What effect will the raising retirement age have on this series? Its a small proportion of the working age population but you would expect older workers to have a higher burden of illness/disability.
Sorry for the very delayed reply - but Paul, just to answer you: this probably will have a little bit of an effect. I mentioned at https://inequalities.substack.com/p/why-you-cant-trust-stats-on-out-of that the rising state pension age biases the trends in benefit claim rates over time, and I'm sure that's true of the WCA figures.
While it's hard to estimate this with any precision (the Stat-Xplore data doesn't split WCAs by age), and you can plausibly argue that this biases the figures in both directions, I'd guess this only makes a relatively small difference to changes over time.
Thanks for responding - I asked because I am seeing in the social action projects I work with more people who would have just retired 10 years ago instead jumping through the WCA hoops. My feeling is it could be the higher retirment age and/or a greater need to maximise benefits as savings are less likely to meet people's needs.
What effect will the raising retirement age have on this series? Its a small proportion of the working age population but you would expect older workers to have a higher burden of illness/disability.
Sorry for the very delayed reply - but Paul, just to answer you: this probably will have a little bit of an effect. I mentioned at https://inequalities.substack.com/p/why-you-cant-trust-stats-on-out-of that the rising state pension age biases the trends in benefit claim rates over time, and I'm sure that's true of the WCA figures.
While it's hard to estimate this with any precision (the Stat-Xplore data doesn't split WCAs by age), and you can plausibly argue that this biases the figures in both directions, I'd guess this only makes a relatively small difference to changes over time.
Thanks for responding - I asked because I am seeing in the social action projects I work with more people who would have just retired 10 years ago instead jumping through the WCA hoops. My feeling is it could be the higher retirment age and/or a greater need to maximise benefits as savings are less likely to meet people's needs.