Tribunal waiting time.

rogerblack

http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/publications/statistics-and-data/tribs-stats/sscs-stats-notice-july2011.pdf

Some figures from this.
The average time to deal with a case was around 10 weeks in the beginning of 2008.
As ESA kicked in, this rose to 15 weeks at the beginning of 2009, and now stands at around 25 weeks.
(Remember, that appeals will take at least another 6 weeks or so after the time of decision for the DWP to send the paperwork to the tribunals service)

The backlog of ESA cases peaked at 100000 in october last year, and from March has been falling steadily at a rate it'd hit the pre-ESA amount sometime in 2014 - probably just in time for the migration over to Universal Credit.

39% of ESA/IB appeals succeed, 38% of DLA, 28% of IS, 15% JSA, and just 7% of social fund.
There will be variation between in-person, and paper appeals, with more people who appear in person winning, especially represented people.

The ad-hoc statistics analysis page - http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/adhoc_analysis/index.php?page=adhoc_analysis_arc is also interesting

cit_k

Interesting stats that could perhaps be useful as evidence that cuts to welfare rights services,and legal aid etc, are having the governments desired effect - less people having a chance at justice.

Balanced with moves from the DWP to avoid tribunals in the first place, of course.

rogerblack

I don't believe these particular statistics (other than the delay time) are particularly relevant to that.

For example, you could argue that the decrease in success rate at appeal is due to better decision making at the DWP, and better communication with claimants.

The fundamental problem with statistics is that the DWP doesn't track the real ones which would be actually useful.

The real figures you want are:

Percentage of the population that are claiming. (broken down into correct and incorrect claims)
Percentage of the population that might claim (broken down into would have a correct claim, and would not)

Measuring outcomes (followed up by an in-depth visit of a statistically valid sample to see if they were correct) of benefit applications has the problem that it misses numbers on people who don't realise they could claim.

Measuring outcomes of the normal process without followup has the flaws that people put off at any stage of the applications process (misadvice by the DWP, finding filling in the form too hard, ...) are not counted.
And it risks misreporting some things - for example someone who doesn't understand the system, and tries to appeal on the wrong grounds, when they may win on the right grounds - will be counted as a failure.

Then you have the headline figures that are put out for political purposes '87% of people applying for ESA are found fit to work' - or similar.
When this includes people who were claiming for a few weeks after they broke their arm, and who were never going to be on the benefit long enough for their ability to work to be tested.

Doing statistics right is hard - and the DWP has no interest in doing expensive reviews of hundreds of cases at random taking several hours per person which would be required for statistical accuracy.