Sanction figures: Shurely shome mishtake?

I blogged yesterday on the way both the Coalition and Mussolini’s Fascists reorganised the government’s statistics bureaux to produce spurious figures supporting their administrations. Mussolini placed the corte dei conti, supervising government expenditure and the Institute of Statistics under his personal control and away from that of parliament. The Tories and Tory Democrats set up the Office of Budgetary Responsibility to justify the austerity campaign. And these highly suspicious figures are one example of the result.

Mike Sivier's blog

There’s something not quite right about the DWP’s latest statistics covering benefit sanctions.

I’d go into it in detail but, in the spirit of the saying that a picture can tell a story better than a thousand words, let’s just have a look at this graph instead (courtesy of @UKJCP on Twitter).

By my reckoning, somebody’s calculations started to go seriously amiss in November 2012.

What do you think has happened?

And who do you think is to blame?

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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