for most questions that would usually be the end of it, except for the fact that in this case the whole IB re-assessment programme rested fundamentally on a test based on medical knowledge, the WCA. It goes completely against the scientific method to pre-judge the outcome of an experiment. Imagine if a pharmaceutical company announced a new drug for dementia by saying "We are confident that it's going to cure millions of people, even though we haven't actually done any controlled clinical trials yet". The company would be a laughing stock!
I doubt that DWP ministers were given these forecasts by their technical staff or by outside advisers; I think politicians jumped to their own conclusions based on guesstimates and the rough results of a small number of local trials, because it was what they wanted to believe - wishful thinking, in other words.
The trouble is, ministerial expectations inevitably shape departmental policy; in this way, it seems, the high failure rate for claimants after their WCAs became a foregone conclusion.
