Following allegations earlier this year that Coulson encouraged phone-hacking during his time at the News of the World, David Cameron announced his belief that everyone should have a second chance.

He even went close to suggesting that Coulson’s resignation from the NotW was a moral one, saying:

“It’s wrong for newspapers to breach people’s privacy with no justification. That is why Andy Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World two-and-a-half years ago.”

The Press Commission, when investigating the original allegations, complained that

“Throughout we have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation.”

This time, however, the claims are far more substantial than before, and the prime minister is under pressure to reconsider his choice of Director of Communications and Planning. Tom Watson, the Labour MP, has written to No 10 demanding a full judicial inquiry.

As the New York Times revealed in a 6,000-word report, the previously unproven allegations have been given new life. According to the NYT:

“A dozen former reporters said in interviews that hacking was pervasive at News of the World.”

Coulson is alleged by one source to have ‘actively encouraged’ phone-tapping. This is a serious challenge to Coulson’s claim to a Commons select committee earlier this year that “I have never had any involvement in it at all.”

Left Foot Forward has previously revealed Tory attempts to whitewash Coulson’s record, with Liam Fox wrongly claiming that he was not involved in the succesful tribunal claim of sportswriter Matt Driscoll, who won £800,000 from the paper on the basis of unfair dismissal. Cameron’s media adviser is unlikely to be Nick Clegg’s favourite member of the No 10 staff, as he appears to have been responsible for a smear campaign against the Lib Dem leader in the run up to the election.

Predictably, the NYT’s investigation has been ignored thus far by Rupert Murdoch’s News International media empire: The Sun and The Times websites are yet to cover the story. Even the Washington Post – the NYT’s main rival in America – has ignored the allegations. But, strangely, the BBC has also failed to report them. Beyond the indictment of Coulson, the report also alleged that the Metropolitan Police had colluded with News International to cover up evidence of phone hacking.

As Will Straw reported in June, Coulson continues to use his control over the press to his personal advantage, preventing his £475,000 salary from appearing in a widely-reported list of ‘top civil service fat cats’. It’s unlikely to work this time.

His evidence for this claim? That Will told the Evening Standard in January that “Ed Miliband, if he stands, could prove a popular leader”.

Rentoul, seeing his error, wrote: “I apologise to Will – I should have tried to contact him before posting.”

As regular readers of Left Foot Forward will know, on May 15 we made it clear that we would be “sitting on the fence” throughout the race.

This was not the first time that Rentoul had erroneously attributed a false position to Left Foot Forward. Shortly before, on May 13, Rentoul blogged:

“Will Straw, of Left Foot Forward, has just popped up on the BBC News Channel to tell us (after saying that his father was quite right not to contest the Labour leadership) that Labour had some truly marvellous results in England, but that there is a “doughnut” of seats round London where the party did not do so well.”

The word “marvellous” had not passed Will’s lips and Rentoul was again happy to issue a clarification including the line, “as Homer Simpson will tell you, a decent doughnut has a small hole and plenty of dough.”

D’oh!

Independent fact-checking website FullFact.org today took the Mail to task and unearthed the real figures. Patrick Casey reports:

When we contacted the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to find the relevant figures, we were directed to statistics, given nearly a month ago, in a written parliamentary answer to Labour MP, Phil Wilson. Given that concerns have previously been raised about the lumping of fraud and error together in news reports, it is worth checking how the two add up for the DLA.

Looking at the figures for the last year, which can also be found in Table 2.1 of the DWP statistics on benefit fraud and error (published 27 May), it can be seen that while £220 million was lost in fraud and error, only £60 million of this was actually fraud…

Underpayments through error for 2008/9 are estimated at £290 million – £70 million more than the amount overpaid through error and fraud. Looking back at previous years, a trend emerges, as the table below shows:

Year	Overpayments	Underpayments	Net
2006/7	£170 million	£230 million	+ £60 million
2007/8	£190 million	£250 million	+ £60 million
2008/9	£200 million	£260 million	+ £60 million
2009/10	£220 million	£290 million	+ £70 million

Such figures do not in any way make fraudulent claims any more permissible, they simply highlight a bigger picture, ignored by the report in the Daily Mail. The estimated amount lost to fraud for 2009/10 was £60 million, less than a quarter of the amount not paid to people through errors leading to underpayments.

