Not "hopes" John - it knows it will!

John Harris has a piece up at the G - We have to talk about why some people agree with benefit cuts - which contains the following line .. " and next week the DWP will begin the transition from disability living allowance to the personal independence payment. The government hopes to save £2bn, largely by denying up to 500,000 people the new benefit."  Well John is obviously far too busy to consult recent copies of the Daily Mail or back copies of the Independent this weekend, because if he had therein he would find that Esther McVey - graduate in Law, holder of an MSc in Corporate Governance, businesswoman, former TV presenter and currently Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Work and Pensions with special responsibility for the Disabled - has repeatedly made it clear that at least 300,000 current holders (or more - another Mail piece refers to her introducing "new checks to stop 500,000 people claiming up to £120 a week in Disability Living Allowance") of DLA will lose it or see the amount they receive substantially reduced under the transition from DLA to PIP.  Or as the Mail decided to headline it "I will go after bogus disabled... some of them DO get better! Ex-TV host who is our new Work Minister on the UK's THREE MILLION claiming disability benefit" wherein

McVey’s title of Minister for the Disabled gives the impression her job is solely to make life easier for them. But Esther the bubbly blonde ex-GMTV presenter is about to become Esther the Axewoman.

because, says Esther

The number of people who get DLA has tripled to three million in 20 years and McVey says if it carries on rising at the same rate, one in 17 of the population will receive it within five years.
She says many who get DLA and are officially classed ‘disabled’ are no such thing: ‘Only three per cent of people are born with a disability, the rest acquire it through accident or illness, but people come out of it. Thanks to medical advances, bodies heal.’

In the Indie article from December 2012 - Esther - in a no doubt inadvertent  departure as a relatively new Minister from the official DWP line that "we don't do targets" explains what is going to happen when Atos start testing current DLA recipients to see how many of them will qualify for its replacement PIP ...

More than 300,000 disabled people will have their benefits cut when Disability Living Allowance is replace by a new benefit, Esther McVey, the minister for disabled people, announced today – but the change has been delayed for two years.
An initial 560,000 claimants will be reassessed by October 2015, and 330,000 of these are expected to either lose their benefit altogether or see their payments reduced, Ms McVey told the House of Commons today.

The apparent use of "a target figure" did not go completely unnoticed at the time ..

Mark Lever, Chief Executive of The National Autistic Society, expressed concern that Ms McVey had set out numbers of people expected to lose their benefits, arguing that it suggested the assessments might not be conducted fairly.
“It is concerning that in making her statement to Parliament, Disabilities Minister Esther McVey set out very clearly the numbers of people who she believed will qualify for the new benefit.

Indeed.  But as stressed repeatedly by the DWP they do not and did not have targets for the numbers of people that would fail to qualify for ESA when having a Work Capability Assessment as part of the switch away from Incapacity Benefit - even if the figure of 1 million appeared to have been bandied about from time to time, and nor do they have a target for the number of people who currently receive DLA but will fail to qualify for PIP when they are "mobility re-assessed" even if the present and previous Minister for the Disabled, or even the Secretary of State had mentioned specific figures, such as half a million on the floor of the House of Commons and to members of the press.