News round-up

With so much going on in the world the media, particularly the BBC, can happily ignore the issues which concern the poorest in Britain.  They managed - just - to report the fact that the government lost a vote on the bedroom tax.  It was a private member's bill, introduced by a Lib Dem (!) to water down the current rules by exempting disabled people who need the extra room or have adapted homes, as well as those who can't be found a smaller home to move to.  Labour backed it and the government lost by 306 votes to 231.  It will now go to committee stage and is unlikely to get through its third reading and into law.  But it's a start.  Unfortunately the BBC managed to spread misinformation.  The website piece says that the original changes "were designed to ensure social tenants get the same treatment as private tenants, who do not get any rent support".  I don't know what he means by "rent support", but this suggests that private tenants don't get housing benefit, which is untrue.  The piece also quotes Iain Duncan Smith as claiming that the changes would cost the Treasury £1 billion, a figure which is as accurate as all IDS's numbers.  

Then we read about the "attitude to work" assessments which the gormless Esther McVey is now going to impose on the unemployed.  It's an idea borrowed from Ingeus, apparently.  You can read the Daily Mail version if you really want to, or the less hysterical version in the Independent.  Although she's presenting it as voluntary, and as a way of not putting people on courses they don't need, there are obviously fears that it will be another way of catching people out and sanctioning them.

On the outsourcing front, there was an interesting article in the Independent about the race to, in effect, privatise the probation service.  It suggests that there are 5 companies involved - Capita, Sodexo, Amey, Interserve and Carillion - and that they would be well advised to have nothing to do with it.  They are very unlikely to make a profit.

Finally, please read the Guardian piece by John Lanchester about poverty and inequality.

Carrying on

On the day of the reshuffle the DWP put out its independent report into the way the bedroom tax is working.  It's a process known as burying bad news.  But it was noticed, particularly by the Liberal Democrats, who decided that it was just too bad to defend any longer.  And it's that, unfortunately, which has been the news story, rather than the contents of the report itself.  Let's skip the politics and look at the facts.
You can read it all here - "Evaluation of Removal of Spare Room Subsidy".  There's a lot of it, so you might like to copy most of the media and just look at the Key Findings from page 15.  Crucial is the fact that only 4.5% of affected claimants have moved "within the social sector" in the first 6 months of the reduction, with another 1.4% moving to the private rented sector.  There's nowhere to move to.  Most people said that they had done more to find work or better-paid work (well, they would, wouldn't they?) but hardly anybody had taken in a lodger.  41% of tenants have paid the full shortfall, 39% have paid some, and 20% have paid none.  Where have people got the money to pay the extra?  57% say they have had to cut back on essentials (like food) and 26% had had to borrow money.
And on it goes.  The RSRS (as the report calls it) is a massive failure, as everyone except IDS and Freud predicted, and all it has achieved is to plunge poor people into greater penury.  The BBC got a quote from Iain Duncan Smith: "This department is delivering some of the biggest welfare reforms in over 60 years, designed to return fairness to the system and we are on track to make the £6bn savings we had previously set out.  At the same time we are helping to make sure our housing benefit reforms have a transformative effect on the lives of those who in the past were faced with a system which trapped people into cycles of workless and welfare dependency.  The scaremongering by those opposed to our welfare reforms - in particular our housing benefit reforms - has been proven to be without substance, and we are already seeing the effects of people moving into work."  The risible DWP Press Office chaps tweeted desperately in similar vein.  But the Lib Dems decided that they couldn't defend it.

There was some barely-noticed news on the outsourcing front.   The contract for electronic tagging of offenders, previously held by G4S and Serco (both of which were found to have defrauded the taxpayer of millions) has gone to - wait for it - Capita!  Some asked why Capita; why does it always have to be these three?  But it's an inevitable part of the outsourcing business.  If you create huge contracts only the big firms can bid, and it was these three which were prepared to bid for everything.  
One lot of contracts of interest to many is Community Work Placements.  But CWP doesn't seem to be going well.  The Boycott Workfare team is doing a great job of publicising companies and organisations which agree to take part by taking free labour.  One was recently claimed by the government as a success, providing a photo-op for Osborne.  It quickly decided to withdraw when it discovered the trouble it was attracting.  It looks like the CWP contractors are targeting councils and housing associations for placements, if Seetec is anything to go by.  They say, "Examples of such projects include estate maintenance and local renovation, groundswork, horticulture, recycling as well as administration, customer service and sales, warehousing, distribution and cleaning services. The list of potential projects is almost endless."  Sadly, it will be tempting for cash-strapped councils to go for this.  Presumably they can adapt the hi-viz jackets they use for Community Payback offenders on similar projects.

