Newsroom

Minister misleads House of Commons with welfare stats cribbed from the internet

The work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has been exposed as having misled the House of Commons by claiming that official statistics showed that private landlords were driving up housing benefit bills.

Landlord groups expressed incredulity as it emerged that data which Iain Duncan Smith had claimed was from the highly-respected Office for National Statistics, had actually been found on the internet.

During a House of Commons debate on housing benefit last week the secretary of state said (column 167):

“We now know that, according to the Office for National Statistics, the private marketplace in housing fell by around 5 per cent last year. At the same time, Local Housing Allowance rates had risen by 3 per cent. There is thus a 7 per cent gap with what is going on in the marketplace.”

However, the Department for Work and Pensions has now accepted that this was not true, and that the figures in fact came from a property website, findaproperty.com.

Ian Fletcher, director of policy at the British Property Federation, said: “DWP press officers and Ministers should not cut fast and loose with dodgy stats. I think the public will draw their own conclusions when the Secretary of State has access to the best statisticians in the land via the Office of National Statistics, and best rental data via the Valuation Office, and yet would prefer to use findaproperty.com.  

“In an age of austerity it makes you wonder why taxpayers are paying for all these Government statisticians if the department would rather look up any old statistic off the web than use the professionals they have at their disposal.”

Duncan Smith’s claim ignores the fact that LHA payouts are based on market rent data from the Valuation Office, so if market rents fall, so will Local Housing Allowance rents, but inevitably there is a lag.

Indeed, Findaproperty.com’s own figures now show that UK rents are up 5.3 per cent this year. If the same DWP logic is applied it suggests that landlords are now in fact offering cut-price deals to LHA tenants.

Notes to editors

* The DWP is already under investigation by the UK Statistics Authority. Chair Sir Michael Scholar ordered an investigation this month into the way the Department of Work and Pensions uses statistics following a string of concerns over the nature and presentation of statistics by the department.

* Data from the DWP shows that a greater proportion of the rise in the housing benefit bill since November 2008 was caused by increasing unemployment and by government policies on social housing, rather than by landlords pushing up the rents that they charge to housing benefit tenants.

Analysis using DWP’s figures shows almost 70% of growth in the benefit bill can be attributed to additional claimants – the unemployed of this recession. A further 17.7% is attributed to an increase in payments in the social rented sector – due to the transfer of council house stock to housing associations, which have higher rents – and only 13.2% to an increase in average payments in the private rented sector.

Source: Building and Social Housing Foundation, Support with Housing Costs: Developing a simplified and sustainable system.  Based on Department for Work and Pensions (2010) Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit Caseload Statistics, July 2010, Tables 4 and5, http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/hb_ctb/hbctb_release_jul10.xls

* The department’s misleading use of statistics has been reported on by property trade magazines the Estates Gazette, and Inside Housing.

For further information please contact:

Ian Fletcher, British Property Federation director of policy, at ifletcher@bpf.org.uk, or on 020 7802 0112

Patrick Clift, Media and Public Affairs Manager, at pclift@bpf.org.uk, or on 020 7802 0128

Paul Sweeney, Media Assistant, at psweeney@bpf.org.uk, or on 020 7802 0113