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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

There was an interesting discussion on the topic of people dying after being declared fit for work on the BBC Radio 4 show "More or Less" that examines statistics in the news [1].

It's a few weeks since I listened, but part of the argument would be that you would expect the death rate to be higher as by definition some of this population is in less than perfect health. The death rate for those that weren't declared fit for work was higher as well.

Also between 2010 and 2014 total spending on welfare increased by £28 billion so austerity seems to be as much a PR exercise as anything <-- just to make clear, this wasn't part of the show.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06810qc

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Yes, but having been declared fit to work you would expect that their health has been assessed and "passed" and so expect lower mortality rates in this population, or at least lower than the total claimant population. Without the official statistics it's impossible for anyone to determine whether the total figures are reasonable or not.

I disagree about austerity being a PR exercise. As far as I can tell the £28bn increase in the total "welfare" budget is almost all pensions, and what people typically think of as welfare (child care, housing, unemployment, etc) has dropped by 6% overall, although the social exclusion budget within that has actually risen.

They are passed to be able to work, not to live a long and healthy life. For instance, someone very obese might have high blood pressure and diabetes, but could probably still work in a call centre.

>> As far as I can tell the £28bn increase in the total "welfare" budget is almost all pensions, and what people typically think of as welfare (child care, housing, unemployment, etc) has dropped by 6% overall, although the social exclusion budget within that has actually risen.

Pensions are welfare spending. If you're going to arbitrarily pick sections off then you could make any amount of spending look like a reduction. You could argue about the priorities, but not that welfare spending has gone down.

Suicides are preventable deaths. Benefits changes - driven by the austerity programme - cause deaths by suicide. Making JC+/DWP less hostile to people who've got a history of selfharm or suicide attempts would reduce numbers of people dying by suicide.

Note that I'm not saying that anyone with a history of using MH services should just be allowed to claim benefits for ever. But if JC+\DWP are going to suspend benefits at the drop of a hat they should make the support to get a job better.

>> Benefits changes - driven by the austerity programme - cause deaths by suicide.

That's just an asserion. Citation?

>> But if JC+\DWP are going to suspend benefits at the drop of a hat...

Pretty sure this isn't what they do, but if you have a better method of sorting genuine claimants out from the rest I'm sure they'd love to hear it.

This link, which has already been posted to this thread, talks about DWPs own investigations. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/one-in-five-benefit-rel...

"benefits changes cause suicide" is not in any way controversial; pretty much everyone accepts that it happens. Financial instability is well known and accepted as one driver for suicide. What people normally say is that the rate of suicide in people who are sanctioned is the same as in those who are not sanctioned - but I'm not talking about sanctions, but about all the changes. (Reduction in support for ESA claimants in the work-related activity group; refusal to help complete forms; etc)

> Pretty sure this isn't what they do,

Pretty sure this is what they do, because I speak to people who have had their benefits suspended.

One person did some voluntary work, and declared it. DWP wanted more information, and sent a stencil, but it got delivered to the wrong address. The first the person knew about it was that their benefit hadn't been paid. (They were due to get paid on a Friday. Not getting paid left them with no food over a weekend - this is one of the reasons so many people are using foodbanks. The important bit about this anecdote is that because the person was claiming contributions based ESA with permitted work at the higher rate the voluntary work (which had already been fully declared) was irrelevant to their claim - it couldn't have had any effect.

You do know that a benefit suspension is different from a benefit sanction, right?

Your example doesn't sound like an act of government policy, but rather a typical example of state-sector incompetence.

Yes, I don't think it's done the left much good harping on about austerity when we can all see people in the Mediterranean countries have had a much harder time than us.

The increasing in welfare spending seems to be a result of increasing spending on pensions though? http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_2006_2016UK...

It looks like it from that chart, yes. However, increasing pensions isn't a sign of austerity either.

Austerity is a macroeconomic thing. I've not seen any definition of austerity that states or implies that it has to affect everybody equally, or that all people have to be negatively affected. So it makes little sense to argue that it isn't austerity just because one type of spending went up.

By that definition, barring utopia, the world would be in a permanent state of austerity because some group or other is negatively affected by any change.

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

Austerity is a macroeconomic policy, and its presence or not is identified in macroeconomic indicators (e.g. government spending as a percentage of GDP). I would have thought that was obvious. The relevance of austerity to the article and other discussions of this type is that austerity is used as the justification for cuts to social services and the welfare state (even in cases when the amount of money being spent/cut is tiny so the difference it makes to the budget is negligible) and that these cuts cost lives (for no gain, since austerity doesn't work).

You can argue about whether there was ever any intention to actually reduce the deficit at all, since the results of austerity are well known to macroeconomists, but that just leads to the conclusion that the government is killing people (and tanking the economy) for purely ideological reasons (i.e. reducing the size of the state, at any cost). Which is hardly any better than the up front reason of "tough decisions" where some people supposedly need to die to save the economy.

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