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IDS gets his sums wrong – by £1.85 BILLION

September 14, 2012 4:00 pm

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Yesterday The Daily Mail reported that IDS’s claim that “benefit tourism” would cost Britain £155m a year. Funnily enough though, there was no mention of the fact that he previously claimed that it would cost £2 BILLION. That means the figure he’s now arguing is “enormous” is a whopping 92% lower than his original guesstimate – £1.845 billion lower to be precise.

Lets take a look at that in chart form.

It’s enough to make you question what other sums this government have got disastrously wrong…

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  • rekrab

    Heavens above! and his universal benefit is about to go live!

    • http://twitter.com/MatthewSDent Matthew S. Dent

      Well, you say that…

  • https://mikestallard.virtualgallery.com/ Mike Stallard

    What exactly are Labour’s plans for the Welfare system?
    There can be no doubt that IDS has been torpedoed by George Osborne with whom, according to the Telegraph, there is a lot of shouting going on. The Treasury, apparently, is in charge of the IT system which has to be put into place to make Universal Credits work and the Treasury simply is sitting back and letting nothing happen. It is, you are right, a total disaster.
    So let me repeat my question:
    What is the Labour policy on Welfare Reform?

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=715486331 Alex Otley

      Labour doesn’t have a policy I’m sad to say, but hopefully Ed’s wonkish ‘predistribution’ thingy will develop logically into “make housing affordable so people don’t need housing benefit”.

  • jaime taurosangastre candelas

    To me, “could” as he actually said has a different meaning than “would” as you report him saying.

    The real point is that benefit tourism, as worked out by his civil servants, could cost us all £155 million a year, which is £155 million too much, and that if we can reduce that £155 million to zero cost, what does £155 million buy in social provisions that we would all support?  By coincidence, it could mean a near 20% cut in the costs of “Meals on Wheels” for vulnerable and mostly elderly people, some of whom are facing an 88% rise in the cost of the service.  See:  http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/8880747.Meals_on_Wheels_costs_to_soar_by_88_per_cent/ . Apart from anything else, the cost of a single meal, even if delivered to the door, of £5.64 seems excessive to me for pensioners on very low incomes.

  • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

    Lol, but tribalism aside we should support measures to crackdown on benefit tourism.

  • William Bungay

    Ugh, what is this?

    The £2bn figure is a potential worst case and even if it is wrong, the ‘error’ is cautious IN OUR FAVOUR.

    If your only points against IDS are, as they seem to be, that 1. he isn’t psychic and 2. he’s taking a bit more care with the money forcibly taken from me every year than labour ever did, then he doesn’t seem bad to me.

  • Brumanuensis

    As FullFact put it:

    “The problem with this analysis – which supposedly led to the vast overestimate – was that it included households who had already qualified for benefits and so wouldn’t be affected by a change in the ‘right to reside’ law. The latest estimate this week from Iain Duncan Smith now excludes these households.

    Full Fact contacted the DWP today for more information on the latest estimate, but no one was available for comment.

    However the whole affair raises serious questions over how the Department has handled both making the estimate itself and publishing its findings.

    On neither occasion has the DWP published any details of its estimates, meaning that anyone interested in knowing what basis there is for trusting these figures is going to be sorely disappointed.

    There is also a secondary problem: neither the Department nor Mr Duncan-Smith seems to have indicated that there was a problem with the old figures that were previously quoted. The new £155m estimate has superceded the old £2bn estimate, but the error has not been corrected”.

    Sums up the DWP at the moment, really.

  • Serbitar

    Iain Duncan Smith is one of the stupidest and least able politicians of any political party not only now but historically. Not to put too fine a point on IDS is as thick as two short planks. More than the Coalition’s economic failure the forthcoming Welfare Reform Bill looks catastrophic: the worst of it is that everybody knew that this was going to be the case from the moment IDS took over at the DWP intent on implementing Centre for Social Justice policies despite the fact that Liam Byrne is supposedly “broadly supportive” of three quarters of its contents.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/sep/15/welfare-bill-iain-duncan-smith?newsfeed=true

    Even dyed-in-the-wool, semi-detached Tory Boys are now convinced that the bill is wrong:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/10/universal-credit-benefits-disaster

    It is almost impossible to put into words how personally disastrous these ridiculous IDS reforms are going to be, if they go ahead, to millions upon millions of men, women and families. Surely the Labour Party should find a much better, braver, effective, passionate and competent defender to stand up for the voiceless and the helpless and the innocent about to face lives blighted by poverty and homelessness than the crypto-Tory and diminutive Liam Byrne? The seriousness of this matter is impossible to over emphasise.

  • MonkeyBot5000

    What’s a factor of ten between friends?

  • williamtheconker

    £1.85 billion?
    Huh!
    How many billion was Gordon wrong by?
    IDS seems like a rank amateur.

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