Benefits

Coalition government ministers have been guilty of consistently abusing official statistics in order to paint a false picture of benefit claimants, according to disability campaigners. Their report details 35 cases in which it says statistical claims made by ministers relating to work and benefits have fallen below acceptable standards.

In all the talk of tackling child poverty, one group has been largely ignored, children of refugees and asylum seekers. Stephen Crossley reports on poverty amongst this 'minority within a minority' and the role local agencies should play.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, is to be called in front of the Work and Pensions Select Committee in June over the misuse by the department of government statistics. This follows the rebuke from the official statistics watchdog for claiming that the benefits cap is pushing people to find paid work.

The select committee’s decision to ‘examine the way the DWP releases benefit statistics to the media’ follows a petition to the committee, signed by 96,666 people, calling for the committee to ‘hold IDS to account for his use of statistics on welfare’. Jayne Linney, who set up the petition on Change.org commented: ‘By starting this petition we’ve shown that everyone has the tools to call politicians out if they try to make things up. They can’t get away with spinning statistics any longer.

Around 4.3 million working families, including 40 per cent of all those with children, were receiving benefits or tax credits in 2012, according to a new think-tank analysis – contrary to the impression often given that 'making work pay' is the answer to controlling benefit spending.

The New Policy Institute analysis focuses mainly on payments of housing benefit (HB), council tax benefit (CTB) and working and child tax credits (WTC and CTC) to working families in 2012. It points out that there is no official estimate in this area. Simply adding up the numbers receiving each benefit in isolation would amount to double counting all those who receive more than one. The analysis instead derives estimates from a combination of administrative statistics on the total numbers receiving each of the benefits in isolation, and survey data from the Family Resources Survey and Households Below Average Income (FRS/HBAI).