Catching up with benefit fraud (not)

Explaining why Gordon Brown is losing the votes of the "GMTV family", The Telegraph quotes Sarah Randall from Harlow:

Mrs Randall reckons the whole system is weighted against people who try to stand on their own feet. "We both work, and yet the Government doesn't seem to be doing anything about people who don't. We're doing everything we should do. We're in a stable relationship, we've got our own home, we're looking after our children, and they [the Government] don't do an awful lot to make our lives any easier."

What incenses her is to see others living idly at the taxpayers' expense. "I have an issue with people over 16 who live at home, don't work, and are given dole money," she said. "A lot of that money is spent on drink, drugs and cigarettes".

Today we have Mohamed Shaukat Ali from Portishead, who received an overpayment of housing benefit of £6,073.98 and an overpayment of council tax benefit of £712.93.

The offender started a claim for housing benefit and council tax benefit in November 2004 for a property in Portishead.

He renewed his claim by completing a review form in April 2007.

On investigating the claim, it was found that he had not declared that he was actually the leaseholder for the Spicy Aroma restaurant in High Street, Portishead and had been since September 2006.

The investigation also established that he had bought a house in Portishead.

He got away with it for two and a half years. He just went on claiming too long.

A woman from Wootton Bassett was overpaid £7,240.25 of housing benefit and £1,542.10 of council tax benefit - between February 2001 and December 2006, nearly 5 years. She had failed to declare savings of more than £12,000 and was planning a Caribbean holiday.

And a Cardiff couple with four small children cheated the benefits system out of more than £36,000 in a fraud which went on for years.

Gemma Kerr, 24, had just one five-month-old baby when she put in a claim for income support saying she was separated from her husband and unable to work because there was no one to look after her child.

By the time the law caught up with her and Anthony Kerr, 32, they had become parents to three more children and are now expecting their fifth.

But Mr Kerr was working as a taxi driver.

Kerr’s applications for taxi driver licences exposed the cheating when the local authority realised his address at Elizabeth Avenue, Barry, was the same one his wife used for her benefits.

Mr Crowther said: “They cross-referenced the details with credit agencies and found he had claimed to have been living at that address with his wife for the past four years.

A man from Market Rasen was overpaid Council Tax Benefit of £774.70 and Income Support of £3034.70 after failing to declare that his wife had inherited £48,000! The council spotted this one quite quickly - the overpayments covered a 10 month period.

The News of the World has a report claiming that "weedy, pasty-faced and workshy, swaggering Keith MacDonald is the most disgusting little breeder in Britain", but he'll probably be proud of the publicity. He's fathered seven children by seven girls. "And seedy MacDonald — who blows his benefit money on beer and fruit machines — has no intention of ever supporting his growing brood".

"I don't pay anything for any of my kids. I don't see them, so why should I?" he sneered. "They get benefits. They get looked after".

The paper suggests that the offspring will cost us £1m in benefits.

Age is no bar. MacDonald is 22, but Graham Waterman from Portsmouth is 58. Between 1997 and 2006 , he claimed £55,813 in income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit that he was not entitled to by failing to tell the authorities that his wife Linda, was working as a carer. He also didn't mention that he was working for two months at the beginning of 2006. Comment from the Taxpayers' Alliance focuses on the fact that he would be 110 by the time the money was repaid. But the fraud went on for nine years.

The authorities hope that reports like these will deter. But will they? If you're hard up, they might increase the temptation.

The Edinburgh Evening News reports that the estimated annual cost of benefit fraud in the UK is "£900 million, or £36 from each family". The council is producing a newsletter.

Doubtless Mrs Randall would be impressed.

P.S. Feeling over-taxed? Trevor Kavanagh has a cracking piece.

How benefit frauds work

A woman from Newton-le-Willows failed to declare that her partner had moved in with her, which resulted in an over-payment of benefit totalling £3,557.66.

In Fulham a 75-year-old pensioner pleaded guilty to defrauding the Council out of £6,442.96 in housing benefit and £1,993.37 in council tax benefit. The offences, dating back to 2001, were picked up in a datamatch from the National Fraud Initiative Report 2005 "which identified thousands of fraudsters from across the country". He had been working while claiming benefit under the pretence that he had been out of work. The council may claim that it "will continue to track down those who commit benefit fraud and bring them to justice", but it didn't track him down. They were handed him on a plate and it took them several years to close the case.

Next, the case of the Iraqi general's son which has been making the national news. He has been living secretly in South Yorkshire for years as a failed asylum seeker using forged papers. Abas Fazil also made false claims for benefits when he could not find a job.

