... in the context of the £500 a week benefit cap (of which I am broadly supportive; in practice it is a cap on Housing Benefit paid to private landlords):
... the notion that because of the cap loads of people have suddenly found themselves a job is absolutely fanciful. Out of 5,000,000 welfare claimants, if 8,000 find a job over a period of a few months, that proves f- all.
BobE emails in a slightly more sophisticated analysis and rebuttal in The Guardian:
Iain Duncan Smith has been accused of misrepresenting government statistics in order to claim his cap on benefits was driving people to find work.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on Friday released figures showing the number of people expected to be hit by the cap – which comes into force this week in London before being introduced across the rest of the country – had fallen from 56,000 to 40,000, with 8,000 claimants finding work through JobCentre Plus. (1)
The work and pensions secretary hailed the figures, saying the cap had provided a "strong incentive" for people to look for jobs, even before it had started to affect their incomes. "Already we've seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs. This clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact," Duncan Smith told the Daily Mail.
But Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and a former chief economist at the DWP, said there was "no evidence at all" that the cap had affected people's behaviour.
"The actual analysis published by the Department for Work and Pensions makes it quite clear that they do not attempt to analyse any impact of behavioural change and that there is as yet no evidence one way or the other that there is behavioural change," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. "It may be that the benefit cap has indeed had the effect that Iain Duncan Smith would like it to have. That is perfectly possible but without doing the analysis – and it has not been done – you simply cannot say that and you shouldn't say it."
Portes said it was part of a "consistent pattern" which threatened to undermine public confidence in official statistics.
"I think it is very unfortunate. These statistics are very important. Government analysts, economists statisticians work very hard to produce and they provide important information to the public. It is very important that ministers should not seek to misrepresent what those stats actually do or don't show. That detracts from the public's faith in the analysis produced by government statisticians. This is, I am afraid, a consistent pattern of trying to draw out of the statistics things which they simply don't show."
1) Ho hum, that might well be 8,000 people who were terrorised into taking an unpaid job via the silly "back to work" scheme, making the comparison even less meaningful.
A Reminder
1 hour ago
9 comments:
8000 less on the taxpayers back = good news.
SB - unless of course, as posited by MW, they've all become entrants to the WP, in which case the "taxpayers back" is still as you might put it "carrying them" and the only difference is that the taxpayer funds being spent on them will appear under a different entry to "JSA" in the DWP accounts!
"That detracts from the public's faith in the analysis produced by government statisticians."
What faith? Don't most people subscribe to the "lies, damned lies and statistics" theory?
B - there is what might be called an on-going attempt by the UK Statistics Authority to clean up the image of "government stats" and Sir Michael Scholar, the Head of it has taken IDS and his junior Minister;s such as Chris Grayling and Damian Green when they were in post to task about how his department chooses to interpret and publicise data the DWP collects, and in particular the contention by IDS that DWP 'research data' is/was not subject to the rules in the Code
of Practice for Official Statistics whilst at the same time issuing press releases giving the impression to the media that this research data represented "official statistics" when it hadn't been presented for, never mind been subjected to, validation and approval by the ONS.
Dunno about the rest of it but "8,000 claimants finding work through JobCentre Plus" will be pure fantasy.
Everybody knows that only the rubbish jobs that no sane person would entertain are advertised in those sordid establishments (run, as is usual in the highly paid public sector, for the benefit of its employees rather than its clients).
8,000 claiments may well have been 'nudged' into emploument but it will have been the result of local networking
"Gis a job".
SB, I refer you to Bob's more measured response.
B, people will believe anything they want to believe, even if the original lie is from politicians. Beer cheaper than water? True. Thousands of acres of greenbelt lost to development? True. Immigration pushes up house prices? True. And so on.
BobE, the ONS has been waging war on the government since long before the Con-Dems got it. It;s all very entertaining.
B: "Dunno about the rest of it but "8,000 claimants finding work through JobCentre Plus" will be pure fantasy."
Of course it is pure fantasy. Those who wish to believe it will believe it, and those who have a vague grasp of reality will not believe it.
"ONS has been waging war on the government since long before the Con-Dems got it. It;s all very entertaining."
I get the feeling that the ONS has the same problem as the Beeb: the government of the day sees them as propaganda machines, whereas they see themselves of purveyors of accurate statistics and news respectively.
Purely for the information of those who may not be aware, and with particular reference to Bayard's "I get the feeling that the ONS has the same problem as the Beeb: the government of the day sees them as propaganda machines, whereas they see themselves of purveyors of accurate statistics and news respectively" the ONS have no choice in "how they see themselves" :-
The Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 established the UK Statistics Authority as an independent body at arm’s length from government with direct reporting to Parliament and the devolved legislatures, rather than through Ministers, and with the statutory objective of promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics that “serve the public good”.
The Authority’s functions relate to its statutory areas of responsibility:
oversight of the UK official statistics system, which includes around 30 central government departments and the devolved administrations, and the promotion, safeguarding and monitoring of quality, comprehensiveness and good practice in relation to all official statistics, wherever produced;
production of a Code of Practice for Statistics and assessment of official statistics against the Code; and
governance of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) the UK’s National Statistical Institute and the largest producer of official statistics.
B, I disagree. The Beeb clearly has a pro-Labour bias.
The ONS is (as far as I can see) perfectly straight (like the IFS) and while Labour were still in charge, the ONS (and probably the IFS) often called "bullshit" on whatever Labour ministers were pronouncing.
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