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IDS exposed for misleading Commons on rental figures

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  • 18/11/2010
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The work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has been exposed as having misled the House of Commons by claiming official statistics showed private landlords were driving up housing benefit bills.

It has emerged that data which Iain Duncan Smith had claimed was from the highly-respected Office for National Statistics (ONS), had actually been found on the Internet.

During a House of Commons debate on housing benefit last week the secretary of state said: “We now know that, according to the ONS, the private marketplace in housing fell by around 5% last year. At the same time, Local Housing Allowance rates had risen by 3%. There is thus a 7% gap with what is going on in the marketplace.”

The Department for Work and Pensions has now accepted this was not true, and that the figures came from a property website, findaproperty.com.

Ian Fletcher, director of policy at the British Property Federation, said: ” I think the public will draw their own conclusions when the Secretary of State has access to the best statisticians in the land via the ONS, and best rental data via the Valuation Office, and yet would prefer to use findaproperty.com.”

He added that Duncan Smith’s claim ignores the fact that LHA payouts are based on market rent data from the Valuation Office, so if market rents fall, so will Local Housing Allowance rents, but inevitably there is a lag.

Findaproperty.com’s own figures now show that UK rents are up 5.3% this year.

 

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