As I was saying yesterday...

... 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.