Reblogged from Watching A4e:
Iain Duncan Smith is obviously unrepentant. He was taken to task, you remember,
for coming out with dodgy figures to justify his benefits cap, but said he
believed it so it must be true. He still hasn't faced the Work and Pensions
Select Committee to answer for this (although his civil servants did). Now he's
doing it again. The odious Express
tells us that "16,500 find jobs after clamp on benefits" in a headline, and goes
on: "Tough but fair reforms to Britain's broken benefits system have helped
16,500 claimants back into work, new figures reveal." The sceptical may already
perceive that there's something wrong here. What's the actual connection
between this nice round number and any specific benefits change? Well, "The
people living in potentially-benefit capped households were helped to find the
posts by Jobcentre Plus over 18 months." Now, this is the sort of distortion
that the statistics people got cross about before. There is no proven
connection between the number getting jobs (who may or may not have been
"helped" by JCP) and the potential for household benefits to be capped. Yet the
article proceeds on the assumption that the cap is making the idle get a job.
"The figures, revealed exclusively to the Daily Express, showed that Mr Duncan
Smith's promise to 'make work pay' is starting to change a culture where some
lifelong layabouts viewed benefits as a limitless cash machine."
Surely it's
time for the select committee to do its job and hold IDS to account. As well as
the dodgy statistics, there's his failure to publish any data on sanctions. If
Dame Anne Begg and her committee are not concerned about this, what is their
purpose?
