One of the ‘facts’ about the ‘bedroom tax’ which is becoming increasing accepted is that 9 out of 10 disabled people affected by the ‘bedroom tax’ and refused a discretionary payment are going without food.
There is a rather good graphic, much shared, on Facebook illustrating this and it has been added to the Labour rhetoric of the all round wickedness of the Coalition.
There seemed something rather ’too bad to be true’ about this figure to me so I asked the Papworth Trust, the organiser of the survey, how they arrived at this much quoted statistic. I assumed that as they are a large disability charity, they would have talked to people they work with and found out how they were affected. But that is not what they have done. Instead they put a survey form on the internet and asked anyone interested to complete it.
The form is still live and the Trust expect to produce further reports based on it
The form is well worth going through. It does not require anyone to actually be disabled or affected by the bedroom tax before they fill it in. There are some easily circumventable measures to stop people filling it in more than once, but only half the participants have given an email address. The Trust say they have weeded out any answers which were ‘obviously repetitive’ – rather an odd concept for a multiple choice survey with a limited number of questions.
Given how easy it is to participate and how widespread the request for people to complete it was, you might expect they have had a lot of participants; not at all. Only 259 people have competed it of whom 51 said that they had been unsuccessful in obtaining a discretionary payment.
So what this actually means is that about 40 people said in an online survey that they were going without food. Bizarrely in a country with the NHS, a quarter, 12 people, also said they were cutting back on healthcare.
To see how absurd this is consider a survey which said that because of the Coalition’s increased taxes on the better off, 90% of them said they had been forced to cut their contribution to charity, with the survey having been circulated to readers of websites aimed at the rich. Would this have any credibility? Of course not, but that is the exact analogy of what has happened.
To be clear I think is a perfectly legitimate area for the Papworth Trust to look at, but it seems extraordinary that rather than actually talking to their clients about how they have been affected they should prefer an anonymous survey.
Does the fact that this particular claim appears to be nonsense mean that Lib Dems can afford to be complacent about the impact of the ‘bedroom tax’? Not at all – which is why our Minister have arranged that the discretionary amounts to help in hardship cases have been increased and why Lib Dem controlled Councils like Stockport are leading the way in coming up with fair ways to deal with the challenges of implementation
But lets make sure the discussion is based around facts – not badly designed ‘surveys’.