Truth must be not only discovered,
but perennially rediscovered and redefined.

Poverty in Britain remains horrifying. For example, about 7% of households cannot afford a single hobby or leisure activity and a quarter cannot manage to save £10 a month for rainy days or retirement.

Bleak.

But the DWP plans to spend just over £130 billion in 2008. Surely some mistake, so I did a quick calculation based on 2007 numbers:

Now, as a first estimate, it appears that DWP manages to spend almost twice as much as the poverty threshold for every person in poverty. This is optimistic too: I used the threshold figure for a single person with no children. If we took the figure of £260 per week for a couple with two children, and divided by four, it would appear DWP spends about three times the threshold per head.

These are devastating ratios, but worse, it is not working:

Using a still lower threshold of 40% of median income, however, the pattern is rather different: unchanged levels throughout the last decade. In other words, there has been no reduction in the numbers of very poor people.

Sustained misery, maintained at vast expense, is a tragedy.

Thank goodness, then, for Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice and for Chris Grayling. We are getting there.

A pity millions of people must wait for significant change to begin.

Without apparent irony, HMRC offer both an update on the personal information lost and warn of fraudulent attempts to obtain personal information:

This front page has been up for a while.

There’s a homeless man I see every day, who sleeps in a subway. He’s pleasant and harmless. He used to be a promising chef apparently. People choose to give him money: he never asks. He keeps himself smart and clean, thanks to a nearby centre that opens in the week, during the day. He’s handing out Christmas cards to people who have helped him this year.

He was arrested this week for begging. He spent the night in the cells as bail was not granted. He claimed this was fine by him: a warm dry night with hot food and drink and he didn’t have to walk to court in the morning. The judge fined him £20 but dismissed it in recognition of the night in jail. He was straight back where he started, doing no harm, although now he is a trainee Big Issue seller.

He alleges that the following night, certain uniformed individuals approached him and offered that if he disappeared that night, they wouldn’t bother him for a year. Apparently that night was the night the homeless count was to be taken.

This seems to me quite evil. It’s bad enough that people get trapped on the street, without others fiddling the statistics. What happens when the area’s 500 (say) homeless find their centre is closed because it was funded for 50?