'Tough love' and fitness to work

By some quirk of planning, Channel 4 and BBC Two ended up showing two very similar programmes last night about the mess of the assessments that determine whether a sick or disabled person is able to work. The most haunting of the stories told last night was Panorama’s case study of a man who had died of heart failure while contesting a decision declaring him fit to work. The assessor who had initially referred Stephen Hill to a doctor for urgent medical attention was the same person who paradoxically declared him fit to work.

A potted history of incapacity benefit is not kind to either Labour or the Conservative party. The graph below shows that the bill for this benefit rose steeply through the late 1980s and early 1990s under the Conservative government. Hundreds of thousands of people left unemployed by the collapse of the coal mining industry were shifted from official unemployment figures to the incapacity benefit claimant count.