Benefit frauds again

Many benefit claims start legitimately but people do not tell their local council when they return to work, so payment of the benefits continues.

Thus a Leebrooks woman kept claiming housing benefit and council tax benefit despite getting a job at McDonalds and overclaimed £5,000.

A Widnes woman fraudulently claimed £2,607.34 in housing and council tax benefits despite returning to work.

A Watford woman's claims began legitimately but then she didn't tell Three Rivers District Council she had got a job, resulting in a £1,800 overpayment in housing benefit.

Today's most interesting case concerns an Isleworth man, even though the fraudulently claimed benefit amounted to only £655.70.

Suspicions about Day were raised when Hounslow Council's fraud investigation unit received information from the National Fraud Initiative, a data-matching system holding details of benefit claimants nationwide.

It showed that Day had failed to notify Hounslow Council he was working.

His jobseekers' allowance had ended, but he had continued receiving housing benefit.

One can absolutely understand councils wanting to police their own benefit applicants - after all, the money comes out of their budgets - but it makes this national reconciliation of the different databases all the more important.

All the hot news that's fit to print

Plenty about in the blogosphere about cold hard facts which increase the question marks over "Global Warming". Richard North contributed here. And read Melanie Phillips' summary of the latest cold data.

This is picked up by Philip Stott, who asks about the role of our supposedly impartial news media. The media's near silence on this, he says, "betrays so much about our failing journalism under the exclusive dominance of hegemonic myths. We joke about 1984, but I sometimes wonder."

Yet, thank goodness for the web. As it was with the invention of printing, this is the new liberator, helping us to break the dangerous hegemonies that seek to enslave our minds and lives. But now, alternative voices can no longer be suppressed by a weakened and often compliant media, trendy editors, or media magnates.

And he concludes that

Melanie Phillips, and all writers and bloggers like her, are a brave voice for freedom in a world where too many who should know much, much better are seeking to exclude inconvenient truths and facts, but, above all, to shut down the voice of reason.

Inconvenient truths, indeed!

There is also a media agenda about the EU. Shh is the order of the day here too. Not all of this is a conspiracy. Some presenters who strive for impartiality seem to be genuinely ignorant about the scale of EU power. Ability to get the rational case across hasn't been helped by the wild-eyed, flag waving tendency. Richard North comments today on the blind spot at the BBC. I'd like to see a volunteer group of media monitors who would pick up errors and omissions and bring them to the attention of the programmes, as well as reporting them on a blog. It could start small and grow.

Any takers?

Governments aren't nimble

Richard North notes the risibly flat-footed response of EU governments to their own policies on emissions reductions now that they are being helped to start understanding the possible impacts of their ignorant grandstanding.

Rhetoric is one thing but – to no one's surprise – economic reality is another.

Some of the main economic landmarks are changing rapidly and interventionist governments' policies will never be able to keep up with this speed of change.

For instance, the Financial Times reports that

Prices of top-quality wheat jumped 25 per cent to a record high on Monday in their largest one-day increase as Kazakhstan, one of the largest grain exporters, said it would impose export tariffs to curb sales.

The move, which follows similar export restrictions in Russia and Argentina, is likely to put further pressure on already tight global wheat supplies, analysts said.

And of course demand from industrialising countries is still shooting up.

In a leader the FT comments that some factors affecting the price of food are temporary. "But the biggest structural change is biofuels."

Over the next few years, therefore, prices should stabilise as supply increases and stocks are rebuilt. In the meantime, those governments that are subsidising biofuels need to cough up and help fund the World Food Programme. The world has enough food to feed everybody – if there is the will to do so.

There is no chance that an interventionist supranational government seemingly making policy based on bad science with the consent of ignorant heads of government will be able to generate intelligent responses to these changes in anything like a timely fashion.

Another fast moving area is data encryption. Common laptop disk encryption products for Microsoft, Apple Mac and Linux operating systems can be easily overcome. Symantec's chief scientist comments that

The first thing to observe is that encryption technology from ten years can almost now be broken with a Casio watch. It's a war out there and hackers realise, that with enough motivation to break technologies, the gains are worth the effort.

ITPro notes that lost laptops are the most frequent cause of data breaches (36%), the use of paper records causes another 24%, while hackers, malicious insiders and malicious code combined lead to just 12% of such incidents.

Putting data in the hands of third-parties doesn't mean it's any safer, as some 38 per cent of data breaches were seen to be caused by external contractors or partners.

