Once again, the Tories have fallen foul of the number crunchers. After previously rebuking David Cameron for falsely claiming in a Conservative Party political broadcast that the coalition “was paying down Britain’s debts”, the UK Statistics Authority has rapped Iain Duncan Smith for his claim that 8,000 people moved into work as a result of the planned introduction of the coalition’s benefit cap. In response to a complaint from the TUC, Andrew Dilnot, the watchdog’s chair, states that the assertion was “unsupported by the official statistics”.
In a separate letter to Duncan Smith, Dilnot writes that “In the manner and form published, the statistics do not comply fully with the principles of the Code of Practice, particularly in respect of accessibility to the sources of data, information about the methodology and quality of the statistics, and the suggestion that the statistics were shared with the media in advance of their publication.”
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