LC briefing: DWP on Trial – a quick update
9:35 am - March 13th 2009
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Yesterday, the Guardian technology supplement carried a story that covers a part of our briefing, specifically the threat of a libel action by Amir Liberman/Nemesysco against two Swedish reseachers who published a paper criticising the ‘lie detector’.
This opens some doors for us and allows us to reveal much more information about the technology behind the trial but it doesn’t resolve all the issues we’ve been trying work around. For that reason, I’ll be publishing the detailed technical and scientific articles over at the Ministry of Truth, where I can safely hang it all out there and take risks that I can’t justify taking when I’m blogging here.
But that doesn’t mean that I can’t link to the articles, so to get you started…
Purnell’s Lie Detector – The Scientific Evidence
Purnell’s Lie Detector – What the Guardian didn’t say.
Moving the detailed techie material to the Ministry doesn’t mean we’ll be neglecting the Lib Con regulars. On Monday we’ll be revealing some more juicy details you won’t have seen before. So keep watching, there’s plenty more to come.
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'Unity' is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He also blogs at Ministry of Truth.
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Story Filed Under: Blog ,DWP lie detectors
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Reader comments
You might be interested in this Parliamentary answer from Tony McNulty with some figures on the ‘success’ of the VRA system.
Essentially, it seems to me that if you do a fishing trip for fraud among ‘high risk’ cases identified by VRA you get a slightly better success rate than a fishing trip among low risk ones.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090311/wmstext/90311m0002.htm#09031164000014
You’re not far off the mark.
There’s a little more to it than that, but you’ll have to wait until Monday when we publish the full error rates to find out exactly what.
This is all very exciting, and mysterious but I still don’t know what’s going on!
A very interesting post at Liberal Conspiracy that goes beyond Guardian reporting on the use of telephone lie detector tests on by the British Department of Work and Pensions.
If my experience is anything to go by, living as I do on “social housing” estate, many people in fact do not apply for what they are entitled to.
Of course there are benefit fraudsters, and they should be dealt with, but Liberal Conspiracy is to be congratulated for resisting the overwhelming effort to attack an “underclass” by elites in the British press.
Charles Arthur writes in the Guardian,
And if you think this is pointless – remember, it’s DWP spending our money on a technology that remains unproven, and not even doing the proper tests to determine whether it works. There isn’t even an estimate of savings. It’s astonishing.
Sadly it isn’t astonishing – it’s par for the course.
But well done Unity et al for exposing it.
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