Government policy

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.

The paper welcomes proposals in the Hills Fuel Poverty Review to measure incomes for fuel poverty purposes after housing costs and adjusted for household size and composition and the call for substantial additional data collection in order to better understand contemporary energy use behaviours and dwelling temperatures.  However, the paper argues for a wider range of measures than is proposed in the Hills review and is concerned that the measurement framework will result in low income households living in energy efficient dwellings being classified as not fuel poor. 

There has been 'substantial progress' over the past year in promoting social justice, according to the coalition government's first annual progress report on its social justice strategy.

The strategy, published in March 2012, defines social justice in terms of transforming the lives of the most disadvantaged individuals and families. A set of seven 'key indicators' covers issues such as family breakdown, educational inequality, reoffending (by both young people and adults), worklessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and 'social investment'. The indicators do not cover low income.

The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, has said he could manage to live on £53 a week 'if he had to'. He had been challenged on the BBC's Today programme by a market trader, David Bennett, who said he was forced to survive on that amount – his net income 'after paying rent and bills'. (The current level of jobseeker's allowance is £71.70 a week for those aged 25 or over.)

Following the programme, an online petition gathered 460,000 signatures, in the space of ten days, calling on Duncan Smith to prove his claim in practice.