Post-match report: IDS versus Work and Pensions Committee

I’m a member of the Work and Pensions Select Committee and, for some time, we’ve been trying to question Iain Duncan Smith over his misuse of benefits statistics to generate stories about so-called scroungers and mask the failings of his policies. Despite it being postponed on several occasions, this session took place on Monday.

Unfortunately the reaction amongst disability campaigners – over 100,000 of whom had signed Jayne Linney’s petition calling for this session to take place in the first place – was one of disappointment. For a sample see my mentions on Twitter on 9 December.

I totally understand why people feel the way they do following Monday’s session. When you can’t work but have been declared as able to do so, or when you see people in such situations considering self-harming or even suicide, you’re obviously going to want to see the man who is ultimately responsible for this getting a hard time.

I accept that, if we could rerun the session, I would have done some things differently. So when IDS was being evasive or didn’t know the answer, I should have made this plain so as to embarrass him. But there were three other factors at play.

Universal Credit

For a start this meeting was meant to focus largely on statistics, but a decision was taken to limit discussion to half an hour because of the escalating chaos of Universal Credit. I regret that we had to do this, but this is what the committee agreed.

Nature of Select Committees

Secondly our committee could never have gone for IDS like the Treasury Committee go for bankers or the Home Affairs Committee go for police officers. None of these figures are politicians so in these instances the committees have more of a free hand. But IDS is a Conservative Cabinet Minister, so we had several considerations to bear in mind.

For a start the membership of the Committee reflects the share of the seats won by each party at the last election, so at least some questions went to MPs who support the Government and gave IDS comparatively easy ride.

Furthermore the strength of Select Committee reports is that they are agreed by all their members. If Labour MPs had become overly-aggressive in their questioning, the Tory members might have become less cooperative when writing future reports. So we had to exercise some restraint.

And let’s not forget that the Conservatives are particularly prickly when it comes to welfare. Given their failings on living standards, they feel this is one of their strengths in the run-up to the next election. As a result our Chair had a particularly difficult balance to strike.

IDS himself

The third issue to bear in mind is IDS’s Teflon-like character.

So when he was confronted about Grant Shapps’ claim that 900,000 people dropped their ESA application rather than go through with an assessment – the real figure is 19,000 – he said that was a matter for Conservative Central Office.

And when I told him that his Employment and Support Allowance statistics from before appeals already take account of informal reconsiderations by civil servants – thus masking the true extent of the failings of the assessment process – he simply said that I should write to him.

Now any Labour Secretary of State might be concerned about examples like these, and admit mistakes had been made. At the very least they’d put on a brave face, but you’d get the impression they would knock heads together later.

But IDS isn’t a Labour Secretary of State. He’s a Tory. A really Tory Tory.

In the back of his mind he probably knows that stories about scroungers don’t reflect the lives of most benefit claimants.

Equally he probably knows that undermining public confidence in the welfare system isn’t fair on those – such as people with disabilities – who have no choice but to use it.

And he probably also knows he should act on failing policies – such as the ESA assessment – because of the impact on vulnerable people.

But he’s willing to misuse statistics to whip up scrounger rhetoric and conceal policy failings because somewhere, just somewhere, there probably is the odd individual who deserves to be pilloried and put through the mill. It’s this exercise in self-deception that allows IDS to sound so confident and unruffled.

I can assure campaigners that this is not the end by any means. I will be writing to IDS and the UK Statistics Authority to pick up several issues that arose in Monday’s session. However the one sure-fire way of dealing with IDS is for us all to play our part in booting him out of Government at the next election.

Sheila Gilmore is Labour MP for Edinburgh East