Looking at the balance of payments caused by error, it can be seen that errors caused £160 million in overpayments, but amounted to £290 million in underpayments.

FullFact conclude that:

While there is nothing inaccurate about the statistics quoted in the Daily Mail report, the article completely ignores the other statistics that should go hand in hand with any record of overpayments. The large sums for both overpayments and underpayments, suggest room for improvement in efficiency when the Work and Pensions Secretary unveils his reforms to the system in the coming months.

But these figures show that if Iain Duncan Smith managed to create a system with all DLA claimants receiving the correct amount, the Government could actually stand to lose several million. Perhaps this is what the headline meant when it announced the figures represented, “the tip of the iceberg.”

Last week, Left Foot Forward exposed the secret briefings on workless households from the DWP, which led to several stories in the right-wing press about 250,000 households in the UK ‘where no one has ever had a job’, again accompanied by quotes from Mr Grayling; and the week before City AM reported that the DWP had claimed that the proportion of households in London where no-one has ever had a job was 23 per cent – the true figure is seven per cent.

For a full list of Grayling’s calamities this year see here.

Yet the DWP have not made this analysis available to the general public via its website – as is the case for the vast majority of DWP’s statistics – despite the Coalition’s commitment to ‘throw open the doors‘ of public bodies.

But the DWP has confirmed to Left Foot Forward that they did brief the press, and have provided a copy of the press release (which is still not listed in the DWP’s newsroom). As well as being secret, the figures provided to journalists appear to contain errors.

Press reports make clear that the DWP said that adults in 250,000 households had never had a job. However, by the time Left Foot Forward recieved the figures the estimate had changed to 325,000 households, as a result of an ‘error’ in the original analysis.

This also means that DWP’s correction in City AM to Chris Grayling’s additional error (when he first stated that there were 71,000 households in London who had never worked, comprising 23 per cent of the population, which was then revised to 61,000 and 7 per cent of the London population) is also incorrect. The most recent figures provided by the DWP to Left Foot Forward suggest that they now believe there are 95,000 households in London in this position, who comprise 4 per cent of the population.

But the real problem goes beyond the secrecy and the statistical mistakes. It is beginning to look as if DWP ministers are insisting that officials put a party-political spin on what should be a straightforward release of statistical information.

Many of the households included in the analysis are likely to be made up of people the Government does not expect to work and has committed to protecting – severely disabled people and single parents with very young children. DWP statistics show that around 10 per cent of people who undergo the Work Capability Assessment are placed in the Employment and Support Allowance Support Group, which means that the Government does not expect them to seek work or undertake work-related activity.

Even using this contentious measure of severe disability, a minimum of 260,000 disabled people nationally are in this position – some will never have worked.

Similarly, there are around 1.9 million single parents with dependent children in the UK, of whom around 57 per cent are in employment.  It is likely that around 200,000 of those single parents who are not in work have very young children, and that a proportion of these people may never have had a job. The Government only believes that only single parents whose oldest children are over five should be in paid work, so using these people as evidence of persistent worklessness seems disingenuous.

In addition, the analysis published by DWP is not broken down by age – meaning that young unemployed people and student households are included in the analysis. However, ONS analysis suggests that around 39 per cent of households where no one has ever had a job are households aged 16-24. Workless student households are not a key government concern. On the other hand high levels of youth unemployment definitely are – but these young people need support, not criticism. With youth unemployment at 17.5 per cent, it seems hard to see how any Government could hold young workless households responsible for their predicament.

Of course, there are people included in the data who have never worked and are not young, disabled or parents with childcare responsibilities – yet this does not mean that they can all be written off as feckless.