The researchers took the opportunity to renew calls for UK or EU data breach notification, but said it was necessary to create one legislation for companies to follow. Each of the 40 US states with notification laws has different legislation which requires separate filings. A multinational corporation faces even more different rules.

They said, "The worst thing that could happen is very harsh, detailed restrictive legislation. Government don't do a good job of legislating technology... we say use best practices." They also stressed the need for safe harbour clauses.

If you've done best practices and are at zero risk of a breach, you shouldn't be penalized... Don't punish a business which has done the right thing.

This is not EU governments' way. How likely are we to see another set of obsolescent prescriptive measures based on bad science?

Detailed government policymaking just can't keep up, especially as it comes with irrational baggage. In the energy field

Luxembourg, Finland, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other countries have all written to the EU industry commissioner Günter Verheugen, to ask for "swifter decisions" on how the EU plans will affect big energy consumers.

Expect our legislators to continue to think that they know best even though they can't even submit acceptable expenses claims and they think it's fine that Robber Conway is still an MP.

And the thefts go on

In Burnley a primary school worker pleaded guilty to a £47,000 benefit fraud. She claimed the money between 2000 and 2006 after failing to disclose that her partner had moved back in. She was overpaid £27,217 in income support, £15,121 in housing benefit and £4,691 in council tax benefit.

A South Shields man claimed £2,142 in council tax benefit despite having £100,000 in an undeclared bank account.

A North Lincolnshire woman is again under investigation after declaring herself bankrupt. In January she was sent to prison for six months for illegally claiming more than £21,000 in welfare benefits. The DWP is disputing the bankruptcy. The paper reports that

Last month, a judge at Doncaster Crown Court was told Bangladeshi-born Begum (57) had made false statements on eight occasions to claim benefits, despite owning properties and having cash assets.

She pleaded poverty to officials, saying she only had £100, when in fact she had four bank accounts, containing at least £63,000.

On another occasion, she paid off her son's mortgage when she claimed to be bankrupt.

Sentencing Begum to six months in jail, Judge Graham Robinson said: "You claimed benefits to which you were not entitled - you were in fact quite a wealthy woman, owning properties and having cash assets."

Begum had asked for 187 similar offences to be taken into consideration.

On a happier note, the benefit fraud team at Wyre Forest District Council are publicising some successes.

Between April, 2007 and January, 2008, the team completed 206 investigations into allegations of fraud in the area and found more than £140,000 had been paid to people making false claims. The overpayments are currently being recovered.

And in Ulster an MP has called for the introduction there of the Voice Risk Analysis software being trialled by Harrow Council which I blogged last week. The Belfast Telegraph reports that

Harrow councillors believe the scheme has saved taxpayers £300 every working hour.

Well done, Lady Sylvia Hermon. Unless there is a better package out there, the software should be rolled out nationally now.

These aren't the only people robbing taxpayers. Robber Conway is still an MP.

Mice or men?

By common consent Michael Martin is a poor Speaker and not always fair. If his expenses are within the rules, so much the worse for the rules. He draws over £20,000 a year to spend on the only house he owns, while in London he enjoys grace and favour apartments.

He should never have been Speaker anyway. It wasn't Labour's turn, but their new MPs blithely rode roughshod over democratic precedence.

So he is biased, incompetent and expensive. What do the fearless guardians of our government do? They rally round to protect him.

Gordon Brown says he is "a very good Speaker" (complete rubbish, clearly demonstrating Brown's attitude to the truth), Cameron says it is not for him to become involved as a party leader, and Clegg says - ever so little so incoherently. All the MPs seem to be cowering, afraid to put their heads above the parapet.

And these are the people who would lead our country. Pygmies all.

The muddle around MPs' expenses makes the case for Accountable Transparency. The rules certainly need to be rewritten - for instance to stop people like Mr and Mrs Balls, John Cruddas, and the Wintertons abusing housing allowances for their own profit.

And activities like those of the Embezzler Con way must be stamped out.

The key reform then will be accountable transparency. All MPs' claims and expenses must be published on the web in detail (except where the privacy of members of the public might be compromised), so that journalists and diggers can inspect them.

Meanwhile these fearful elected representatives tiptoe around an issue of housekeeping where the remedy is obvious.

No wonder Robber Conway is still an MP.

How they steal from us

No, not MEPs. Not MPs. A look at some benefit fraudsters. Stealing from us seems to be easy for them, as well as for MEPs and MPs.

