One of the most persistent problems in the debate over welfare reform has been the misrepresentation of fraud in the benefits system.

The £5 billion figure for benefit fraud and error has previously been cited as the figure for fraud alone, when actually this accounts for a little over a billion of the total.

For example, last month Welfare Minister Lord Freud apologised for making such an error.

In the hands of tabloid newspapers this conflating of fraud and error has been combined with language claiming the money is “plundered” from society by “cheats” and so painting an unfair picture of people receiving the wrong money due to official error.

Full Fact has previously factchecked figures presented in this way.

So today it was welcome to hear Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, acknowledge that there is room to tone down the rhetoric on benefit fraud.

Answering questions from the Work and Pensions Select Committee this morning Mr Duncan Smith said that people receiving overpayments through no fault of their own were being unfairly characterised as fraudsters.

He told the committee that by moving to the Universal Credit system he is proposing such cases would be reduced – sparing those involved the wrath of politicians and newspapers.

He said his proposed system would help “tone the rhetoric down quite a bit. You can turn the knob down on this because there's always this sort of fraud, fraud, fraud and everyone wagging their finger at everybody else.

“The truth is quite a lot of what we here politically term constantly as fraud is often complexity error, which is very easy for us to then say this is fraud and people feel quite stigmatised by that.

“The truth is quite a lot is nothing to do with them, it's the system itself.

“It simply means they didn't understand what they were meant to be doing and now they are apparently committing fraud and a lot of them didn't know that was the case.

“So we're hoping that this will politically just tone some of this rhetoric down and stop basically accusing people of things which frankly is partly because of the system and nothing to do with them.”
 

It is welcome to hear the Secretary of State acknowledge that there has been a problem with a way some of these figures have been presented.

With Mr Duncan Smith on record making this clear, Full Fact will not hesitate to make people using the kind of rhetoric aware of his remarks.