Office for Statistics Regulation slams Starmer-Kendall axis lies
Liz Kendall’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been slammed for scamming the public and forced to retract “entirely misleading” claims about supposed growth in the number of UK people unable to work.
The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) last week upheld complaints about a DWP press release claim that the number of people claiming Universal Credit health benefits because they were unfit to work had risen almost fourfold since the pandemic. The government fake news read:
The number [of people] has almost quadrupled since the start of the pandemic when 360,000 people were considered too sick to look for work – a 383% rise in less than five years.
Typically of the Starmer government’s shoddiness in its attacks on the poor and vulnerable, the press release stated ‘almost quadrupled’ when in fact a 400% increase would be a quintupling, but the OSR found that the 383% claim:
presents an entirely misleading picture to the public.
Much of the increase in Universal Credit health claims is because new claimants are now forced to claim through Universal Credit (UC) instead of the legacy ‘Employment and Support Allowance’ (ESA), meaning that new UC awards were significantly offset by a corresponding fall in ESA awards, leading to an accurate figure for the rise – much of which is caused by people suffering long covid and other Pandemic-related issues – of only 50%, not 383%.
Kendall’s department for work and persecution has form. Just the week before, the DWP had put out a press release falsely claiming a “staggering 319% increase” in people on UC for health reasons – again either outright shoddiness or Kendall thought an additional 64% rise had happened in just the space of a week. According to Benefits and Work:
The DWP removed the figure but refused to add a note showing the press release had been altered [and] after being contacted by the OSR, the DWP continued to use the untruthful 383% figure but now with a small amount of explanation.
The OSR has instructed the DWP to remove the figure entirely by 4 April, add a note that the press release has been updated and refrain from using the untrue figure again.
Labour’s ‘useless eater‘ war on the disabled will rob disabled people of as much as £7,000 a year – and deprive many family members caring for disabled relatives of carers’ allowance as a consequence. Kendall has also declared a war targeting people with neurodivergence or suffering mental illness that has caused calls to suicide helplines to rocket – and at the same time the party is pushing through an assisted suicide bill that will treat any attempt to stop someone seriously ill from committing suicide as ‘coercion’ and will target people with Downs Syndrome and even diabetes.
Labour has refused to conduct proper assessments of the impact of its benefit changes on vulnerable people and Kendall is fighting in court to prevent the release of figures showing how many people the Tories’ policies – which were condemned by the United Nations as a breach of human rights but which Labour is taking even further – killed.
Keir Starmer has outrageously compared his government’s cuts – which will impoverish at least 400,000 people and not the 250,000 Labour admits – with cutting the pocket money of a lazy child to encourage him or her to find a Saturday job. True to form, he then tried to blame the comparison on subordinates.
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You couldn’t make this crap up of a labour government but truly we know it’s happening how they used history to show the people’s that feeding useless eaters is no go but it’s happening now that stammer is and that aktion t4 rolling along with out much of a ado
And we thought fester mcvile was the whore of babylon. 😕
It looks like there will be a few more signing on with the DWP over the next couple of years. It will be interesting to see what they think of the DWP’s services first hand.
https://www.civilserviceworld.com/professions/article/cabinet-office-to-cut-headcount-by-1200-over-next-two-years
10 Apr 2025
The Cabinet Office is planning to reduce the size of its workforce by a third, with around 1,200 staff set to leave the department over the next two years…………..
Alongside the 1,200 planned departures, around 900 people have already left the department since Labour came to power, including those who moved when the Government Digital Service transferred to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology………….
These combined reductions of 2,100 would result in the central Cabinet Office headcount dropping from 6,500 in December 2024 to 4,400 two years from now………
It will be interesting to see what they think of the DWP’s services first hand.
What kind of callous mind-set thinks it might be ‘interesting’ to know what other people (but not themselves, of course) might ‘think’ about their having suffered the probable consequences of poor government decisions?
You really are a loathsome individual.
“What kind of callous mind-set…”
You’ve not read the vermin’s vehement (and nonsensical in itself) defence of child sexual abusers, their protectors/enablers, and ideological measures that harm children and the most vulnerable in society, then?
He’s a degenerate.
Toffee – You’re the saddo who is running around making unsubstantiated allegations.
You are more than welcome to try and prove your ridiculous assertions using direct quotes with links to your source material.
Unsubstantiated allegations?
Says the wrong un that had to practically be browbeaten in condemning child sexual abuse(rs).
