Wednesday 16 July 2014
Lies, damn lies and failing DWP bedroom tax reports
by joehalewood Pictures displayed by Street Democracy UK
On the same day as the cabinet reshuffle the DWP released a 163-page interim report into the bedroom tax. Unfortunately this deliberate burial of a report is the best that can be said for it as it really is that bad.
Firstly it only records the first 5 months of the bedroom tax from April 2013 to August 2013 and so this report is already ELEVEN MONTHS OUT OF DATE.
Secondly, the authors of this report who include some well known and respected figures should hang their heads in shame for the content, the quality and the outrageous bias in this report…which I remind is 11 months out of date and purposeless.
Let’s begin with the Executive Summary which starts on page 13.
This Interim Report presents early findings from the evaluation of the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy (RSRS) undertaken by Ipsos MORI and the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research. A final report will be published in 2015.
We have already been told by Steve Webb, then a minister at DWP, that the final report will be published in Summer 2015, that is AFTER the next general election. Hence this sham of a report is to be the ONLY coalition report on the bedroom tax in this parliament which you would not know from reading this cleverly worded sentence.
Note too that this 163-page report claims to be an evaluation, that is an assessment of the bedroom tax policy yet it fails to mention in all of its 163 pages whether the bedroom tax produces any savings at all which was the claimed rationale for the policy. How can you ‘evaluate’ something by not evaluating its principal rationale?
If that doesn’t tell you what this report doesn’t say – that the bedroom tax is a costly failure, then nothing will. It is staggering that the claimed saving is not mentioned in a report consisting of 163 pages.
The opening of the Executive Summary continues:
The objectives of this project are to evaluate:• the preparation, delivery and implementation of the policy changes by local authorities and social landlords;
To decode and put into simple English, we asked councils and landlords for how they judged themselves! Hardly likely to get any form of objective evaluation from that are we! The summary continues:
For more click here:• the extent of increased mobility within the social housing sector leading to more effective use of the housing stock;
