Some welfare reform can be immediate - like removing warped incentives. DWP assessors paid are £80 for every extra sickness benefit claim they approve. The only way to speed up (or 'curtail') is to recommend the full award. Interview over: next case! The success rate is now 80%, twice... what it was in 2010. Here is Michael, an NHS nurse before he was a DWP assessor, on his concerns about the process.show more

Approval rates for sickness benefit below. Higher tier approvals (max payout) up from 10% to 60%.

Much of what ails society can be reduced down to perverse incentives. We need to think really carefully about policy and ask "how might this go wrong, how could this be gamed? What is the actual outcome we want to incentivise, does this do that?"

That’s just insanity

Why not just pay an hourly wage and have bonuses linked to overtime done linked to cases processed (either negatively, positively, or neutrally)?

Who on earth brought in that incentive? Was it the Tories?

Same sort of thing with immigration applications.

I this is the case, why are there so many PIP tribunals?

These incentives haven't existed since September, and the main incentive has always been the insane throughput targets imposed on assessors, as well as the DWP mandating LCWRA outcomes through their 'audit' system.

Genuinely interested. When was the £80 incentive introduced; and why? Thanks

All the freedoms that this low life abuses only exist because of men and women who wore the king's uniform and fought - sometimes to death - under the flag he chooses to desecrate.

In January, someone not too dissimilar to Rakeem shouted at me when I passed him at a tube station. He yelled something like 'what you looking at'. He then followed me from behind and whacked me on the side of the head. The details of how Rakeem killed Sam make me shudder.

The CPS will charge you for offending “the religious institution of Islam” but not for inciting the murder of MPs.

Abolish the Home Office.