While the Government states that: “the problem isn’t down to a lack of jobs” there are close to 2.5 million people who are unemployed,  2.3 million economically inactive people who want to work and less than 500,000 vacancies across the economy.

In addition, many of these vacancies are for posts that long-term unemployed people are unlikely to be qualified to undertake (for example 62,000 are in health and social work, 31,000 in financial services and 35,000 in professional and scientific activities) and positions are not spread evenly around the country – in many areas of the country where there are even fewer jobs than the national figures suggest.  Between June and July, the number of vacancies available fell.

Any objective analysis of these statistics would acknowledge these points, yet they have been presented in a way that encourages the media to blame those who are out of work for their predicament.

Long-term worklessness is not a lifestyle choice – it is a debilitating, stressful and difficult existence. Prolonged periods out of work have significant negative impacts on health and wellbeing for individuals as well as damaging the economy.

Research by the Prince’s Trust has recently shown the impact that growing up in a workless family can have for children. According to their report one in five (20 per cent) of young people living in workless households said that seeing their parents out of work made them anxious about finding a job, one in four (25 per cent) said their parents didn’t have the knowledge to help them find employment and two-fifths (39 per cent) of those living in communities with high levels of unemployment said they worried that they would never find a good job.

The Government are also wrong to imply that benefit levels are too high.  It cannot have escaped the DWP’s attention that Jobseeker’s Allowance levels in the UK are now worth less than they were in the 1980s. If households are receiving high benefit payments it will be a consequence of them being in significantly greater need – for example parents caring for disabled children or large families or families where adults are disabled are entitled to higher levels of state support.

We cannot even assume that everyone in the DWP’s analysis will be claiming benefits: the Labour Force Survey will include exceptionally wealthy people who do not have to work as well as workless households that are not entitled to welfare payments (e.g. students). In addition, households that are entitled to benefits but are not claiming them (unclaimed benefits save the Treasury around £16 billion a year) are counted in the Government’s workless household figures.

Of course the Government should be doing all that it can to support people who are out of work to move into jobs. But implying that everyone who is not in work should and could be in employment, that people facing long-term worklessness are somehow to blame for their position and that overly generous state support is preventing people from entering jobs is not borne out by the evidence. Of course there is nothing to stop politicians making those claims, but they should not expect DWP officials to do so on their behalf.

Although carefully avoiding any mention of Labour’s Chancellors, the picture used by Guido liberally used photoshop to remove the Labour data points. Left Foot Forward has gone through Ipsos-MORI’s fascinating slide pack on the Coalition’s first 100 days to dig out the full chart.

Gordon Brown’s popularity dipped into unsatisfied territory on only two occasions – once around the time of the fuel protests in 2000 and again as prepared to become Prime Minister – but he never hit the depths reached by Norman Lamont or Ken Clarke. The surprise finding is that Denis Healey was so popular despite presiding over the Winter of Discontent.

Some will argue that Healey’s popularity bodes well for George Osborne since he also undertook a period of fiscal consolidation. The difference, of course, is that the cuts in the 1970s were demanded by the IMF shielding Healey from some of the blame. And while Healey reduced the level of public expenditure from 49.7 per cent of GDP to 45.1 per cent, George Osborne is attempting to go twice as far by reducing the public sector from 48.1 per cent of GDP to below 40 per cent.

The eyebrows and piano playing helped too.

In a blog titled “ICM show Labour and Tories neck and neck”, UK Polling Report observes:

“There is a new ICM poll in the Guardian tomorrow that probably isn’t what David Cameron hoped for on his 100th day in power. Topline voting intention figures are CON 37%(-1), LAB 37%(+3), LDEM 18%(-1). This is the first time an ICM poll has shown Labour catching the Conservatives since October 2007 and the election that never was.

“Despite this rather striking finding, the Guardian’s report concentrates upon the findings on the economy, which is rather more positive for the government.”

