Disability living allowance cases in payment where blindness is recorded as the main disabling condition: November 2008NumberForest of Dean parliamentary constituency80Gloucestershire510Notes:1. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10.2. Totals show the number of people in receipt of an allowance, and exclude people with entitlement where the payment has been suspended, for example if they are in hospital.3. A diagnosed medical condition does not mean that someone is automatically entitled to disability living allowance. Entitlement is dependent on an assessment of how much help someone needs with personal care and/or mobility because of their disability. These statistics are only collected for administrative purposes. 4. From October 2008 the way in which disabling condition is recorded on the live system changed. Disabling conditions are now recorded as primary and secondary, (previously recorded as disability care and mobility codes). For existing cases a mapping exercise was carried out which assigned disability care code to primary disabling condition and disability mobility code to secondary condition. Information Directorate has updated the methodology used to derive main disabling condition to reflect this change in the live system. The old category D08 (blindness) is now subdivided into a range of more specific condition codes. These are referred to by the over-arching title ‘Visual Disorder’.5. The preferred data source for benefit statistics is 100 per cent. Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study. However, the 5 per cent. sample data are generally the preferred source for analysis on disabling condition as information is more complete for disabling condition on the 5 per cent. sample (Some recipients of disability living allowance who transferred from the attendance allowance system may not have been allocated a specific disabling condition code. This problem can be corrected on the sample data but not on the WPLS data. The number of cases affected is decreasing over time). In this case the WPLS data have been used as some of the caseload figures produced are very small and so would have a high level of statistical variation should the sample data have been used.Source:DWP Information Directorate: Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study