The Budget is window-dressing

This blog is highly unexcited about tomorrow's budget. As Roger Bootle says:

This Budget will not be a firecracker. They never are nowadays. Indeed, the institution is a bit like Parliament in microcosm.

The outward form is still largely the same, which gives the appearance of continuity, but in reality the life has gone out of it. The important events are happening outside the Westminster bear pit. The Budget should be regarded as essentially a piece of political theatre.

- just as Richard North keeps stressing about the EU's primacy. Indeed, the parallel is even more striking. Bootle continues:

What happens to the economy will be determined by events abroad, how much banks cut back on their lending and what happens to the housing market. These factors will together determine whether we experience a slowdown, a recession or a slump. The Chancellor, like the rest of us, will be largely a hapless bystander.

That doesn't stop the FT's Philip Stephens devoting today's column to it. On strategies he writes that

Part of Mr Osborne's answer is that he would cut deep into welfare bills by getting more people into work. Sounds easy? I well remember a Tory social security minister faced with that challenge during the 1990s. To lop just £1bn from the benefit budget, he remarked, was to take £1,000 from each of one million people. Which million were his critics thinking of?

This is lazy, top down thinking. Who knows how much money is to be saved by attacking benefit fraud properly? It may not be one million people, it may not be £1bn. But if a piece of software can save one local council over £335,000 (34% more fraud than they'd thought they were suffering), and more than a quarter of their claimants are saying they do not need the benefits as their conditions have changed, what scope is there for savings nationally?

On the basis of these results it would pay the software company to offer the software free to every authority in return for (say) 20% of savings over the following 12 months, capped at (say) three times what the software would have cost.

Benefit fraud is a crime. So offenders should have to pay back twice the amount of the fraudulent benefit, and not be eligible for further benefits until they have. Publicise these penalties hard, well in advance.

This would be a better deterrent than a Fraud Minister bleating that benefit fraudsters are bound to be caught - a lie, of course, benefit fraud has been estimated to cost the DWP alone £690m a year. That's in addition to frauds on local authorities.

If the professional compassionate classes are concerned that people will be disadvantaged, let them set up a charity to support benefit fraudsters and solicit donations from the public. This blog is not saying that needy benefit fraudsters should never receive any money from anyone. Just that more money shouldn't be available to them from the state they have defrauded until they have paid the financial penalty.

Politically this isn't fuzzy enough to be a starter. On the same page of today's FT as Philip Stephens, Gideon Rachman regrets the taboos that apply to the public discussion of policy. Lazy thinking from Philip Stephens doesn't help.