foxes that was never fraud. It was a deliberate systemic failure which meant that the quality of decisions that people were fit to work were not effectively checked or audited and the 'policing' of validity of claims was not done effectively and often dumped on GPs given no resources or incentives to apply it equitably or effectively which did mean that plenty of people who were fit to work were signed off and received benefits which they shouldn't really have been entitled to but were committing no fraud in receiving them. Because we did really get to a point where sickness benefits became an 'on demand' system in all but name.
I'm familiar with the hysterical figures about 'x number of people died in the month before they were found fit to work'. They're absolutely meaningless out of context and anybody with a glancing knowledge of statistics could tell you that.
The only way they could acquire any meaning is if a control group of a similar size was proven not to have a similar level of unexpected deaths or if each death could be unequivocally related to the condition which was declared not to be severe enough to prevent them working. The fact that those statistics are never, ever related by campaigners to the background facts which would give them meaning makes me strongly suspect that the links don't exist and the figures are in fact meaningless.
As an example: if 1,000 people are signed off work with knee pain are declared fit to work, but 100 then died in the following month from heart attacks or car crashes that doesn't mean that the decision to say they were fit for work was wrong unless you can show a causal link. You might do that by looking at some control groups of 1000 people and seeing that only 1 of them would be expected to die in any given month so the figure of 100 dying would clearly show something was going on with the group sent back to work having disproportionate deaths. Or showing that each of those 100 deaths was unequivocally linked to knee pain which was declared safe to work with. If, however, the number of deaths is found to be in line with the rest of the population it probably means the figures aren't linked. And making that link is what campaigners always fail to do. All those figures tell us is that some people have died. Not that their deaths were caused by the decisions.
Given that millions of people have been through these assessments and the overall mortality rates of benefit claimants dropped over the same period those figures are so low they seem to be pretty likely to be meaningless in the context of what they tell us about the effects of assessments.
I suspect the fact that hundreds of thousands if not millions of people have come off sickness benefits and returned to work without major issue speaks volumes more about the assessment programme than a handful of deaths which have no proven link to the programme do anyway.