Last November he showed up at a Doncaster recruitment agency looking for work, and presented a Home Office Leave to Remain letter in his name, which checks showed was fraudulent. When he returned four days later officers were waiting for him, he was arrested, and his home in Regent Street, Balby, was searched.

A UK passport in the name of Craig Birtles, but with Fazil's photo inside, was found and he later confessed he had paid an associate £1,000 for the passport in 2005 so he could visit his sister in Iraq.

He also admitted buying the fake Home Office document for £100. While not working Fazil had falsely claimed more than £3,500 in Jobseeker's Allowance, housing benefit and council tax benefit.

Fazil, who has already been served with a deportation notice, was jailed for nine months.

More forgery in the case of Southall "spiritual guru Parmjit Singh", who claimed Housing Benefit from November 1995 to November 2004 totalling £46,002. He produced forged declarations from people who he said were his landlords, without revealing that his real landlord was a family member, which would have disqualified him from benefit.

Forgery isn't a feature in most court cases we've reported so far. But the general's son was able to get his forged documents very cheaply - suggesting they are easy to get and are widely used.

Benefit fraud around the country

A Warrington woman aged 59 has admitted fraudulently claiming income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit totalling over £10,000 between August 2005 and July 2007 while she was in employment. The council say: "The obvious message to benefit cheats is you will be caught"!

Kennet District Council are announcing they uncovered more than £60,000 in overpaid housing and council tax benefit as a result of benefit fraud in the first nine months of the financial year. They prosecuted 11 fraudulent benefits claimants in the courts, handed out seven administrative penalties against fraudsters in excess of £2,000 and gave 18 official cautions. They go on to warn anyone committing benefit fraud that it is only a matter of time before they are caught! But they don't tell us how much they paid out.

========

If you want to commit benefit fraud, you may find the hints from Wokingham Borough Council helpful. They list some common types of fraud and add

We pay approximately £12.3 million in Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit every year. Nationally, it is estimated that about 10% of benefit paid has been claimed fraudulently.

Sadly this huge number is not sourced. Nor are Wokingham saying how much fraud they detected.

Labour's decline continues

An amusing coda to the story picked up by Richard North about the proposal for public buildings to fly the union flag more often. The Financial Times reports that these plans have suffered "an unexpected glitch".

The government consulted on the proposal and promised to publish the results. But ministers have now changed their minds, since "a backlash by “middle England” generated hundreds of letters of protest" after a Labour MP suggested that the flag should be changed to incorporate the Welsh dragon.

Officials told the FT the “hundreds” of responses had focused mainly on the perceived threat to change the flag. “Although that was not remotely part of what we were consulting on, it provoked middle England to reply,” an official said.

Asked if the government decided not to publish the responses because of their Daily Mail-style outraged tenor, the official replied: “That’s a fair assumption.”

The FT claims that "the decision to relax the flag-flying days will now be slipped out, as part of a white paper on constitutional changes to be issued shortly".

So Brown's government will only publish the results of consultations if they get the right answer. This contempt for truth and accountability might have amused my Umbrella Blog colleague Tony Sharp, but he seems to be in an angry mood these days.

Maybe he will be cheered by the news that McBrown is seen to be in danger of losing southern England. Hence, reports the FT in a spiky report worth reading in full, an ideological debate is raging in the PLP.

Nearly half of Labour’s most vulnerable seats are in the south, says the FT, and 20 of the party’s 47 losses at the last election were in the south-east.

Seats in London and along the M4 corridor, the north Kent coast, the south coast and the M11 corridor are known in the Labour high command as the “killing fields” of the next election.

Lord Radice has taken to referring to "southern discomfort".

Twisting the knife, the paper suggests that Gordon Brown may privately welcome a row with the Labour left: "it sends out a useful political message to the aspirational middle classes and it is cheaper than trying to buy back their votes – something he cannot do because the coffers are empty".

Voters seem to have seen through McBrown's Britishness wheeze. And Mr Cameron is about to point out that inflation for most voters is running far above Mr Stalin's figure of some 2%, hammering Mr Stalin rather than Mr Eyebrows. Quite right. Mr Eyebrows will doubtless be jettisoned when it's convenient, whereas Mr Stalin seems highly unlikely to walk the plank.

Mrs Balls' response to the Tories is feeble as usual: "We can't afford the Conservative approach of unfunded tax cuts and taking risks with stability and inflation." This is the political answer to those who would like promises of big tax cuts: because the Tories aren't promising them, they are depriving Labour of their target. Mrs Balls is flailing at a target which isn't there.

