Charlotte Leslie Foodbanks

Charlotte Leslie MP for Bristol, currently being investigated for accepting cash donations and failing to declare them  has written a blog for 'Conservative Home' titled

"Why government needs to be more like foodbanks"

In this article she describes her visit to a foodbank, she states;

but according to the 'Bristol Northwest Foodbank' (the one Charlotte visited) they state in their winter newsletter  that "Benefit changes and Benefit delay are one of the major contributions to local people needing to use our foodbank".  She does a huge disservice to the staff and users of Bristol Northwest Foodbank by denying that this is the case.   

This main reason is also backed up by figures from the Trussell Trust with delays in receiving benefits accounting for 30.93% of people being referred and 16.97% due to Benefit Changes.

Benefit delays are obviously a huge problem that leaves the claimant without money until the Government process their claim, this results on them having to rely on foodbanks.  It is not only the unemployed that is affected, the disabled and sick are also affected and as this article by the BBC shows this Government's utter contempt for the sick and disabled - leaving them 6 months or more without much needed funds.

Charlotte then goes on to say ...

"cutting through the politicisation" ..she then goes on to shamefully do just that by trying to score political points over Labour in terms of the number of foodbank users when they were in power against that of her own government.

So lets look at the numbers when Labour were in power;

2005-6	2,814
2006-7	9,174
2007-8	13,849
2008-9	25,899
2009-10	40,898

and now under Coalition Government

2010-11	61,469
2011-12	128,697
2012-13	346,992
2013-14	913,138

Its distasteful for Miss Leslie to try and score political points over starving people but even worse when her government is responsible for the huge increase in foodbank users since foodbanks franchises started in 2004.

Interestingly she also states "since the government opened up foodbanks to job centre referrals the rise in numbers attending foodbanks has doubled".  Apart from the disingenuous statement regarding Labour; the DWP have repeatedly denied that JCP refer claimants to foodbanks

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/11/food-bank-jobcentre-dwp-referrals-welfare

So thanks to Miss Leslie we now know that the DWP have been in fact referring claimants to foodbanks since 2011.

She then goes on to criticise her own government's model

I am sure Miss Leslie agreed to so this blog in order to deflect blame away from her government's role in the upsurge of food banks but manages not only to highlight the huge rise in foodbank use since the Coalition came to power but also highlights that the DWP were lying when they said they did not refer claimants to foodbanks and lastly criticises her Government's model which exacerbates the need for foodbanks.

So in essence is not that the "Government needs to be more like foodbanks", the Government should be ensuring that they is no need for foodbanks by protecting, not punishing, the most vulnerable in our society.

My advice to Miss Leslie is to keep on blogging, she's an asset to all her political opponents.

Shaun Lintern's analysis of NHS earnings

Its that time of month again whereby I am compelled to write yet another article on Shaun Lintern.  I must point out that when I first decided to write a blog my aim was to write about the misuse of statistics used by the media and politicians, little did I know that the majority of it would be concerning Shaun Lintern.
This is not a deliberate or personal attack on Shaun Lintern per se but to merely set the record straight regarding his misuse of statistics.  Today's blog is not about misuse of statistics but rather his claims to them and the personal smears which accompanied them.
I will always challenge dodgy statistics because I believe the public deserve to know the truth about what is happening in our NHS and we should have the right to question someone who misleads the public without being smeared at.

Today Shaun announced that he had carried out an "analysis" for HSJ.

When further questions where put to Shaun about these figures he could not answer

I did ask for his source and after much to-ing and fro-ing he eventually gave me the link to the spreadsheets from HSCIC.

http://t.co/oiC3VCh2X8

If you download the spreadsheet and turn to table 2b, you will see that in fact HSCIC has done the "analysis" - not Shaun but credit where credit's due Shaun did come up with a pretty picture - unless someone else came up with that as well.

Now Shaun knows I know what has happened i.e. he tried to pass off someone else's work as his own but instead of owing up he labels me a "troll" in order to deflect from the subject and to smear me.
His tweet tonight - which is frankly so embarrassing for him that I will not post it here; is another ploy to smear and play the victim with some actually falling for it, but as they say you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time but you cannot fool all the people all of the time!

Needless to say the figures Shaun quoted are wrong - the HSCIC spreadsheet does carry a warning that they are estimates and "experimental".  I won't embarrass HSCIC by publishing their mistakes but I firmly believe that no professional journalist would take these stats and publish them without checking first their validity but then in order to check their validity one would need to have a degree of maths knowledge which Shaun Lintern clearly does not have.
So my advice is once again to treat any stats that Shaun Lintern produces with extreme caution and if in doubt ask Shaun to produce his math formulas, that should separate the wheat from the shaft!