ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY, Edinburgh Section
Preliminary Announcement: Please circulate to all local organizations who might be interested
Dr. David Webster of the University of Glasgow will be speaking to us on the very important topic of Britain's Misleading Benefit Sanctions Statistics on Tuesday 11 th October at 6pm, in the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences on 15 South College Street, Edinburgh. Dr. Webster's talk will be preceded by tea at 5.3O pm.
All members of the public are cordially invited to attend.
Speaker:
Dr David Webster
Honorary Senior Research Fellow
Urban Studies
School of Social and Political Sciences
University of Glasgow
Title of the talk:
Britain's Misleading Benefit Sanctions Statistics
Abstract:
This presentation will explain and discuss the main misleading features of the DWP’s published benefit sanctions statistics and their presentation, drawing on the author’s successful complaint to the UK Statistics Authority in July 2015. These particularly concern understatement of the scale of sanctions, and missing information. These statistics offer a striking illustration of the way official statistics can be abused to present a politically loaded picture, without any actually false statements being made. There will also be a brief look at the problems involved in attempting to make a definitive assessment of the severity of the sanctions regime since 1996 under JSA compared with previous regimes.
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