Thus a 61-year old pipe fitter from Portsmouth managed to claim some £10,000 of benefits. He had been claiming income support, incapacity benefit, housing benefit and council tax benefit while still earning a living.

In Market Harborough a woman failed to tell Harborough District council her husband had returned to work, so that the family was overpaid £3,651.

In Scotland a widow has been jailed for a year for defrauding Stirling Council of more than £58,000 in housing and council tax benefits over seven years. She and and her late husband had kept the existence of his BBC pension a secret in order to claim the money.

A fraudster who worked for the Saudi Arabian embassy has been jailed for 15 months for falsely claiming almost £30,000 in housing benefits. Mohamed Ali Gubara had been claiming housing benefit for his Ealing home from January 2003 to August 2006 but never mentioned his other homes in Brentford and South London. The total value of the two properties is more than £500,000. He also failed to declare that he worked for the Saudi Military Attaché’s Office for almost the entire time he was claiming benefits. Ealing Council is seeking to claim back the money owed through the sale of Mr Gubara’s properties.

Lesser social security frauds are reported from Derry. A woman claimed Income Support totalling £2,838 while failing to declare she had capital. She was given a two month prison sentence suspended for eighteen months and will have to pay a fine of £300 and court costs of £49. A man wrongfully cashed Jobseekers Allowance cheques totalling £161. He was given a conditional discharge for two years and ordered to pay court costs of £42. And a woman claimed Income Support totalling £530 while failing to declare she was working. She was fined £400 and ordered to pay court costs of £46. All three will have to repay the money they wrongfully obtained.

These are reports from just the last few days. Does that suggest that the penalties aren't much of a deterrent?

When I blogged Harrow Council's experimental voice recognition system in September (it analyses voice patterns for signs of stress shown by possibly fraudulent claimants), it had saved the council £40,000 in 3-4 months. "Benefit fraud", it was said, "costs the council £250,000 a year".

Now it has been renamed a Voice Risk Analysis (VRA) system, and we are being told it has helped Harrow Council save around £336,711 in benefit payouts - that is, a massive 34% more than the total fraud the council had thought they were suffering.

Since Harrow Council started the £63,000 trial in the month of May last year, more than a quarter of claimants said they did not need the benefits as their conditions had changed.

Harrow’s saving consisted of £284,461 in housing benefit and £52,249 in council tax benefit.

What lessons does this suggest?

• This is a crude filtering system. Undoubtedly it doesn't catch all the benefit fraud.
  
  
• Fraud is higher than the council - and therefore the government - thought.
  
  
• The system is paying for itself in spades, so why not stop the pilot and roll it out nationally now?
  
  
• Penalties clearly don't deter enough. Maybe they should include repaying at least twice the amount, with no entitlement to any benefits until that's been done.

By the way, Robber Conway is still an MP. Taxpayers are being fleeced.

Why welfare reform is popular

Why does the government want to outflank the Tories on welfare reform with a proposal that unemployed people will be forced to take on placements or volunteer work once they have claimed benefits for more than a year?

It's partly stories like this from Southampton -

A benefits cheat, who ripped off the taxpayer for more than £40,000 over six years, has been jailed for 12 months.

It doesn't seem to have been difficult - he had three jobs. The defence lawyer said that "this was not a particularly sophisticated fraud." He just seems to have asked and have been given. For six years.

Or the story that down in Hounslow

A convent worker who used a string of false names to claim nearly £30,000 in benefits has narrowly avoided jail.

The council became suspicious when data-matching showed there was another person wth one of her surnames at the same address. The fraud lasted for four and a half, years, though. One reader comments there that

The sad fact is, pursuing benefit cheats is not cost effective.Recently released figures showed around £150 million spent to recover just £22 million.The quality of evidence required to secure a successful prosecution is a major stumbling block.

Bizarrely, the government has been accused of failing the North East over returning unemployed people to work, with the region having the country’s highest proportion of benefit claimants.

It's not up to government to find jobs for people. What happened to responsibility?

Maybe that's why the BBC (of all people!) invited a member of two conservative US think tanks to South Wales. His line is that welfare money should be cut and put into creating local jobs. He argues that the number of people claiming incapacity benefit in Wales could be reduced by two-thirds if American-style reforms were adopted.

In the US we cut people's cash benefits in the 1990s and told them they were going back to work.