And STILL gives us chapter and verse on how smarmerite labour ‘acted appropriately’
throughout the dewey disgrace.
We KNOW what you are.
Toffee – Given the timeline of events what would you have done differently
Is this the post that you are referring to?
Unfortunately the section above that refers to Dewey is inaccurate.
The time-line (of who knew what and when) given below and freely available from multiple news sources published at the time clearly illustrates that any claims that the Labour Party knowingly allowed Dewey to stand in the borough’s council elections despite his arrest are simply untrue.
Thomas Dewey (TD) was arrested on 29/04/2022 just 6 days before the election on 6/05/2022 and 24 days after the latest date that candidates could be changed in that election.
The National Crime Agency who carried out the raid and arrest did not inform Hackney Council about TD’s arrest until 13/05/22 a week after the election and Hackney Council’s Chief Executive did not inform the Mayor Philip Glanville (PG) until a day later on 14/05/22.
The Chief Executive of the Council officially informed the Labour Party on 16/05/22 10 days after the election took place.
It has been reported that when TD was confronted on 16/05/22 he immediately resigned both his seat and his already suspended membership of the Labour Party.
Given that to date there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that the Labour Party knew anything about TD being arrested and bailed until at least a week after the election had taken place then any assertions that Labour allowing TD to stand in the election knowing that he was on bail for the possession of child porn appears to be nothing more than ill-informed hyperbole driven by factional prejudices rather than the known facts.
Maybe an enquiry will reveal further details but until someone comes up with some credible evidence that presents a radically different time-line on who knew what and when then it looks like the Labour Party were never in a position to prevent anything to do with this and given their knowledge at the time acted appropriately throughout.
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/01/30/labour-first-backing-mahmood-despite-starmers-cover-up-of-whistleblowers-abuse-allegations/#comment-264019
Given the above timeline of events plus the fact that TD wasn’t even charged by the police until more than a year after the election what would you have done differently? 🤔
You desperately keep trying and you keep failing.
The party KNEW about Dewey.
They still let it run for the seat instead of withdrawing its candidacy.
They local party/council leader PARTIED with dewey, knowing full well what itd been arrested for.
Smarmerite labour allowed dewey’s resignation rather than the outright dismissal and disownership</I any NORMAL group anywhere, would’ve committed to.
And then – to cap it off – smarmerite labour threatened hackney CLP with sanctions if they dared to discuss the case and any safeguarding measures that should be applied.
And ONLY YOU say that smarmerite labour “acted appropriately throughout”
YOU, AND ONLY YOU.
And the reason for that is nobody else on here has child harming propensities.
We KNOW what you are, wrong’un.
Billy, given your long record of making unsubstantiated unevidenced libellous allegations, you are the last person to be mardy arsing about such matters.
You have nothing to contribute. An honourable man would be requesting a revolver for personal use.
Dave – Really, what have I said that is libellous?
Billy, you have publicly alleged on this site – with no supporting evidence, that I have publicly condoned a Government and its policies which provided torture facilities for the “extraordinary rendition” programme run by rogue Western Governments and their agencies.
Despite being asked to apologise or provide evidence for your smears, you have failed to do so.
But if you want to test this in the appropriate forum, I suggest you provide me with your contact details, and we can take it from there.
Didn’t think so:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0V8wTdDm6EI
It looks like there will be a few more signing on with the DWP over the next couple of years.
This is your idea of a better future.
You told us to vote for this.
Therefore this IS on YOU. Own it.
Toffee – If the changes result in improved government services that are more productive then surely that’s a good thing.
but it doesn’t.
qwerty Thanks but no thanks, I’m going to pass on your mystic meg routine.
Productive for whom, Billy?
When the public sector reduces the workforce, those workers will be added to the pool of workers seeking employment in the private sector. Which experience demonstrates drives down wage levels.
There are already many workers employed whose wage rates are low enough to trigger social security payments. Adding a further drain on public sector spending is not very productive.
Moreover, reductions in spending power feeds back into lower demand throughout the economy. Leading to more job losses and closures of enterprises, from the factory to the corner shop.
That’s the problem with your shoddy approach to the analysis of anything. It is entirely reductionist and totally ignores systemic contexts.
Dave – “Productive for whom,”
Hopefully everyone, it may have escaped your notice but the UK has a significant problem with productivity.
What are you advocating, should the government just muddle through with the mess that the Tories saddled the country with?
