The Means Test .
In the House of Commons last week the Minister of Labour stated that according to the estimate of his Ministry the Means Test, or as it is now being rather more happily termed the Needs Test, has resulted in the current financial year in a saving of about £8,000,000. This is a surprisingly low figure. It points to a total saving in the full year of under £16,000,000, which suggests that the estimate of £25,000,000, to which we committed ourselves a week ago, is definitely too high, though it was based on official figures of disallowances and reduc- tions. No accurate computation can, in fact, be made even by the Ministry itself, for no one can tell how much benefit the disallowed claimants would have drawn if the old system (of continued benefit on the statutory insurance scale) had 'continued. Everything, for example, to take only one obvious point, depends on what proportion of them have since their application been unemployed continuously, what proportion for three months, or six months, or so on. Since no record is kept of that, once a claim is disallowed, no estimate of savings effected can be more than a rough approximation. But the Ministry's figure must, of course, be taken as the most authoritative so far available.
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