Why Iain Duncan Smith should go

Someone yesterday started a story of a conversation supposedly overheard on a train to the effect that in the forthcoming reshuffle "Ian" was to be replaced by "Esther".  Despite there being no substance to this story at all it's made it as far as the BBC website.  One thing that this demonstrates is that Iain Duncan Smith's future is the biggest talking point in the reshuffle.  Will Cameron move him?  Will he have the guts to fire him if he refuses to be moved?  Who would replace him?

I have blogged before about IDS's failures, as have a great many people.  There's an excellent piece on the Labour Left website which lists "Iain Duncan Smith's 100 biggest failures".  It's a heroic effort, well worth study.  But let's distil it into the most obvious areas where his ambition has far exceeded his competence.

• The Work Programme.  This was the first of IDS's grand schemes to be put in place.  It was going to solve unemployment; and the most revolutionary aspect of it was "payment by results".  But it was never that.  The providers were guaranteed an "attachment fee" which would keep them going if they did nothing; and they were able to look forward to an "incentive" payment even if they failed badly.  And fail badly they did.  After 4 years it's clear that job outcomes (below even the minimum performance demanded and way below the providers' promises) depend on the economy and not on anything the companies do.  Helping to drag down the WP is:-
• ESA.  The companies were never going to be able to help those on ESA into work.  Indeed, most have been parked.  And overall, the companies have spent less than half the amount per client which they promised.  Remember, they get contracts because of the promises made in the bid documents.  And now they've got contracts to scoop up the people they've failed into:-
• Community Work Placements.  Okay, these appear not to have actually started yet.  But that's because a huge chunk of the voluntary sector want nothing to do with them, and a growing number of councils have also refused to take part.

There were a number of other, almost incidental, schemes along the way which have also been disasters, notably

• The bedroom tax.  (Let's face it, no one was ever going to call it "the removal of the spare room subsidy".)  It has cost councils a fortune, saved no one any money and inflicted huge distress and misery on thousands.
• Universal Jobmatch.  This was, it seems, entirely IDS's baby.  A grand one-stop-shop for employers and jobseekers alike which would have the added advantage of monitoring the activities of claimants.  The contract was given to a company with a poor record but which claims that much of what went wrong with UJM could have been prevented - but they were told not to put the necessary refinements into the software.  The system has been used to control and punish claimants without ever being the wondrous solution IDS envisaged.  But its costs are enormous.
• The sanctions regime.  A ludicrously impractical "claimant commitment" has been coupled with a vicious imposition of punishments which breach people's human rights.  Yet time and again IDS and his ministers have simply lied about sanctions; McVey repeated again this week in Parliament that they are "a last resort".  The human cost is appalling.  

The biggest failure of all, however, is:-

• Universal Credit.  This was to be the lasting legacy of Iain Duncan Smith, transforming "welfare".  At the outset opposition parties said yes, great idea, but it's never been done because it's too difficult.  Not for IDS, though.  Millions have been spent on IT that didn't work, more millions on trying a different IT system, and on patching up the problems thrown up by the very limited trials of UC.  We needn't rehearse all the problems.  But through them all IDS has insisted that it will all be fine.

We're told that it's Osborne who is keen to get IDS out because the Chancellor wants to slash the welfare budget and IDS resists that.  We're also told (in the Mail today) that Smith will again refuse to go.  This man's failures have cost us dear.  Surely he must go.

Weekend round-up

Still waiting for A4e's accounts, but as one of our commenters points out, A4e has frequently been late filing its accounts in recent years.  Perhaps of more immediate interest is the down-grading of its credit rating.  But while we await developments there are the usual attempts by the DWP to hide its own incompetence.  The news came out that there has been a blunder with the hated bedroom tax.  Anyone who was on HB before 1996 and has been on it ever since should not be subject to the new legislation; they are covered by an older law which wasn't superseded by the new one.  One estimate is that this applies to around 40,000 people, many of whom have already had to go through the misery of losing their home or trying to exist on less money.  And I reckon that many of the people who have been on HB that long will be disabled or have long-term conditions.  So the government intends to "close the loop-hole".  It's not clear whether that will mean more retro-active legislation, or whether they can just sneak it through on a Statutory Instrument, which doesn't go through Parliament.  Either way, why did those highly-paid civil service lawyers not spot this before?
The DWP tried to distract from this with news that the benefits cap is very successful.  This is perhaps the most popular of all their bites at benefits, because it seems only fair that you shouldn't get more than many people can earn.  But it obscures the fact that the bulk of the money goes to landlords, not the claimants, so if you live in an expensively-rented home and suddenly lose your job, you will lose your home as well; this is shown by the fact that the large majority of the boroughs where people have been affected are in London.
The row about Channel 4's Benefits Street rumbles on.  The Daily Mail's contribution comes from John Bird, who is the founder of the Big Issue.  It's typically confused.  Bird thinks that the show tells the truth about benefits, and he's an expert, he says, because he came through dire poverty himself.  Perhaps the worst example of right-wing hate-mongering came from Katie Hopkins on the BBC's This Week last night.  Who's Katie Hopkins?  Quite.  Her only claim to fame is that she was on The Apprentice; she now writes for the Sun, and seems to have taken the place of Kelvin McKenzie as the nutter of choice for TV producers wanting to anger their viewers.  (The Daily Star called her rent-a-gob.)  Last night she called for more welfare cuts; directly insulted Diane Abbott MP, who showed remarkable restraint by not decking her; and said, "Food banks are a con."  The rage about her on Facebook, most of it, I guess, not from benefits claimants, shows that we might just have reached a point where the general public is embarrassed by this continual demonisation of the poorest.
One bit of news about the DWP itself came from an unlikely source - the Telegraph.  It revealed that more than 1,100 DWP staff have been warned over "prying" on benefits records.  That's breaches of privacy, accessing records they had no right to see.
Finally, how's this for irony?  "BBC misleads public every day on scale of cuts, fumes Cameron".  Yes, it's the Daily Mail describing Cameron getting annoyed on Radio Merseyside when he as accused of treating Liverpool unfairly.  No wonder the BBC has become so tepid in its journalism.

A new way with figures

I heard an item on the lunchtime news programme which had me laughing in disbelief.  One of the housing associations came up with figures to show that the bedroom tax was not raising the sort of money the DWP insisted it would, because people are moving to the private rented where rents (and therefore housing benefit) are higher, rather than paying the tax and staying where they are.  They got a university department to go through the figures and produce a report.  The university confirmed it.  So today Esther McVey, the new minister, was interviewed about this.  Her response?  To rubbish the report as not true because it was based on figures provided by an organisation which had a financial interest.  The interviewer, clearly gob-smacked, pressed her.  What was not true?  All she could say was that the DWP had modelled all this before it was put in place.  But what was not true?  She repeated the canard that the housing association had a financial interest in providing false figures.  She's obviously settling in fast and absorbing the culture of the DWP.  When the figures come from government, distort them, lie about them or just refuse to publish them; if they come from outside government, say they're lies.  Brilliant!

The Indymedia website carries an article which confirms that A4e is putting in a bid for the Transforming Rehabilitation contracts, effectively privatising the probation service.  It's not a surprise.  They need contracts to survive.  But the model is the same as that of the Work Programme; payment by results with a three-tier structure of primes and sub-contractors.  We'll see whether A4e makes it through the PQQ stage, but there's no reason to think they won't.

PS:  Here's the Independent's take on the housing report and a comment from McVey.  This one is a little different but no more sensible.

More unravelling

I'm sorry to post only links to news items, but they are coming thick and fast, and showing how Iain Duncan Smith's grand plans continue to unravel.
First, there's an article on the Guardian's website with more evidence that the "There are no targets and no league tables" claim doesn't hold water.  It includes a link to the "scorecard" - a league table by any other name - and full accounts by two different JCP staff on how the system works.  The figures are interesting; 85,000 sanctions in January alone, with 24,000 of these coming from Work Programme providers.  So are Duncan Smith, Mark Hoban, Lord Freud and Neil Couling (the Jobcentre Plus manager) knowingly telling porkies?  Probably not.  They have never issued an instruction explicitly saying, "You must punish at least x per cent of claimants to get them 'off-flow'".  The pressure is more subtle than that.  But the effect is the same.  What's needed now is a full response from Duncan Smith
Universal Credit is also in trouble.  A report tonight (see the Independent) says that the trial of this will be scaled down.  There were going to be 4 areas piloting it in a month's time; now it's going to be just one, a jobcentre in Ashton under Lyne.  They don't have the experience, training or computer programmes in place to do any more at present.  Embarrassing.
And with the bedroom tax starting on Monday, the National Housing Federation, representing 1,200 housing associations, says that it will hurt the most vulnerable (also in the Independent).  There's no need for it in many areas, and nowhere for the displaced to move to.  They also point out that where disabled people have to move out of specially adapted homes, it will cost millions more to adapt their new homes.  This all comes on top of Frank Field MP telling councils to brick up doors or knock down walls to avoid the tax, and Nottingham apparently re-designating lots of properties as one-bedroom.
One wonders whether any of the media have invited Iain Duncan Smith to be interviewed, particularly by someone who knows the subject.

A brief history of "social housing"

Forgive me for straying well away from the main focus of this blog.   In the current controversy over the bedroom tax or "spare room subsidy" no one seems to recall the history of what is now contemptuously called social housing.

A hundred years ago the large majority of the working class lived in private rented housing.  There were charities which had built "model dwellings"; some big employers like George Cadbury and James Reckitt had built estates for their workers.  But for most, housing was overcrowded and often squalid.  An inside toilet was an unheard-of luxury.  People moved house surprisingly frequently, perhaps doing a "moonlight flit" to escape rent arrears.  There were no regulations to protect tenants.  A few councils began to construct decent housing for rent.  But the real impetus for this came with the end of the Great War in 1918.  A big building programme was intended to create "homes fit for heroes" and the age of the council house began.  There was an added surge after the destruction of World War II.

Millions of us grew up in council houses.  There was no stigma attached to this.  The vast majority of tenants were working, but would never be able to afford the deposit on a mortgage.  Even if they could, most had a horror of taking on that sort of debt.  They were content to pay their rent and let the landlord take care of repairs and maintenance.  In the 1970s government encouraged other housing providers to enter the field, as housing associations.

And then came Margaret Thatcher.  A whole new lexicon was created, reflecting the free-market vision.  Anyone with aspirations would want to "get on the housing ladder".  Only life's losers would want to live in rented accommodation, and only those with special needs should be in "social housing".  Thatcher decided to dismantle the whole structure (and, in the process, destroy the power of local councils) by forcing the sell-off of houses at discount prices to their tenants.  Councils were not allowed to use the proceeds of the sales to build more housing, so the stock declined much faster than HAs could supply the deficiency.  People were encouraged to take on massive debt, and twenty-somethings were given a dozen or more mortgages for buy-to-let properties.  The only people who could get the tenancies of social housing were those perceived to be unable to afford to go private but in urgent need.

It has been a resounding victory for the political right.  As in other areas of our national life, a century of progress has been rolled back.

Can we afford Iain Duncan Smith?

Yet another policy of the Work and Pensions Secretary has had to be altered after a period in which he has refused to listen.  The "bedroom tax" is still a disaster.  But Iain Duncan Smith has conceded changes to allow foster carers and the parents of armed forces personnel to keep their "spare" bedrooms for when they are needed, without financial penalty.  But confusion still reigns, as they're now saying (I'm watching BBC's Newsnight) that the money is coming out of the discretionary fund.  And as the Guardian points out, it's only 3 weeks until this all kicks in.  And despite claims from Cameron and other Tories that the families of disabled children and others are exempt, that isn't true.  It's up to the local authorities to find enough from the one-off inadequate fund to cover those who apply.
As we pointed out last month, this is just the latest in a long list of messes which Duncan Smith has created. And another is looming.  A pilot of Universal Credit, in which social housing tenants on housing benefit were paid the HB directly rather than it going to the landlord, has resulted in a big increase in people defaulting on the rent.
Can you imagine keeping your job if you did it as consistently badly as IDS is doing his?  The country can't afford to have this man in any position of power.

The law of unintended consequences

We have written about the likely consequences of the "bedroom tax", the deduction from the housing benefit paid to people in social housing who are considered to be "under-occupying", i.e. have spare bedrooms.  There is a severe shortage of smaller accommodation in the social housing sector for them to move into, and falling back on private rented housing will cost more in housing benefit.  But now we hear that Universal Credit is going to cut the amount of private rented accommodation available.  According to the Telegraph, the Nationwide, the biggest buy-to-let mortgage provider, is not going to offer any more loans to landlords.  The reasoning is that under UC the housing benefit is paid not to the landlord but to the claimant; so the likelihood is that a lot of rent won't get paid and so landlords will default on their mortgages.  Net result - a lot of homeless people.  I don't think that's quite what Iain Duncan Smith intended.
And there's another hole which the government has dug for themselves, or rather for local councils.  Those councils have had their support for means-tested council tax benefit cut by £500m, and many councils have had to charge people on benefits who currently don't pay anything.  The Guardian reports that up to 84% of those hit with the charge are not likely to pay it.  While some councils will pursue people for payment, others will consider that the cost of going after what are small sums is just not worth it.
Another snippet of news: new figures from the ONS show that in 2012 a quarter of all workers earned less than £12,800 a year.
Finally, hats off to a group of churches, the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, the Church of Scotland and the Baptist Union, who have published a study called The Lies we Tell Ourselves.  They accuse the government of deliberately misusing evidence and statistics to misrepresent the plight of the poor. There's a summary on the BBC's website.  (Be careful, BBC, they'll be complaining about bias again.)