In mentioning the finding towards the bottom of their online piece, the Guardian’s Larry Elliot and Tom Clark write:

“But despite some reasonably strong personal numbers for the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, when it comes to voting intentions there are clear signs that the first peacetime coalition in the era of universal suffrage is serving his Liberal Democrats less well than the Tories. Where the Conservatives are holding on to the 37% vote share which achieved in the election, a quarter of those who backed the Lib Dems have since switched sides, leaving the third party on just 18% – down one point on the month, and six on the election. Many of these deserters have drifted towards Labour, taking its standing to 37%, and allowing a leaderless party to run the Tories level for the first time in three years.”

The ICM / Guardian General Election prediction poll put the Tories on 37 per cent, Labour on 28 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats on 26 per cent.

Sarah’s full report -Immigration and Employment: Anatomy of a media story – iis now available to download from the ippr website – http://www.ippr.org/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=769

The Mail and the Express also reported a new study by Migration Watch which purports to show that immigration has led to reduced employment in the UK – but what do the stats actually show?

New ONS employment statistics show that 28,933,000 people in the UK were in work between April and June this year.

This is an increase of 188,000 (0.7%) on the previous quarter (though note that these statistics aren’t seasonally adjusted) and an increase of 101,000 (0.4%) on April-June 2009 (a comparison which should deal with seasonal variation). So far, so good – a positive sign of a recovering economy.

The breakdown by country of birth shows that 25,080,000 UK-born people were in employment in April-June. This is an increase of 41,000 (0.2%) on the previous quarter (again, not seasonally adjusted), but a decrease of 15,000 (-0.1%) compared to April-June 2009. In the same period, 3,846,000 non-UK born people were in employment – an increase of 145,000 (3.9%) on the previous quarter, and an increase of 114,000 (3.1%) on April-June 2009. Now you can see why people might be worried.

So, the Express’s ‘77%’ and the Telegraph’s ‘four out of five’ is taken from the quarter-on-quarter comparison (145,000 is 77% of 188,000). But these statistics aren’t seasonally adjusted, which means that year-on-year comparisons are more useful.

They are also more worrying for Express/Mail/Telegraph readers because they show an actual decline in the employment of UK-born people (expressed in the same terms as the Express/Telegraph headlines, the year-on-year figures show that 113% of new jobs went to non-UK born workers) – something that was no doubt not lost on the Mail when they chose to focus on the year-on-year figures.

So the papers are reporting real stats. However, there are two other sets of stats worth looking at – employment by nationality (rather than country of birth), and employment rates (rather than absolute numbers in employment).

Statistics broken down by country of birth disguise the fact that many non-UK born people are actually British nationals (e.g. the children of British servicemen born overseas, long-settled migrants who now hold British citizenship). Helpfully, the ONS also provide employment statistics broken down by nationality, though these don’t merit a mention in the papers (with the exception of a passing reference in the Express).

The same stats broken down by nationality show that 26,530,000 UK nationals and 2,401,00 non-UK nationals were in employment in the UK in April-June, i.e. almost 1.5m of the 3.8m non-UK born workers are actually UK nationals (as an aside, the Telegraph wrongly uses ‘British’ and ‘foreigners’ to describe country-of-birth data). This represented an increase of 4,000 (0.0%) in UK-national employment on April-June 2009, and an increase of 97,000 (4.2%) in non-UK national employment on April-June 2009.

So, employment data broken down by nationality confirms that there has been no decline in the employment levels of British nationals over the last year – the Mail are incorrect to say that ‘the number of Britons with jobs falls’. However, the overall trend pointed out by the papers stands – the vast majority of the increase in the number of people in employment over the last year is accounted for by an increase in the number of non-UK nationals in employment.

But this doesn’t necessarily tell us much about employment rates (i.e. the proportion of the population in work). It could be that the population of UK nationals is falling or steady, while the population of non-UK nationals is increasing (the UK has experienced net immigration in this period). This could mean that changes in the absolute numbers of each group in employment just reflect population, rather than telling us anything about employment rates.

