Statistics Fail Of The Day

From the BBC:

A raft of benefits have been cut or curbed as part of a radical shake up of the welfare system. These changes are designed to save £11bn per year by the end of the parliamentary term... A big saving comes from linking benefits, except the state pension, to the lower consumer prices measure of inflation. Although they both measure changes in living costs, the latest Consumer Prices Index (CPI) is at 3.4% while the Retail Prices Index (RPI), which is currently used to set benefits, is at 5.1%.

Just about plausible. Total non-pension welfare payments are about £80 billion, if we index at CPI and CPI is 2% lower than RPI, then in the fifth year, welfare payments will be about £11 billion less than they otherwise would have been.

The 'fail' bit is in the table half-way down, which suggests that indexing Jobseeker's Allowance ('JSA') in line with CPI not RPI would save £46.5 billion. Not only does that completely contradict the figure mentioned above, the total value of JSA and Employment Support Allowance (the new name for JSA) paid out according to DWP's Table 1 (available from here) will be £8.7 billion in the current year. Even I would struggle to get a £46.5 billion saving out of that, and even over five years the cumulative saving will be less than £3 billion.