The government’s Welfare Reform Minister Lord Freud has been accused by landlords of ‘fiddling’ the figures to blame landlords for rising housing benefit bills.

Landlords have asked Lord Freud, who gave evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into housing benefit reforms on Wednesday, to retract claims that private landlords have been most to blame for the rising cost of housing benefit. Both the British Property Federation and the Residential Landlords Association claim his own department’s figures show that the opposite is true.

The two bodies say that data from the Department for Work and Pensions show that a greater proportion of the rise in the housing benefit bill since November 2008 was caused by increasing unemployment and by government policies on social housing, rather than by landlords pushing up the rents that they charge to housing benefit tenants.

Analysis using DWP’s figures shows almost 70% of growth in the benefit bill can be attributed to additional claimants – the unemployed of this recession. A further 17.7% is attributed to an increase in payments in the social rented sector – due to the transfer of council house stock to housing associations, which have higher rents – and only 13.2% to an increase in average payments in the private rented sector.

Landlord bodies claimed that the misuse of statistics was part of a campaign by the DWP to justify its programme of housing benefit cuts.

They allege this has seen the department misrepresenting independent research it commissioned from the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies and the University of Birmingham comparing low income working households not receiving housing benefit with benefit recipients.

In one newspaper article (Daily Telegraph, 17 October) it was claimed that “on average