They are some of the most successful policies we've ever introduced. In some states, money from benefit claimants was taken and used instead to create jobs in local companies, boosting employment opportunities.

As this blog has argued, we need the stick as well as the carrot.

The noose closes round British government

Open Europe has released the Presidency's list of unfinished business to be dealt with once the Constitution has been smuggled through.

As well as terms and conditions for the President and the Foreign Minister, it includes the structure, operation and field of action of Europol, the new powers and operation of Eurojust ("We could compel the British police to make a prosecution"), the rules governing the European Public Prosecutor and its functions, and the powers of the new sinister-sounding "Operational Committee on Internal Security", or COSI. (The portentous apparatus for common defence and foreign policies will probably prove an expensive farce.)

The final blueprint for COSI's extensive powers has yet to be finalised, however. Negotiations on the issue will take place in the second half of this year - after the planned ratification of the Treaty in the House of Commons, meaning MPs will not know what they have signed up to. Talks on COSI will be held in secret. Waterfield cites leaked internal EU documents, circulated almost three years ago which admitted that "the exact nature of the committee cannot be discerned by reading" the relevant clause of the Treaty - and no new work to clarify the issue has been carried out since.

Tony Bunyan, of the Statewatch civil liberties group, has warned that if the Government "gets its way we will see an EU Interior Ministry without any democratic control. It is quite outrageous that the role of the new EU internal security committee is being decided in secret. If COSI becomes a high-level legislative body, as well being in charge of operational matters, a whole swathe of decision-making and practice will be removed from democratic debate and discussion."

Open Europe also picks up a Handelsblatt report that "the Commission is holding back plans for controversial legislation until after the revived Constitutional Treaty has been ratified. Plans to harmonise Europe's corporate tax base are also being held back.

"The controversial Health Directive will be reintroduced only once ratification is complete, as both the UK and Ireland are opposed." And we already know a group of cancer specialists have for some reason called for EU involvement in cancer care in Europe ... as if we were to be ruled by all-wise philosopher kings.

But they were only ever a doctrinaire philosophers' ignorant fantasy. Our new politburo believe in "Global Warming", Kyoto and biofuels. Nothing seems to attract their regulatory zeal like obsolete or half-understood science.

And there will be nothing we can do about it. Just pay the ever increasing - and largely pointless - bills, as our freedom drains away.

Picking the right questions

While the Spectator's Coffee House blog enthuses over the exquisite decorations at the Conservatives' Black and White Ball and its readers debate the merits of tielessness there, back in the real world Philip Stott offers a useful summary of his recent speech on Global Warming Politics.

We have been wrong about climate change in the past, he says, so how certain are we that our politicians have got it right now?

He distinguishes between ‘Global Warming’ - "a politico-scientific construct in which the human emission of ‘greenhouse gases’ is unquestioningly taken as the main driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will inexorably result in a significant warming during the next 100 years" - and the science of climate change. This is "concerned with the most complex, coupled, non-linear, chaotic system known", and it is "unlikely that climate change can be predicated on a single variable, or factor, however politically convenient".

So, he asks, will cutting carbon dioxide emissions at the margin produce a linear, predictable change in climate? No, he says. Climate is so complex and chaotic that we cannot manage it predictably by "fiddling at the margins".

We can’t stop climate change, or even aim to produce a predictable outcome for climate.

We need political realism -

The UK currently represents only 2 per cent of world electricity demand (1 per cent of world energy demand). These figures will fall to around 1.4 per cent and 0.8 per cent by 2020. Whatever we do in the UK will have no predictable effect whatsoever on climate. Indeed, if one accepts the ‘global warming’ construct, it is clear that the future of climate resides, above all, in China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the rest of the developing world, not in the US and Europe. By 2020, China and India will produce more ‘greenhouse gases’ than the whole of North America.

As we can't affect climate change, we need to concentrate on adapting to it -

Perhaps of far more significance are population growth, the looming energy crisis, the continued success of farming in enhancing yields, the attack on poverty, and the world management of water.

Farming in the UK needs the scope and flexibility to produce more if necessary. And -

In the UK alone we are facing an energy gap of up to 50 per cent which no amount of wind, wave, and waffle will fill. Coal is going to have a great renaissance world wide, despite environmental concerns; nuclear will have another generation of plant; yet, ‘renewables’ will toil to achieve even 15 per cent.

In reading Stott's comments you realise just how ludicrous our politicians will seem with their vainglory that they can affect the climate. Canute, anyone?

As Stott says, we cannot stop climate change. "It is the great hubris of our Age to think that we can. We cannot even manage climate change predictably. But we can constantly adapt to inexorable change".

On the energy front, to take one example, slowly and in full view, the Russians are tightening the noose of gas supply around Europe, in a long game of naked "power" politics. More on this here from Helen. Putin has not decided to head Gazprom on a whim. He knows where the levers of power will be.

Down among the little people, Robber Conway is still an MP.

How we are governed

A choice cut from Dr North in Defence of the Realm. The permanent under secretary of state for the MoD talks to a committee of MPs about the equipment programme.

…our ministers would very much like a programme which is, if anything, more focused on the kinds of equipment requirements that come out of current operations like protected vehicles, helicopters et cetera. It would be extremely surprising if the process we are going through did not lead to a consideration of that.

Yes Minister is alive and well. We know what our ministers "would very much like". It would be extremely surprising if we did not in due course get round to giving this our consideration. That would be after we have gone through a previous process [undefined].

Sir Humphrey would be proud. Give that man a gong, and meanwhile lunch at my club.

They do things differently at the DWP, it seems. Apparently within seconds of his return to the department, James Purnell (you remember him, he it was who mysteriously appeared in a photograph when he hadn't been there, he it was who predicted that 24-hour liquor licensing would lead to a café culture) had appointed David Freud as an adviser, to help implement changes in the welfare state. Given that Mr Freud cheerfully reveals Chancellor Brown's opposition to his proposals, did Prime Minister Brown know this appointment was coming?

And Mr Freud is enthusiastic.

Peter Hain was worried about the Left. Purnell is showing astonishing energy, there is going to be a much more single-minded ferocity.

All this change just because the vain one couldn't fill in a donations return! (Amusingly, The Telegraph actually writes "Peter Hain [the previous work and pensions secretary] ...". Is the vain one so soon forgotten?)

The paper tells us Mr Freud's big idea is that the private sector be put in charge of the long-term unemployed. Companies taking part would receive a "huge fee" for getting somebody to stay in a job for more than three years but nothing if they fail.

The Telegraph sets out a bizarre proposal.

Under his system, the market will decide who should receive benefit and who should go out to work. "The private sector will have to start making assessments about who they can get back into work at what cost.

If somebody is really clinically depressed, for example, [the company] might say, 'I'm not going to get this guy to hold down a job for three years because he's not up to it so I'm not going to expend my efforts on him at the moment'."

This only increases the incentive for the skivers to make themselves look like hard cases. And Mr Freud thinks there are plenty of them. "Fewer than a third of those on incapacity benefit are really too ill to get a job." There is talk of some slicing of benefits for those who won't co-operate, but how meaningful will this turn out to be? And how easy will it prove to be to get dubiously motivated people off benefit and into work against competition from enthusiastic Poles?

To be sure, Mr Freud highlights other measures in a carefully unspecific way. He says

If you want a recipe for getting people on to IB, we've got it: you get more money and you don't get hassled. You can sit there for the rest of your life. And it's ludicrous that the disability tests are done by people's own GPs - they've got a classic conflict of interest and they're frightened of legal action.

So there has to be a big change in the procedures for people entering incapacity benefit, and for their continued entitlement.

As the Financial Times points out, some people make a deliberate choice to live off state welfare payments for the quality of life.

And Mohammed Nawaz Raja, an alleged Islamic terrorist organiser says in the News of the World

"Praise be to Allah I have a car of my own. I have a five bedroom house in High Wycombe. The government is paying me. When I go to Pakistan, my family still gets paid. The system in Britain is that the government pays.

"Take for example a small family with four children, if the husband works he would get £300 to £400 a week. And if he doesn't work the government still pay him around that, so why should he work?

"If he works he gets around £350 a week and if he doesn't he gets £300. For just £50, who would work?"

Reading the account of his activities, it's hard to imagine anyone would ever employ him. Carrots can't work in his case, so a pretty useful stick has to be available. Effective policy has to go beyond the touchy feely.

Never mind. Happily for Mr Raja a solution beckons. Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review. If two can live as cheaply as one, what of five?

Mr Freud claims his system can be in place within five years. Hey, hold hard there! Meanwhile, better get working on some pretty serious sticks.

If the officials are prepared to give that consideration in due course.

Robber Conway is still an MP.