Our old friend Lord Freud, minister for welfare reform, was recently caught out again using dodgy and inaccurate stats to justify the government’s savage benefit cuts. Channel 4 Fact Check has the story:

On January 11th, Lord Freud wrote to the South London Press, to point out, “It is also important we end the sensationalist myths about the local housing allowance reforms in 2011…In London around 750,000 private rental homes will still be affordable.”

Two weeks later, in the House of Lords, Lord Knight posed the following question:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the letter from Lord Freud deposited in the Library of the House (DEP2010-2327), what was the methodology used to calculate that 750,000 private rented sector homes will still be affordable in London after the housing benefit reforms have been implemented.

Lord Freud answered:

“I have written to the noble Lord to correct an error in this letter. There are fewer than 700,000 private rented sector homes in total in London, and a conservative estimate is that about 250,000 of these will still be affordable after the housing benefit reforms have been implemented.”

It may seem surprising that the government minister responsible for reforming housing benefit would claim in public that there are more affordable private rented sector homes than the entire number of privately rented homes in the whole of London.

But, to be fair to Lord Freud, he is no more clueless about housing policy than about benefit fraud, which he apologised for “inadvertently” misleading people about.

Or responsible for carrying out incapacity benefit tests, or the entire welfare system, which he “knew nothing about” when he wrote his report into welfare reform.

Or responsible when his then boss misled Parliament by quoting figures from the Office of National Statistics which actually come from a property website run by Associated Newspapers.

Reader comments

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