To put it most generously, that's a pretty feeble response, Adam: that there are minor variations in the way that "welfare" can be expressed is an argument for more transparency. And the differences are minor: one calculation puts the total at 13.6 per cent, the other at 16 per cent; both figures are very different from the government's claim that welfare takes up 25 per cent of expenditure.
And you earlier claimed that the figures must be right because they were put together by civil servants. Quite apart from your apparent view of the civil service as a wholly neutral body (that has no longer been the case for at least 30 years), the figures presented in the document that was sent out are even more dishonest than I'd thought. They come from the Treasury's Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2014 (http://bit.ly/11jol8w), and the relevant figures are presented in Table 5.2 (it's on page 71). The total claimed as "Welfare" is actually Total Social Protection - and it is not labelled as welfare anywhere in the document (the sole reference to welfare is a mention of the Welfare Cap on page 47) - and is exactly as the IFS describe it.
And your suggestion that "Aside from the issue of welfare, the pie chart is broadly accurate" is frankly ludicrous, given the wholly mendacious nature of that claim. The aim of the exercise is clear: it's to suggest, quite falsely, that expenditure on the feckless and the workshy is much greater even than people imagined. The Daily Telegraph, for example, had this to say about it: "Families will be sent letters by the Government showing that a quarter of their taxes are spent on Britain’s welfare budget …They will show that more of voters’ money is spent on the benefits bill than any other area" (http://bit.ly/1xRJxNv), and the Daily Mail this: "The average worker pays more than £1,100 a year towards Britain’s bloated welfare bill, according to Treasury figures to be sent to voters … The initiative is intended to promote ‘transparency’. But ministers believe it will also strengthen their arguments for welfare reform" (http://dailym.ai/10NggcL). In other words, if they can get away with the claim that welfare is much greater than it is, then they can cut payments to the poorest in society even more, whilst liberating cash to hand out to the better off. |