I do fear that this list is going to accelerate in lengthening after the changes that have just gone through.
However, obviously people die all the time and some will die even if they are fit for work at the time of assessment - hopefully someone out there is keeping decent comparative stats to deny the Government any easy get-out of this kind..
nope.
You will hear two figures:
73 deaths/week. This is the total number of people on ESA who die each week, and should never be used to illustrate how many deaths are caused/lives shortened by the failure of ESA to correctly assess people, as this includes all the people in the support group.
32 deaths/week. This is the number of deaths of people in the WRAG. It shouldn't be used either but is the best figure we have. Really this needs to be expressed as a death rate and compared alongside the death rate for the general population but even that isn't getting you anywhere near an honest figure because you'd expect the death rate for people in the WRAG to be higher even if the test was perfect.
The figure we really want but they don't collect is what happens to people who are kicked off IB/ESA onto JSA, because you could compare the death rate here with the death rate of the JSA population and get a reasonable figure.
But all of that only asks and has the potential to answer one question, which is whether there is a difference in the death rate between those on ESA and those in other groups. It can't answer whether the approach taken (eg: to split applicants into three groups with differing level of support/conditionality and payments; whether the work-focused approach is right or not; whether the support/conditionality that is received in each group is any good).
So it could easily be possible that the three way split and work focused approach is right, and that the test correctly assesses the level of support that is required, but that the support that is given is not the right support.
Or it could be that the test was working perfectly, but was testing the wrong things.
It also can't be easily compared to different systems. Really the question you want to ask is something like "Does the WCA correctly assess the level of support/ability to work of an applicant?".
Clearly if you can see a higher death rate then this would suggest that something is wrong.
But to know whether the higher death rate is as a result of the WCA wrongly assessing people, leading them to not getting the support they require/having conditionality which actively worsens a condition, or as the result of something else, you'd need to imagine an alternative universe which we can't do.
There may well be space for designing trials to test this - it certainly seems like they kind of thing that would lend itself well to a randomised controlled trial, with different tests and seeing what the outcomes are, but you'd need enough people with specific (or close enough) conditions to form big enough groups to make them statistically significant.
You can't easily compare things to a different country, though it might be worth doing this alongside something else.
All in all answering that question is probably not best done on the basis of showing a higher death rate. I think the minimum 20% failure rate of the process is the best macro level evidence (50% appeal their decision, 40% of appeals succeed. This gives a minimum as some people won't appeal, it also disguises the reality a bit as nobody put in the support group will appeal, so of those who might appeal, something like 50/66 do with 40/66 appeals succeeding, iirc around 1/3rd of people get put straight into the support group).