Economically things will continue to get worse for the government, so all the Opposition has to do to maintain its lead on economic competence is to keep pointing out that the government - and McStalin in particular - have been profligate with our money and are lying about the worsening inflation numbers, making them look out of touch. Was it not Mrs Balls herself who claimed she could buy 4 pints of milk for under £1? - or maybe I misheard her.

Mrs Balls it was who introduced the harmful Home Information Packs - and even managed to botch that. Mrs Balls it was who said she made no apology for "greenplating" the measure. For expenses purposes Mr and Mrs Balls claim their expensive London house as their second home (which it clearly is not), while pretending that their constituency residences are their main homes. Richard Littlejohn reports that between them they receive more than £580,000 a year. No wonder Mr Balls shrugs his shoulders at the prospect of higher taxation.

Mrs Balls is probably more useless than Alan Johnson or Charles Clarke - no mean achievement. Perhaps we'll return to them in a future post.

You play, we pay

The Taxpayers' Alliance blog Burning Our Money has as its non-job of the week Islington's advertisement for a Senior Play Ranger.

The requirement for "an experienced play worker who is level 3 qualified in play work" alerts us that this is not some isolated Islington loonery - there is a whole qualification structure out there. We know it must be important because Islington will be using "initial two-year funding received from the Big Lottery Fund". Yes, lottery players, your money is going to good causes.

How much of this is going on? Search Google for .uk sites which include the word "council" and the phrase "play ranger", and it offers you "about 3,250 pages". I'm not going to read them all, but one guesses that:

1. There will be a 'national strategy'

2. There will be guidelines and enablers and possibly inspectors

3. It will be costing us a lot of money across the country.

Indeed, North Hertfordshire helpfully inform us that

The Government-commissioned document ‘Making the Case for Play’, produced by the Children’s Play Council (2002), has highlighted the importance of play in children’s development and raised its profile nationally. In 2005, central Government pledged £200 million to improve children’s play facilities, and in November of that year the Big Lottery Fund (BLF) launched a £155 million Children’s Play Initiative.

How does North Herts get its hands on a share of this boodle?

Each District Council has been allocated a proportion of the BLF Play funds, with North Hertfordshire entitled to up to £227,000 over three years. However, in order to draw down these funds, Districts have to make a written application setting out their intentions. Part of this criteria (sic) is that Councils have a Play Strategy and Play Partnership.

There were four "contact officers" for the North Herts strategy submission, the Acting Children’s Services Development Manager, the Community Development Manager, the Senior Lawyer, and the Accountancy Manager. I bet they even took their meetings seriously.

This goes on across the country. Here's an inspiring picture from Richmondshire (no, I didn't invent it). Smiling are (left to right) Paul Radley, Army Welfare Service; Kate Davis, Richmondshire Community Safety Partnership (on the swing); Coun Jane Branch, Chairman of Play Partnership and Member Champion for Recreation and Healthy Lives; Judith Bromfield, Richmondshire Council for Voluntary Services; Lynda Powell, Head of Partnerships, Richmondshire District Council; Vivienne Osborn, North Yorkshire County Council 4 Youth; Simon Robson, North Yorkshire County Council Sure Start. Good people, doubtless, but should we be forced to afford them?

To take one more example, Cheltenham's Play and Free Time Strategy for Children and Young People in Cheltenham 2005 - 2008 informs us that

The Play and Free Time Strategy for Cheltenham has been developed by using three key strategic agendas, Every Child Matters, the Gloucestershire Play Policy and Cheltenham’s Community Plan.

Perhaps not surprisingly considering this ludicrous spending (not to mention the ludicrous overheads caused by all this paperwork), we find that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister was involved.

“When children play together, parents invariably talk together and new community alliances are forged. Inclusive play spaces can be the seedbeds from which sustainable and inclusive communities grow.”

That won't stop if the play strategy and the play rangers are abolished overnight.

If we are to have national nannies, they should be funded locally, so that local communities can decide whether they want to pay for such a "service", and if so what they want it to do in their area.

Maybe local communities would prefer their money to be spent on open spaces. Maybe local communities would prefer their money to be spent on home care for the elderly. Maybe people in local communities would prefer their local authorities not to spend their money on this at all, but to leave it in their own pockets, where it came from.

But how much more convenient for the state nannies to organise it centrally. Local authorities are immune from challenge, because they are bound by national rules. So the central bureaucrats can nanny all the local authorities, and being part of the large central apparatus they themselves are safer from challenge.

It is not the state's money. It is not the local authorities' money. That money belongs to the people. You play, we pay.

Benefit fraud looks easy

Richard Smith was unlucky. He obtained benefit of £6,481.53 over a three year period from Stockport Council even though he had £24,000 in the bank. This was not picked up by the council and we can have no idea how long it might have continued, had the council not been alerted anonymously through the fraud hotline.

========

Rossendale Council is to try naming and shaming. They are warning people who claim benefits they are not entitled to that "they will be caught and placed on their website" (though I can't find the page yet), and posters will be displayed across the borough. Given the squeamishness of some police forces about publicising criminals, it will be interesting to see whether the campaign faces human rights challenges. The report of this initiative gives examples of three types of frauds.

• Anne Egan received a 36-week suspended sentence and 100 hours community punishment after she cheated tax payers out of over £30,000 by failing to declare that her partner was living with her.
  
  
• Keith Broxton was given a 12-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay £100 costs when he lied about his savings so he could claim over £11,000 in job seekers allowance and council tax benefit [which doesn't feel like a deterrent sentence].
  
  
• Shirley Smith dishonestly received housing benefit and council tax benefit payments totalling over £11,000 by failing to notify the Council and Department of Work and Pensions that she was in employment.

These people are being roundly described as "benefit cheats". The council's web pages on benefit fraud are clearly written, explaining for instance "What Changes In My Circumstances Do I Need To Notify The Council of?" and "What Organisations Do The Investigation Unit Have Access To?"

None of these bodies sounds fierce. The Local Authority Investigation Officers Group "aims to provide its members with access to information from Parliamentary sources, the Department of Work and Pensions, Data Protection and the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate, which is relative to their fraud enquiries".

The aim of the National Anti Fraud Network is "to make available a national intelligence service to assist in deterring, detecting and preventing fraud. It also aims to provide a regular source of intelligence and focal points for Local Authorities on a wide range of fraud related matters".

The Benefit Fraud Inspectorate "was launched in November 1997 in response to widespread concerns about the estimated high levels of fraud in the Social Security system. Their mission is to maximise counter fraud performance and minimise the risk of fraud throughout the Social Security System". Their latest annual reports are dated 2002 and 2005 (state sector, innit). It is now to be closed. Its site reports that "the responsibility for the Government's inspection and assessment of housing and council tax benefit transfers from the BFI to the Audit Commission from April 2008".

The BFI published a few reports on local authority performance based on the authorities' self-assessments (none for September 2007 - March 2008), and undertook inspections (four in that period, all dated October). These are for underperforming authorities. Here are two.

The Haringey inspection, reported on in October, had taken place in May. "The Benefits service has a Housing Benefit (HB) and Council Tax Benefit (CTB) caseload of 37,200 and paid out £201 million in HB/CTB in 2006/07." There were 77 cautions, 29 administrative penalties, and 10 prosecutions, a total of 116 so called sanctions out of the 37,200 caseload (0.3%, or 16.6 cases per investigator over the whole year). Your chances of being caught in Haringey are probably slim. No ifs, no buts, you're likely to get away with it.

In 2006/07 Broadland District Council paid Housing Benefit (HB) and Council Tax (CTB) totalling £17,949,870 to 6,739 "customers". The council reported 4 successful prosecutions, 24 formal cautions and 5 administrative penalties, a total of 33 sanctions out of the 6,739 caseload (nearly 0.5%).

The inspection reports are wordy and unwieldy, do not follow a standard format, and seem to have taken a long time to produce. It hasn't proved easy to find the cost of the Inspectorate. It's probably desirable to give the Audit Commission a shot at doing better.

Benefit thieves, do you know who's following you? Probably nobody.

Accountable transparency and MEPs

My Umbrella Blog colleague The Huntsman applauds progress being made with disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act, with the present spotlight on MPs' expenses. We are only halfway to our destination.

On the financial front, think of Freedom of Information as a stepping stone towards accountable transparency. Click the label below to see previous posts. But the key point is that all state financial transactions are recorded on the web, so that we can see what they have spent our money on without having to submit (significant word) a request (significant word) each time we want to know something - and then wait.

If MPs' expenses are an Augean stables, what are we to say of spending by MEPs? This is the milieu which Open Europe have chosen to swim in. They have e-mailed UK MEPs inviting them to participate in their "European Parliament Transparency Initiative".

The enquiry focuses on employment of family members and particularly the EU arrangements for "paying agents". Open Europe write (surely tongue in cheek):

We believe disclosure of these details will help to restore trust that public money is being well spent. Our aim in this initiative is to restore confidence in the Parliament and MEPs of all parties. We will be publishing regular reports on the progress of the initiative.

Mr Pottering recently remarked that if he employed a family member it would be the end of his German political career. In the UK we see the transparency debate moving fast. This leads to the questions:

• What are the practices in EU states?
  
