Churches Condemn Tory Policies for Stigmatising the Poor

Photograph by Eamon Curry

A number of churches and religious organisations from across the UK and Ireland have called on prime minster David Cameron to stop Tory party policies stigmatising the poor.

In an open letter [PDF] to the prime minster, the groups ask David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party to stop manipulating statistics to suit Tory policies and condemning the poor, with an aim of making sure the debates on poverty are based on facts and not assertions.

Dear Prime Minister,
We wish to express our grave concern about a number of instances in the recent weeks where senior members of the Government, including the Chairman of the Conservative Party, have given misleading and inaccurate information about those on benefits. As such, we write to you in your roles as Prime Minister and as leader of the Conservative Party.

There are three specific pieces of information that have been cited by senior Government ministers which are demonstrably and factually wrong. We ask that these are corrected as soon as possible, and that an apology is offered to those who have been misrepresented:

1. On 30 March, Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps stated that 878,300 people had dropped claims to incapacity benefit “rather than completing a medical test” as evidence of the need for welfare reform. This gave the impression that those who withdrew their application had submitted false claims or feared that they would not be eligible for benefit if tested, something that was repeated in media interviews.

   In fact, the figure refers to every time an individual stopped claiming ESA during the assessment period since October 2008. Many of these claims were for short-term problems; others finished when a partner’s income increased, removing them from eligibility. There is no evidence that people withdrew their applications “rather than” undergo a medical test, which it is implied that they would have failed.

2. On 12 April, the Daily Mail quoted the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith.”Already we’ve seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs,” he was quoted as saying. “This clearly demonstrates that the cap is having the desired impact”. The evidence upon which this figure was based contained an explicit warning that it was not possible to draw a link between the numbers affected by the benefit cap or the numbers going into employment and the effectiveness of the policy. Yet Mr Duncan Smith stated that these figures showed that the benefit cap was having “the desired impact”.
3. In an interview with the Daily Mail on 8 April, Mr Duncan Smith said that many people were applying for Disability Living Allowance before the new Personal Independence Payment was introduced in order to avoid the new medical test. It is absolutely clear from the publically available data that this was not the case. The small amount of statistical evidence produced to support the claim appears to refer to changes in caseload rather than the readily available new claims data.