Speeches by Yang.

“Mr Johnson, whose statistics do you prefer: the Resolution Foundation’s or the IFS’s?”

“We will go on to the reforms later, but as a final question on the data, does anyone on the panel have any confidence in the sickness-related inactivity data? How much can we track the underlying increase or otherwise in sickness-related inactivity?”

“Does that mean that you think that the UK is not an outlier in terms of inactivity, and that that is a problem for the Government to address, or do you have a different opinion about that?”

“We heard earlier from the OBR about concerns about the labour force survey. It is an issue we have raised with the ONS as a Committee. I wanted to start by asking Ruth Curtice to describe the different modelling the Resolution Foundation has done, which in your central estimate finds no net increase in activity from 20…”

“Just to summarise, you are planning to bring in the forecasts related to the employment support package, which was not scored this time, in the autumn, and also relate it to the behavioural changes and other parts of the welfare packages, which did not come in sufficient detail this time? Is that broadly right?”

“You mentioned that some of those costings were incomplete or some of the analysis was incomplete. Could you go into a bit more detail about what was lacking? What would you have needed to make a better or fuller forecast?”

“When you talk to the Department responsible, does that mean a conversation between you and DWP, or is it the Treasury in this case?”

“On the question of welfare reforms, I note that in the preface, you have written that “details of the policy package were sent to us very late in the process, and late notice of changes and incomplete analysis hampered our ability to reflect these measures in our forecasts.” To begin with, I want to ask about the timel…”

“But not about the underlying ill health trend itself? You mentioned there is a rise in claimants and self-reporting of it.”

“I have a specific question about one part of the inactivity data. Mr Hughes, how confident are you that there has been a rise in inactivity linked to ill health?”

“Mr Hughes, do you have any other responses to those questions?”

“My Committee colleagues are quite keen to know whether you think other countries have done a better job of recovering after the pandemic in capturing labour force data. Are there any other countries that we should be learning from in the UK?”

“How long in months or years do you think it might take before you are confident, or at least fairly confident, in that data?”

“Does the fact that the ONS is very confident make you more confident, or are you still not very confident in its data, as you were last November?”

“Professor Miles, you just said that people should have much less confidence in the employment stats than they used to, and when you last spoke to the Committee last November you mentioned that you were not very confident about the labour force survey data. By contrast, when we saw the ONS as a Committee the national st…”

“In response to that, does it make sense to have a kind of fiscal-first solution, in which you decide what percentage of GDP should be spent on these benefits and work from there? How should the fiscal calculation feed into the broader policy calculation?”

“I want to go back to the discussion with Ms McEvoy about the problem of rising claimant counts, expenditure, and disability and incapacity benefits, and to drill a bit more into what kind of a problem that is. Mr Johnson and Ms Curtice, you said that it is a problem. From one perspective, it is a fiscal problem. On the…”

“Does that mean that we should expect an update to those forecasts in the autumn outlook?”

“There is also the implication in a lot of media discourse that the increase in PIP caseloads is not matched by an underlying increase in disability and that, therefore, there is some gaming. Do you see that in the data that you have looked at?”

“So people will put more work into getting the right doctor’s assessments and so on. There is no claim from the OBR that that evidence is mistaken and that people will be driven to—”