This morning’s DODS parliamentary briefing carried a story under the headline.
1 Million ‘STUCK ON BENEFITS’ One million people capable of working are “stuck” on benefits, the Work and Pensions Secretary will say today.
He didn’t say that – if he did he would have been lying. However all three national newspapers which covered the story included in their headlines very similar versions of the same damaging lie.
Daily Express Million who could look for work but live on benefits
The Daily Telegraph A million on benefit capable of work
The Daily Mail One million people who are fit-to-work have been on benefits for three years
At first glance these headlines appear entirely consistent with the cleverly worded DWP Press release which says: “Around one million people have been stuck on a working-age benefit for at least three out of the past four years, despite being currently judged capable of preparing or looking for work.”
The first glance is however deceptive. To understand the full meaning of the sentence you must first wade through a long and necessarily complex statistical analysis document.
An accurate headline would actually be: “Less than 400,000 are unemployed and have received benefits for three of the last four years”. Even this needs qualification as just because someone is receiving benefits for unemployment today it is possible their previous spells on benefits were because of sickness, disability or caring responsibilities. The statistical analysis makes these facts clear to anyone who can wade through it. The press release doesn’t.
The remaining 600,000 of the 1 million headline figure are made up of people who have caring responsibilities, and are not required to work because of them, and people who have been assessed as having a physical or mental condition “such that it is not reasonable to require the claimant to work” .
It is hardly surprising that they are not in work – even under the current very strict criteria the DWP believes they can’t be expected to work! Again the statistical analysis makes this clear but the press release does not.
The DWP has decided to add together the number of single parents who are not expected to work because they have very young children, with people who have been assessed as unfit for work (but with some possibility of working in the future) and the unemployed who are actively seeking work and called them people who are “currently judged capable of preparing or looking for work”. This is a new category of benefit claimants invented for today’s press release which has evidently been poorly explained and poorly understood by the press.
Why has this new category been created? What light does it shed on our understanding of poverty and welfare claimants in the UK? What is clear is that when explained and reported as it was today it merely adds to the misunderstanding, stigma and lies which plague the current debate around poverty in the UK.
No news outlet has yet reported today’s data accurately. Those that have reported it have expressed outrage that people who are fit to work are sitting on benefits in our “something for nothing culture”. The numbers properly understood actually argue against this view, but it is unlikely this will be widely reported.
