The hardest word

A remarkable thing happened iyesterday: Iain Duncan Smith used a five-letter word beginning with S.

Apologising for a mistake is just about the last thing any minister wants to do, but IDS got his chance when Labour’s John Healey asked him at work and pensions questions about the DWP’s bulletin admitting the pre-1996 under-occupation penalty error. Healey quoted the latest survey from the Northern Housing Consortium that ‘nearly half of all frontline housing workers have dealt with someone who has threatened to commit suicide’ largely because of the government’s welfare changes. ‘Will he apologise this afternoon to those people for the concern and chaos that he is causing?’

Duncan Smith replied: ‘I said it all right, and I say it again: the Department is, and I am, absolutely sorry that anybody may have been caught up in this who should not have been.’ So not just an apology but a double ‘sorry’ from both the secretary of state and his department. But before anyone gets too excited, he went on:

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing