As always, this is a statistics massaging exercise. The aim is not to help people into work, but to reduce the numbers and, obviously, the very media friendly number of “scroungers”. The Tories have form. They underwent a number of re-jigs in the unemployment figures in the 1980s to bring the figures down from 3,000,000. The BBC correctly started reporting the numbers as those who were “unemployed and claiming benefit”. For example, if you were unemployed and went on a training scheme, your benefits were adjusted (actually, you’d get an allowance instead of a benefit payment) so that you stopped being paid those which would count you as unemployed. The result: the number came down, and a hidden mass of unemployed were not counted.
