Government: Ministers attacked in row over statistics

Sir Michael Scholar, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, warned that failure to show the evidence for claims made by Ministers risked undermining public trust.

His criticism comes a day after Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith had to explain to MPs why "official" statistics he quoted in the Commons were actually taken from a property website.

The new case centres on a Press release issued by Employment Minister Chris Grayling claiming 1.4 million people had never worked and 1.5 million spent the last five years on jobless benefits.

But the calculations they were based on were not made publicly available, sparking calls for an investigation by transparency campaigners Full Fact.

They claimed Department for Work and Pensions could be in breach of civil service guidelines which says it is not allowed to "quote selectively from unpublished datasets".

Following an investigation, Sir Michael found that the Press release, the analysis on which the first claim was based or the source of the figures were not made publicly available.

"These were, in my view, serious deficiencies in DWP's arrangements, and I have drawn their attention to this," he told Full Fact in a letter responding to their complaint.

"The Code of Practice for Official Statistics requires official statistics to be made equally available to all, subject to statutory provisions for pre-release access," he went on.

"The National Statistician has asked DWP that, when producing new analyses that are used in public statements, they ensure that the statistics are also published by their statisticians, or are accessible to non-government analysts, in a transparent way."