A difficult time for IDS

It can't be easy for Iain Duncan Smith at the moment.
His party spent 13 years in opposition, planning what they would do when they finally got their hands on power again.  Several of them decided to become experts (in their own eyes, at least) on particular subjects, and developed grandiose ideas about how to "reform" that area; Lansley with the NHS (he didn't last long); Gove with education (still there but making a colossal mess); and of course IDS with work and pensions.  It was particularly important for IDS.  Having failed as party leader, he was determined that his political legacy was going to be the "reform" of the entire welfare system.  But it's not going well.  One after another, his plans have hit the rocks.

• The Work Programme - intended to be the panacea for unemployment, it's been a dismal failure.  £400 million was spent by taxpayers in the first 14 months to achieve nothing. Unless there's been an amazing improvement in recent months, it will have to be changed, but the pressure will increase to scrap it altogether.  All the warning signs were there from the outset, but IDS refused to listen.
• Work Capability Assessments - causing huge misery.  And now we learn that the number of successful appeals is rising, to 42% in the last quarter.  Yet Atos got part of the contract to do the same job with people on disability benefits.
• Universal Credit - still on track, apparently, but a new man has been brought in to manage the project.  When the risks were pointed out - that a very large number of people wouldn't be able to cope with it, and there would be a dangerous shambles - IDS refused to listen, claiming that those people would just have to learn.  Now he has had to produce a "framework" to handle the problems, pushing the onus onto local councils.
• Universal Jobmatch - the super-duper website was going to kill two birds with one stone.  It would collect all the job vacancies into one site, and it would enable JCP and WP advisers to snoop on their clients' activities.  But the website itself is far from perfect, and despite announcing a few months ago that registration and conceding access was going to be compulsory, IDS has had to accept that it isn't possible without a struggle to change the law.
• Work for your benefit schemes - judged by the appeal court to have been put in place illegally, necessitating a hasty drafting of new regulations whilst IDS insists that no compensation will be paid to people who were punished for not attending these schemes while they were unlawful.  Wrong advice.
• The Bedroom Tax, or whatever its official name is - warned that it would be Cameron's poll tax, IDS insists that it's fair.  But faced with growing evidence of its unacceptable impact on the disabled, he has directed his people to look at ways of changing the rules.

We were told that Cameron tried to reshuffle IDS away from Work and Pensions, but he refused to go.  He hates to be thwarted or disagreed with over his policies.  His department has made more than 20 formal complaints to the BBC in the last year over "bias" and "inaccuracies".  According to the Telegraph, "Aides say coverage of welfare reforms often feature only the plight of people who will suffer most from the changes, while measures to soften the blow often go unreported."  It goes on, "Over the past few months, Mr Duncan Smith has been particularly angered by the reporting of the housing benefit reforms referred to as 'the bedroom tax' by Labour and the BBC."  Then, "A source said, 'You could look at the BBC’s TV news coverage [of this policy] and think this was a change that would apply only to disabled people.  We have allocated £155 million for local authorities to help soften the blow of the measure, but this never features in the BBC’s news coverage. How is it possible not to think that is biased?'"
Long may the BBC and the rest of the media continue to highlight the failing policies of this man.

A frightening future

I'm scared of what's being done to the poor in this country.  I don't have to worry about the welfare system for myself, not at the moment.  But the damage that's being done to society, and the potential implications down the road, are truly frightening.  Let's just see how all the government's actions add up.

