The Independent reports that Iain Duncan Smith "misled Parliament" on welfare. This is just the tip of the iceberg in relation to DWP's misuse of statistics.
The Independent reports this morning that Iain Duncan Smith “misled Parliament” in a Commons debate on welfare – forcing officials to “correct the record”. As regular readers of Left Foot Forward will know, this is just the tip of the iceberg in relation to IDS and his department’s misuse of statistics.
Today’s Independent outlines that:
“Iain Duncan Smith misled Parliament by passing off figures from a property comparison website owned by the Daily Mail as official government figures.
“In a parliamentary debate, the Work and Pensions Secretary claimed that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that private sector rents had fallen by 5 per cent last year. At the same time he claimed the amount local authorities paid to private landlords had risen by 3 per cent.
“But, in fact, the ONS does not collect such statistics and the figures he quoted came from the website findaproperty.com owned by Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers.”
Left Foot Forward and the independent Full Fact website have been documenting the Department for Work and Pensions’ detachment from reality. Other instances include:
On November 11th, IDS said “We created over four million jobs in those 13 years and…70% of those net jobs were taken by people from overseas”. The first claim was challenged by Full Fact while the use of the phrase “net jobs” was taken to task by Left Foot Forward.
On November 8th Left Foot Forward documented a secret briefing on housing benefit – timed to influence coverage of a Commons debate – which made “exaggerated claims based on out-of-context figures and pointless data manipulation”.
On October 27th, Left Foot Forward revealed that DWP had been caught peddling erroneous press briefings on the number of households affected by the new benefits cap – a Daily Mail story citing DWP figures over-stated the problem by a factor of four.
On October 22nd, Full Fact picked up IDS’s misuse of official figures on job vacancies, when he said there were “something like 450,000, just short of half a million jobs every week created within the Job Centres” – the correct figure was the lower figure of 383,000.
On September 16th, Full Fact exposed a string of secret DWP briefings to the right wing press on welfare and benefits which were not available to the public.
On August 20th, Left Foot Forward revealed that the DWP had issued a secret press briefing on workless households but refused to release the statistics.
On August 12th, IDS’ deputy, Chris Grayling, over-estimated the proportion of London households in which no-one had ever worked by a factor of three.
An investigation has been ordered into the way the Department of Work and Pensions uses releases statistics to the media by the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Michael Scholar. When the rest of the mainstream media will pick up the story is anyone’s guess.
75 Responses to “IDS’ stats rebuke is tip of the iceberg”
Gemini Partnership
RT @leftfootfwd: IDS' stats rebuke is tip of the iceberg http://bit.ly/9ZsIQz
auditukdwp
What needs to be remembered about “welfare claimants” is that ALL claims have been introduced by Governments. So it is time to reverse the trend that has been unfairly and unjustifiably set against the rights of people who have been entitled to make claims according to the law. The faults that Ian Duncan Smith has been caught out on are not, unfortunately, to be uniquely held against him or against the CONDEM regime. Successive holders of the office in the Blair-Brown years that IDS now holds were almost identical in their de facto participation in “damning” the claimants. The claimants did not and could not under the British system of legislation enact a statute no matter how universally that would be justifiable. Condem IDS for his falsehood. But do so in context and admit that the state has been abused by regimes to assail the universal rights of those who have been pushed into poverty by the policies of Governments and by those who have been milking the state many times more than the ordinary benefit claimants put together could claim in all constituent parts of the UK. Let us start to examine the scroungers that have been robbing the UK public of £Billions under so many contracts that the DWP never volunteers information on. That will be an overdue start. Then there are thousands of individual items representing systematic and historic looting of the “welfare £££££” by the big businesses who mechanically join together in their dishonest attacks on the “benefit cheats” which is what they THINK all claimants are anyway.
1505 Saturday 20 Nov 2010
James Moore
DWP Statistics are investigated
http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/improvements_to_JSA.pdf
angus meiklejohn
Hey Nicky boy, you're not the only wee liar. IDS is at it too https://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/11/iain-duncan-smith-statistics-misuse/
Cllr. Kevin Maton
We need to get better at pointing out this abuse of information http://tinyurl.com/29obqun