IF…
An increased workload on those fortunate to escape the axe, multiplied by the restricted services available/accessible due to resulting lack of staff…
Yeah, that’ll work out alright; it always has done previously hasn’t it, soft shite?
And before you even try it, we’re fucking sick to the bastard back teeth of your telling us to wait and see, so spare us it for complete fucks sake.
Also, since when was it labour policy to deliberately make people redundant?
Exacerbated by total fuckwits like you subliminally suggesting we endorse it?
GTF. Go on. Fuck RIGHT off.
Toffee – OR it could be the directing of limited resources to where they are most needed to improve the outcomes for the service users.
Unfortunately it all comes down to where your priorities lie, would you rather pay some pointless Whitehall bureaucrat or spend it on improving the care provision.
Billy, The country has a problem with productivity because the economy over the past four decades has deindustrialised in favour of parasitical financialised rentierism which produces nothing of value because it is an overhead not just on ordinary people but also industrial capitalism itself.
Along with that deliberate deindustrialisation by the privatised Corporate State which is wagging the dog of Government/State we lost the skills, knowledge, expertise and experience.
That will not change whilst ever this sorry excuse for a Government continues to pursue this same failed infantile neo-liberal nonsense as its core policy.
And what is hilarious, because you are cognitively incapable of seeing it, is that your fellow plastic excuse for a human being, Herr Starmer, is actually [checks notes] “muddl(ing) through with the mess that the Tories saddled the country with” because he is continuing to double, triple and quadruple down on a policy framework which will collapse the economy and the Country.
Just as it collapsed other Countries and societies in the past.
People like you are dragging the rest of us down with you into disaster with your continued support for this dangerous idolatry.
Dave – I suppose like everybody else you are entitled to your opinion.
……..and the credible alternative that you are offering is? 🤔
I’ll do better than that, Billy.
Let’s compare and contrast your failed TINA to the tried, tested and successful available alternative:
TINA: Financial and landlord oligarch interests dominate the Government and minimise democratic Government spending and regulation. Business rentier finance interests control the economy. Economies polarise as the State serves the wealthy at the expense of overall prosperity.
ALTERNATIVE: Democratic Government regulated control rather than private oligarchic control of the economy. Administering basic prices and providing public services (utilities, health, education, transport), to prevent wage pressures on the economy (including the productive private industrial sector) from the citizenry trying to pay the speculative financial rentier overhead on those privatised services. Enabling value added business enterprise, rather than financial speculation, to dominate the economy. Leaving business innovation to create personal wealth within limits, but not letting wealthy families monopolise national growth and prosperity.
TINA: Land is commodified, and real estate surpluses are concentrated in the hands of parasitic absentee rentier landlords. Housing is debt-financed and its price is over-inflated by credit produced by monopolistic use inflating its value in non-productive ways to increase credit, leading to crippling debt deflation.
ALTERNATIVE: Land managed as a public utility (Commons) via the elected democratic Government rather than an oligarchy. Owner-occupancy promoted by a land tax discouraging absentee ownership and debt financing that merely turns rent into interest payments instead of tax revenue to tackle the debt deflation of the current TINA policies.
TINA: Pro-creditor laws force debtors – up to the level of sovereign countries which lose their sovereignty in this way (examples include Argentina and Greece) – into clientage, leading to debt bondage and ultimately into serfdom.
ALTERNATIVE: Citizens receive basic needs as a human right without a need for debt financing of basic needs such as housing, education and health care.
TINA: Monetary fortunes and hence credit is in the hands of a parasitic minority of private owners who control the economy.
ALTERNATIVE: As with successful sustainable economies, both contemporary and historical, the democratic Government in the form of the State creates money as a public utility. Its Central Bank extends credit for the purposes of the wider public/citizenry, not for parasitic financial speculation for a wealthy minority which is actually an overhead on the rest of society which is of no productive value to society.
TINA: Prices may be controlled for some basic needs, but most services and prices are privatised, leading to monopoly rents and profits with an inferior level of service.
ALTERNATIVE: Basic needs and services – the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – are available at subsidised prices or free with the aim being to enable growth which lifts all in the boat rather than to make a speculative rentier profit for a few wealthy individuals and families.
TINA: Debts, based on compound interest with a more (exponential) rapid growth doubling rate than production which only increases logarithmically (this is basic objective maths not subjective opinion) are irreversible as they accumulate over time. Advocates of cancellation of unpayable debt are denounced by self-interested oligarchies. Modern bankruptcy laws only cancel debts on a case by case basis.