1. The Work Programme was meant to start to get the long-term unemployed back into work, and leave them with no excuse for not having a job.  It was largely hot air, of course, but Iain Duncan Smith seemed to have convinced himself that it was real.  He is unable to abandon that now.
2. In the absence of actual jobs, there is a sharp increase in the amount of "mandatory work activity", whether as part of the WP or as a separate programme.  Some of this is time-limited, some is indefinite in length.  From Monday this is to extend to those who are still officially sick or disabled (see an excellent Guardian article).  The DWP refuses to disclose the identity of employers profiting from this scheme, despite a ruling that they should.  They have admitted that private companies are involved, but insist that the work has to be "of community benefit".  The DWP's own figures show that this activity has no impact on whether someone can get a real job, so the whole thing has to be seen as deliberately punitive, or pandering to Daily Mail readers.  Common sense says that this is preventing the creation of real jobs.  If companies can get free labour, there is no need to hire anyone.
3. In the ideological fantasies of the right, there is no contradiction between the failure of the Work Programme and belief that people dependent on benefits are too comfortable, and need to be made to suffer in order to find work.  According to IDS, the system is "stifling incentive, opportunity and responsibility".  (The Telegraph yesterday.)  It should not "pay for a life on benefits when work is available".  Last Tuesday's release of performance data didn't actually happen, you dreamt it.
4. So their benefits are to frozen.  So far we don't know whether that includes housing benefit.  If it does, there will be a rapid increase in homelessness.  Even if it doesn't, the impact of an ever-declining standard of living will have the same effect eventually.
5. If all you can get is part-time work, and you are eligible for tax credits, you may well have to get more hours to qualify.  It's going up to 30 hours a week minimum.  So if you can't get more hours, your only recourse is to stop working altogether and depend on benefits entirely.  
6. The "bedroom tax" isn't a tax at all, but a gratuitously nasty attack on the poorest.  Anyone living in "social housing" (I loathe that term) and claiming benefits shouldn't have a spare bedroom.  So you'll have to move.  If you're unlucky enough to live in one of those areas where there is a severe shortage of, say, single-bedroom flats owned by councils or housing associations, then you're going to have to move right out of the area, or move into private rented accommodation - which will cost more, so the cost to the taxpayer goes up.  Wonderful.

Don't look to Labour to change things.  

Some people talk in apocalyptic terms about "work camps" or "back to the workhouse".  Others foresee civil unrest - rioting, in effect - on a big scale.  I don't know.  But I'm scared.

Points of view

There have been some interesting bits and pieces in the media this week which show how the battle to stigmatise those who have to depend on benefits is being won.
The Guardian carried a report on Tuesday of research by a team from the University of Kent.  Not, you notice, a think tank but an academic institution.  It reported that there is "a climate of fear" among people who need to claim benefits which frightens them off.  Government disinformation has meant that 1.8 million people have been "potentially too scared to seek help".  The report lists some of that disinformation (lies, in effect) then examines how the newspapers have systematically branded as scroungers those on benefits.  It's a damning report, but where was the coverage elsewhere?  There wasn't any, because it doesn't fit the agenda of the government and its mouthpieces.  Well done to the Guardian, though.
On Thursday Iain Duncan Smith appeared on BBC's Question Time.  I wasn't able to watch all of this, but I caught the row between him and another panellist, Owen Jones.  Jones tried to talk about the demonisation of the poor, but IDS snapped back at him with a furious face and voice.  And even the usually sensible Deborah Meadon disagreed with Jones.  The truth was outnumbered, as usual.
Plenty of coverage was given this week to Lord Freud, the employment minister in charge of reforming the welfare system.  Radio 4 discussed the "bedroom tax", under which people on benefits and living in social housing (I hate that term) will lose a big chunk of money if they have a spare bedroom.  A reporter went to the North East and discovered that there is a huge shortage of housing which people can down-size into.  So they have to either move far away or go into private rented accommodation which will end up costing much more.  When the reporter put this to Freud he waffled and retreated to the previous question.  Clearly what seems eminently sensible in an office in Whitehall doesn't work in the real world, but nobody wants to know.  Freud again showed the extent of his understanding in an interview in House Magazine, reported in the Guardian.  Apparently people on benefits are too comfortable and have a lifestyle which discourages them from taking risks.  He then made the sort of remark which comes back to haunt you:  "Freud, a former journalist and investment banker, told the magazine that his background did not make him unable to understand the reality of living on benefits. 'You don't have to be the corpse to go to the funeral, which is the implied criticism there,' he said."  The Telegraph also reported the story and the reaction of Liam Byrne for Labour.  The difference in the comments under the two articles speaks volumes about the polarisation of attitudes.
On a lighter note - sort of - was the report of a fake job advert which appeared on the direct.gov website.  It was for a professional killer for MI6, and was so well put together that it was a while before anyone spotted that it was a fake.  Makes you wonder how many other fake jobs are being advertised.