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Hello and welcome to another Full Fact video fact check.
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David Cameron gave an interview with the Mail on Sunday this week in which he suggested that the government may cut housing benefits for the under 25s, saving the government £2 billion.
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Is this a big number? Where is it from? And how many housing benefits claimants are actually out of work as some people have been claiming today?
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Well, the first thing to do is to look at the numbers in context.
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The biggest number we can start with is £1.5 trillion.
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That’s the size of the UK’s GDP. Compare that to our public spending: £700 billion.
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And compare that to what we spend on benefits: £152 billion.
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You can see what the figures mean when put side by side.
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Now the government announced in the Budget earlier this year that a further £10 billion would be cut from the welfare budget after 2015.
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As you can see, that’s what £10 billion looks like in this context.
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Looking more closely at our spending on welfare, we can see where the money actually goes.
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The biggest chunk of this money goes on state pensions: £74 billion in total last year.
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Housing benefit, on the other hand, cost the government £22.7 billion in payments.
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But we also need to consider fraud and error in the benefits system.
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As you can see there, the total fraud and error across all benefits totals to £3.2 billion.
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That’s either because claimants are fraudulently getting money they shouldn’t be or administrative error is given them more than they should.
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But there’s also underpayment as well which you can see there: £1.3 billion.
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That’s because people aren’t claiming benefits that they’re entitled to, or again, a cause of administrative error.
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As you can see in housing benefit, £1 billion is lost to fraud and error, and £230 million in underpayments.
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Now, remember David Cameron’s £2 billion figure that he planned to save?
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That’s what it looks like in the context of the total housing benefit bill.
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So where is the £2 billion figure from?
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Well, the Department for Work and Pensions has statistics on the age groups who receive housing benefit.
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If we look at the average benefit received by these groups, we can calculate the spending on the under-25
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age group category amounts just under £2 billion as you can see from this graph here.
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Now you can see that far more is spent on the other age groups, a total of just over £5 billion on the over-65s for instance.
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But we can see definitely where the Prime Minister is getting his £2 billion saving from by cutting it from the under-25s.
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But another debate we’ve seen today is whether those on housing benefit are actually in work.
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The New Statesman report that just one in eight claimants is out of work.
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Well fortunately, the Department of Work and Pensions also record the status of housing benefit claimants, and this is broken down in the pie chart here.
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Now you can see 13% of housing benefit claimants are on Jobseekers Allowance.
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This may well be where the New Statesman is getting its figure from.
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Now Jobseeker’s Allowance is an out of work benefit, but if you look at the graph, there are other out of work benefits here.
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Income support and Employment and Support Allowance go to people out of full time work.
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The Department for Work and Pensions do make clear that they could be in some kind of part time work, but certainly not enough to justify not being eligible for those benefits.
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We can also see 18% of the people claiming are definitely in employment as measured by the Department of Work and Pensions.
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So we can see that it’s very unlikely that there are only one in eight claimants out of work, the sheer volumes claiming the other kinds of benefits.
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So this is very likely a severe underestimate of the statistics.
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Well I hope you found that useful.
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If you want to find out more housing benefits statistics of course you can visit our website at Fullfact.org and if you have more questions about housing benefit, do send them in on our suggestions page.
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But until then, do stay tuned for more video fact checks.