ALTERNATIVE: Debts are written down when that is needed to avoid major close downs, economic disruption and the pauperisation of whole sections of society through unnecessary austerity.
TINA: Credit is privatised and debts are only cancelled by civil war. Debt dependency, clientage and forfeiture of land and resources for the majority become irreversible over time at an accelerating rate.
ALTERNATIVE: Democratic Government through the State sector is the major creditor via public utility banks. Treating credit as a public utility to finance tangible investments and value added growth, rather than parasitic financial speculation.
TINA: Monetary fortunes and wealth addiction break “free” of public regulation for the benefit of the whole society and citizenry, as the wealthy gain control of ideology and religion. Inefficient private charity replaces public social welfare safety nets.
ALTERNATIVE: The Democratic Government controls the economy to protect overall prosperity and restricts the power of wealthy individuals to act in ways adverse to the prosperity of the wider society.
TINA: Social resilience is lost as a result of creditor landlord oligarchies gaining control of the State and Democratic Government to enact pro-creditor laws, and prevent effective regulation for the benefit of society as a whole. Preventing unpayable debt cancellations and land/resource distribution. Pauperising increasing numbers in the wider society through austerity.
ALTERNATIVE: Social resilience is achieved by subordinating personal wealth seeking, above all else, in finance and land tenure, to wider social objectives. Wealthy individuals remain subject to public oversight rather than the other way around.
TINA: States and localities increasingly become net debtors to creditor oligarchies, who effectively privatise tax collection and mobilise State power to enforce crippling compound interest based privatised debt claims on the resources of peoples and States. Which effectively removes the democratic sovereignty of whole peoples and countries.
ALTERNATIVE: Democratic Government via control of the State for the wider public good organises money and credit as a public utility. Adjusting debt service to the ability to pay without causing economic disruption and eventual collapse.
TINA: Linear time based: Economic inequality debt bondage, and loss of land/resource rights become cumulative and irreversible as debts and financial savings grow exponentially. The resulting economic polarisation results in economic and social collapse and can only be reversed by revolution.
ALTERNATIVE: Democratic Government controlled State – rather than present the privatised oligarchic controlled State – providing stability by preventing a n irreversible financial debt cycle from emerging. Debts may be written down to save individuals or firms threatened by insolvency when that would disrupt the long term interests of the economy.
Now the question is, Billy, are you once again going to sit there gibbering in the corner and playing with your abacus via some pathetic one-liner or childish digital drawing because you can’t be bothered to get off your bone idle backside and do some real cognitive work or are you going to engage in a grown up discussion and debate?
She also uses misleading figures when talking about people with disabilities. When she mwntions 8 billion poungs of fraud, she’s talking about the figure for fraud plus error for all benefits. The DWP considers that the rate of fraud in relation to personal independence payment (PIP) is so small that it is assessed at 0% in the 2024 “Fraud and error in the benefits system annual report”. And it’s unlikely that many people who qualify for PIP are making fraudulent UC claims. https://benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/zero-percent-fraud-rate-for-pip,-dwp-figures-show
Worth mentioning over and over again- the DWP has no figures for fraud on it’s own, error is always included in the figures. Error includes, overpayment, under payments, payments from the wrong department etc… The error figures far outweigh any actual fraud in the combined stats.
Toffee – OR it could be the directing of limited resources to where they are most needed to improve the outcomes for the service users.
Yep. Like the great plan for the nhs…DO fuck off, you wholly unwelcome, interloping wrongun.
‘pointless Whitehall bureaucrats’
Yeah, they’re called the (smarmerite) government.
And again with the credible alternative without explaining a single difference between smarmerite and toerag policy.
Boring, clueless cnut
Toffee – It isn’t my problem that you’re a bit of a numpty. Try having a sleep, you might manage to dream up some answers.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But it IS your fault you’re a nonce enabler/apologist without qualification.
The smarmerites’ champion (guffaws) … Pouring scorn on the people he hasn’t even got the bollocks to name after accusing them of voting tory instead of Corbyn in 2019.
Yes indeed folks, a smarmerite – invading a socialist website to accuse it’s regular contributors of being tories and even VOTING Tory…WITHOUT having the bollocks to back that claim up.
…While the very same stupid, STUPID prick beats his pigeon chest about the ‘miracles of smarmerism’ without realising that it’s even torier than the tories – as declared by its wannabe PM who’s currently carving (what remains of) our NHS up to flog to the carpetbagger(s) prepared to offer him the most in his future leadership bid.
