Tories debunk one of their own myths...

The Tories came up with the fundamentally good idea of capping Housing Benefit payments to "private" landlords, both

a) directly via the £400 weekly upper limit, which still seems far too generous to me and

b) indirectly by capping the total welfare payments which any household can receive at £500 a week. Except in the most unusual cases/outright fraud, no workless household gets anywhere near £500 a week in income support, Child Tax Credits etc, so effectively this means that Housing Benefit (which rather bizarrely is considered to be a welfare payment to the household, not the landlord) will be capped at £200 a week or so (which seems "about right" to me).

Now, somehow unable to sell this simple but fair proposition (perhaps IDS realised he wouldn't be able to smuggle it past the Home-Owner-Ists?), they came up with the myth that millions of workless households were getting £500 a week in benefits as part of their divide-and-conquer approach to government, cue dozens of outraged readers' letters and angry pub conversations etc.

IDS now finds himself under attack for the apparent harshness of this measure (having oversold it) and is backtracking wildly. From the BBC - click and highlight to see how many such households there really are:

The number of households that will be affected by a new £500 a week benefit cap has fallen by over a quarter, the Department for Work and Pensions says.

The government initially estimated that 56,000 households would see their benefits reduced by the policy, losing on average around £93 per week. It now expects 40,000 households to be affected.