A quick update for the Resolution Foundation panel

An update rather than a full post, to be transparent about things I'm saying in a panel discussion this morning

I’m on a panel at a Resolution Foundation event this morning, and the RF team have kindly let me show a couple of slides. These are both versions of charts that I’ve blogged about before (hence this post wasn’t emailed out to blog subscribers), but for transparency I wanted to make sure that people could see exactly what I’ve done.

Welfare spending is not ‘out-of-control’

I blogged about this back in September, but since then I’ve updated the figures slightly - partly because the OBR released some new figures in the autumn, and partly because I dug further into a couple of minor things (see the notes under the chart). It doesn’t change the overall picture, which still looks like this:

Mental distress is high among people receiving benefits

This is something I wrote about earlier this week - but one of the problems with the earlier post is that the general public data isn’t ideal, as it doesn’t let us remove people receiving benefits from the ‘general public’ figure.

But I’ve since realised that you can make some simple assumptions to get a clearer contrast between people receiving benefits vs. the wider working-age public. This is shown in the revised chart below: