Head of UK statistics rebukes ministers for spinning story on migrants and benefits claims

The ministers for employment and immigration, Chris Grayling and Damian Green, have been criticised by the head of the UK Statistics Authority for the way they presented evidence set out in a departmental report on foreign-born recipients of employment-related welfare benefits.

The original report was published on 20th January. An article written for the Daily Telegraph by the two ministers suggested that it provided evidence of large-scale access to welfare dependents by immigrants.  It argued there was a pressing need to examine these to determine the extent claims were in proper order. 

Sir Michael Scholar, the Chair of the statistics watchdog, has written to the Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan-Smith, setting out his concerns about the way the matter was handled. He argues that the report should have been presented as official statistics and its release into the public domain subject to code of practice which governs matters of obvious public interest.

The code of practice would have prevented  ministers from publishing a commentary purporting to interpret the findings ahead of publication.

The BBC report on the incident points out the fact that the ministers' Daily Telegraph article came to the news media ahead of the publication of the full report. It failed to mention that the headline number of 371,000 foreign-born claimants represented a smaller proportion of all claimants - at just over 6% - than the 13% they make up of the overall share of the workforce. On the basis of the evidence in the DWP report the group the ministers were presenting as problematic were actually less likely to be receiving benefits than British-born workers.

Sir Michael urges that in future reports of this kind should be considered as official reports and their publication subject to the full rigour of the code of practice.