In fact though, the stats on employment rates confirm the story – the 70.9% employment rate for UK nationals in April-June is 0.4 percentage points lower than in April-June 2009 (though note that the sampling variation is +/- 0.4%), while the 66.9% employment rate for non-UK nationals is 0.6 percentage points higher than in April-June 2009 (though note that the sampling variation is +/- 0.4%). In other words, non-UK nationals seem to have fared (very slightly) better in this period, in employment terms, than have UK nationals.

The final point about the statistics is about timeframes. Comparing employment rates between UK nationals and non-UK nationals between April-June 2009 and April-June 2010 shows rising non-UK national employment rates and falling UK national employment rates, but this hasn’t been true across the whole period of the recession.

The graph above (taken directly from yesterday’s ONS report) shows that in the last two quarters non-UK nationals have fared worse than UK nationals in terms of declining employment levels. Migrants have experienced a different recession to UK nationals, but not necessarily a ‘better’.

The papers (and some of the people they are quoting) seem to be using the employment data to make four points:

1. The vast majority of ‘new’ jobs are going to foreigners, not to British people;

2. Immigration has reduced employment and increased unemployment for British people;

3. The difference between UK nationals and migrants is that Brits would rather live on benefits than work;

4. The government must reduce immigration in order to get British people back to work.

What the statistics really tell us, however, is this:

• The number of jobs in the UK rose (very slightly) between the second quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010;

• The employment rate of non-UK nationals rose slightly between the second quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010 (by 0.6 percentage points); and

• At the same time, the employment rate of UK nationals fell slightly (by 0.4 percentage points), although the absolute number of UK nationals in work rose very slightly.

Not quite headline fodder, but true.

The evidence on migration and employment in the UK is ably summed up in a paper by my colleagues Maria Latorre and Howard Reed:

“In short, the best available UK microeconomic evidence on the effects of migration on employment finds either no effect at all, or very small negative effects.”

This conclusion is also supported by a wide range of research in other OECD countries.

The data on migration and employment in the UK certainly raise questions about welfare policies, but they also suggest that the problem of worklessness in the UK is complex, and unlikely to be solved by welfare reform alone.

The most convincing link between migration and employment is a political one, and for the Government to reduce immigration in order to give itself an incentive to deal with unemployment seems like backward logic. Similarly, reducing immigration to give employers an incentive to invest in training seems like a roundabout way to address the problem.

These data on immigration and employment are important, and contain important lessons for policymakers; they just aren’t the lessons which the papers suggest – and they aren’t just for the Home Office.

Sarah’s full report -Immigration and Employment: Anatomy of a media story – in which she explores each of the papers’ four points in detail, can be downloaded from the ippr website here.

In today’s paper, the Daily Mail outline that Miliband’s proposal would exclude his own £1.5 million home from the tax and turn to the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s Matthew Elliott for a quote:

“It’s too convenient to be a coincidence that David Miliband has proposed a mansion tax that his very own palatial home would be exempt from.”

Perhaps the Mail and Mr Elliott have a point and Miliband could be bolder. After all – as yesterday’s Evening Standard was keen to the show – the policy will only affect a meagre 34,000 Londoners and just 6,000 other homes so capturing a few more can hardly hurt.

Indeed, although the policy originally proposed by Vince Cable – to introduce a ‘Mansion tax’ on properties worth more than £1 million – provoked a backlash at Lib Dem conference last year, it turned out to be extremely popular. As Financial Website of the year, This Is Money reported last September:

“An overwhelming majority of voters support Vince Cable’s ‘mansion tax’ - the policy that was dismissed by delegates at the Liberal Democrat conference as ‘electoral suicide’.

“A poll in today’s Mail on Sunday has found that, by a margin of more than two to one, voters back the plan under which the owners of homes worth more than £1m would be charged an average levy of £4,000 each.

