The article in question is from 2013. It needs a bit of a furtger disection before blame and the usual mud slinging starts. From memory the bill for Dwp the year 2012 which i would assume the article used as its base point was around the £160m mark. Now that includes all state payouts excluding tax credits which i beleive are issued by Hmrc. The questions that need to be answered in reference to that article are 1 does the figure of 36b include tax credits. If it is inclusive of this then all of a sudden it becomes a sizeable number. Close to 25% of that spend. If it does include tax credits then its it suddenly a smaller number. 2 how is the spend broken down on a socio demogrpahic scale. This being which areas get the money who are the claimants and what do they claim for. For example the pension budget ia about 1/3 of the welfare bill so based on that article youd assume that theres 12 billion spent pa on pensioners in London. Is this actually the case?