And the party that gleefully impoverishes pensioners, children and the disabled…
All this, preached from several thousand miles away (supposedly), where the imbecile is blissfully unaffected and immune from the misery his SHIT is causing.
But we’re the tories, obviously.
Yep, welcome to the latest edition of “The wacky world of the wee gobshite”
Be grateful that at least there are some kids in the UK whobare a bit safer, if the rodent is indeed, in the caribbean.
It’s their problem now.
“It looks like there will be a few more signing on with the DWP over the next couple of years. It will be interesting to see what they think of the DWP’s services first hand.”
Only someone who is profoundly ignorant of what a cruel and kafkaesque system claiming benefits has been since 2010, with now Starmer proudly making it even more difficult, could think a claimant would find any part of that process ‘interesting’.
Please all like minded people here, don’t ‘feed the troll’ (actually that is probably insulting trolls) and hopefully they will go back under their rock.
Please all like minded people here, don’t ‘feed the troll’ (actually that is probably insulting trolls) and hopefully they will go back under their rock.
Unfortunately, Julia, he doesn’t operate like that. Wee gobshite’s tactics, like his stock answers, remain the same – no matter what tactic you might employ.
He is the epitome of the turd that refuses to flush.
So, while he’s here posting the ersatz-tory, pro-starmerite crap he does, I’ll be here to call him – and his (child abuse protecting & excusing) Godawfulness – out.
…And so should everyone else.
Incidentally, wee gobshite, it was your staunch (and morally reprehensible) defence of smarmerite labour over the Dewey disgrace, that gave birth to your accusation that some on here voted toerag rather than corbyn, back in 2019.
For clarity…
https://skwawkbox.org/2023/09/08/hackney-n-labour-condemns-abuse-of-power-to-kill-discussion-of-right-wing-paedophile/#comments
SteveH08/09/2023 AT 4:32 PM
goldbach – Unfortunately at the 19GE far too many exLabour voters, including more than a few misguided souls who contribute to these pages, chose to vote for Boris Johnson in preference to Jeremy Corbyn.
You were mentioning something about ‘unsubstantiated allegations” earlier on in the thread?
At your behest, I’ve substantiated any allegation I’ve made, every single time, without fail.
About time you reciprocated, just this once will do.
So, either put up or shut up.
But you won’t, because you can’t. .
“Substitute lies for facts”
Some money has been found:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c705njr9415o
https://skwawkbox.org/2025/04/10/dwp-condemned-for-using-entirely-misleading-figures-to-justify-war-on-sick-and-disabled/#comment-266220
I’m opening a book on which stock answer the cretin’s gonna devastate you with, Dave.
National debt to win a penny: that f’kin wingding
4/7: You’re not as clever as you think you are
11/10 I don’t understand…
13/8 I can’t be bothered (expect late money on this one)
3/1 The left….
14/1 But Corbyn…
33/1 Credible alternative
You are entitled to your opinion
(Both already had a run in this thread)
80/1 A link to something totally off-topic
100/1 the field (Any of the other flogged-to-death comebacks he decides to dig up to keep fresh – take yer pick).
*Sorry about the short-priced ones, it’s the market at work, I’m afraid.
Ah! The market.
Which might not make it over the line as matters stand.
Here’s the Rev. Chris Hedges and Prof. Richard Wolff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1aFnl-x_3M&ab_channel=TheChrisHedgesYouTubeChannel
“The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, will be marked by developments intimately familiar. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, it will begin to consume the structures that sustain it. In the name of austerity and government efficiency it will prey upon the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty, and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It will relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of labour. Industries will mechanize their workplaces to trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class; the bulwark of a capitalist system.
This will at first be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes decline or stagnate. Politics in the late stages of capitalism will become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations and oligarchs. But as Marx told, there is a limit to an economy built on the scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, he warned, when there will be no new markets available, and no new pools of people who can take on more debt. Capitalism will then turn on the so-called free market itself, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It will in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that make capital possible and will resort, as it causes widespread suffering, to harsher forms of oppression. It will attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature. The final stages of capitalism, as Marx grasped, is not capitalism at all.”
But, you know, TINA.
What I’m looking forward to is the moment the penny drops with Billy on exactly what the current Trump Tariff reset actually means for the UK, which is likely to go completely down the toilet.