“A total of 57% are in favour of the policy, with just 27% against. Even among Conservative voters, the most likely to oppose such ’soak the rich’ policies, 44% were against the idea compared to 38% for it.”

The Labour leadership contender would be liable for £5,000 if a tax of 1 per cent were levied on properties worth more than £1 million cap – perhaps a price worth paying for a significant £2.2 billion tax windfall*, a popular policy, and calling the Mail’s bluff.

* The Liberal Democrats estimated that £1.1 billion would be raised from a 0.5 per cent levy on properties worth over £1 million.

You may remember during the election campaign Left Foot Forward’s debunking of Fraser’s claim that “98 per cent of jobs created in the UK since 1997 have been taken by migrant workers” – now he’s claiming “there were 243,000 fewer UK-born workers between January and March” and “the number of Eastern Europeans working grew by 25,000 over the same period”.

And the source for his claims, made in his latest News of the World column? “Official figures, seen by yours truly”; or, as independent fact-checking website Full Fact managed to tease out of him, “an unpublished source that he was reluctant to reveal” – needless to say, he doesn’t link to or publish the full figures.

Full Fact go on to explain:

“…the main difference between Mr Nelson’s figures and those published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) is that the published data includes people over 65 while Mr Nelson’s do not.”

Yet, in his embarrassing u-turn over his ‘98 per cent’ claim, he acknowledged that it was fair to include pensioners:

“…my original post had both working-age (99 percent of new jobs to foreign-born) and another version of all ages over 16 (including pensioners). This reduces it to 72 percent as there have been fewer pension-age immigrants.”

Of the claim about A8 workers, the quarter-on-quarter rise to January was 27,000, with the number of UK workers down 220,000, stats Full Fact concede are “broadly in line with the findings set out in the News of the World” – but the Office for National Statistics makes clear that the figures are not seasonally adjusted, adding it they do not comment on quarterly comparisons of non-adjusted data, as they “could potentially be distorted by seasonal movements”.

Cue the killer blow from the fact checkers:

“We were instead advised to consider annual comparisons between the same quarters of different years. Such an approach indicates a different trend to the one suggested by the Spectator Editor.

“For the period January to March 2010 the number of UK nationals in employment was 25,039,000 down 244,000 from the same period the previous year. But comparing employment levels for A8-born workers over the same period, rather than a rise, there was a fall of 13,000.

“This means that from 2009 to 2010, the number of UK-born people in work fell by one per cent, while A8-born workers declined by 2.5 per cent.“

Lies, damned lies and Speccie-tistics…

The latest circulation figures come as Trinity Mirror announced the axing of 200 more staff, on top of the loss of 1,700 jobs, one in five of all jobs, from the group last year. Labour MP Austin Mitchell has submitted an early day motion, backed by 24 MPs, contesting the job cuts.

A ‘Save The Mirror’ Facebook group has also been established, with more than 1,500 members, many of whom them well known and respected journalists and MPs; you can join the group here and tweet @savethemirror and #savethemirror.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, called the redundancies “neanderthal”, adding:

“It’s disgraceful that against a background of making more than £70 million in profit last year and of paying millions in remuneration to a handful of Trinity Mirror execs, the company should now throw more than a quarter of its talented, hardworking workforce onto the scrap heap.”

Over at News International, meanwhile, the Times paywall has been dubbed an “empty world”, with only 15,000 people signing up and agreeing to pay money to access the Times’s content, and 12,500 paying for the seperate iPad application.

Michael Wolff, respected US journalist and commentator, writes of the dismal figures:

“He [Murdoch] is not reporting on himself because even less than most news outlets, Murdoch outlets have no objective sense when it comes to their own interests (or the boss’s interests), or willingness to ask questions which the boss might find uncomfortable, or penchant for anything but the party line. The news from News Corp. is always snarlingly good—even when it is very bad.

“My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world…

“It’s a big story—but you won’t read about it in the papers that know it best.”