  
• Should states seek from their MEPs publication of their EU parliamentary expenses according to both EU and their own national rules?
  
  
• Across the EU, what can be considered best practice?

Doubtless Open Europe will raise these issues when the responses of MEPs to their transparency initiative prove to be less than full-hearted.

The over-riding principle here is that the state is not spending its own money. It's ours. That money belongs to the people.

We the people are entitled to see how our money is spent. This is the simple argument for accountable transparency. All state spending should be itemised on the internet.

So accountable transparency is the new democracy.

That is the destination. Congratulations to Open Europe for championing this principle for MEPs' spending.

Benefit frauds roll on

In Ulster, a woman has been convicted of benefit fraud. She claimed Income Support totalling £3,658 while failing to declare she had capital.

A Rochdale woman who fraudulently obtained £35,000 by posing as a single mother was caught when officials secretly filmed her at home living with her husband (which is generally what we want mothers to do, by the way). She lodged a claim when her husband left her in 1997, but she carried on claiming income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit when he returned a year later.

A three-month undercover surveillance operation was mounted at their house after an anonymous tip-off. This doesn't suggest a council that's spotting all instances of fraud. And even if they did, obtaining the evidence to convict seems horrendously labour-intensive. Indeed, she initially denied the allegations when interviewed, but when shown the evidence she admitted her husband had returned.

Today's third case concerns a Bishops Stortford woman who was given a 12-month conditional discharge after she claimed almost £3,000 in housing and council benefit that she was not entitled to. She failed to tell East Herts Council when she started receiving Working Tax Credit.

The paper explains that

Benefits payments are worked out according to the claimant's circumstances, so if there any changes they need to tell the council within four weeks so their payments can be adjusted. This means anything that affects their household income, which includes other people living with them, needs to be declared.

Why don't the DWP and HMRC automatically share this information with local authorities? There is no human rights issue here - if people sign up for means tested benefits from taxpayers, taxpayers are entitled to expect that the state will routinely combine information from the relevant financial databases to ensure that no money is given away which is not properly due.

This would have picked up both these English cases quickly. And if people knew this would be done as a matter of routine, we would probably see fewer attempts at fraudulent claims, especially if the penalties were known to be realistic.

More local authorities on benefit fraud

Winchester City Council reports that it has prosecuted 13 people successfully since April 2007, including a married couple overpaid £11,000 over two years. They worked for four different employers during that time, but still claimed housing and council tax benefit along with Jobseeker's Allowance.

The council call this "cracking down" but give no meaningful numbers.

East Northamptonshire Council has been reported on more comprehensively than most councils. It paid out £64m in housing and council tax benefits between 2000 and 2007.

During that time it has recovered more than £1.8m in overpayments but is still working on claiming back an outstanding amount of £423,531.

So almost 3.5% of the amount paid out has been identified as overpaid.

The council claim to be one of the best at recovering overpaid benefits. "There is always money outstanding because there has to be a full investigation before we can take enforcement action against someone. There is always a delay between the overpayment going out and it being recovered".

The council has reclaimed nearly 75% of the overpayments identified for 2005/06, over 70% of those from 2006/07, and almost 53% from 2007/08. Of course these are only the over-payments they have identified.

"But officers said the speed at which councils can claim back money has slowed because the law has been changed."

Previously, if a payment to a tenant was made direct to their landlord, the council could ask the landlord to repay the money, but now it is the responsibility of the tenant to make the repayment and, as a result, the size of the instalments made to the council tend to be smaller.

In the last year East Northamptonshire Council has taken out two successful prosecutions against people who have attempted to defraud it. It has another two prosecutions pending and has issued penalties in several other cases. Which doesn't seem a lot for all that money.

Benefit fraud and the national fraud initiative

A couple from Chalfont St Giles who fraudulently claimed more than £29,000 in benefits were sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. The housing benefit overpayment was £10,262.03 and council tax benefit overpayment was £2,795.19. The rest was DWP benefits.

They were shopped.

The fraud originally came to light as a result of the Edwards winning a Paradigm Housing gardening competition for best garden.

Photographs of the competition winners were displayed in the district council's offices in Amersham - and on November 8 2006, a member of the public anonymously told the council they believed the couple were both claiming benefits while working.

Following a joint investigation by Chiltern District Council and the DWP, it was confirmed the couple were both working whilst claiming benefits.

A Shenley woman has been convicted of benefit fraud totalling over £90,000. She had been claiming income support and housing benefit since 1999 on the grounds that she was a single parent with three children. But a civil action taken to evict her from one of her properties led the DWP to investigate her claim. They discovered that she had four properties, and undeclared bank accounts containing large amounts of money.

========

More on fraud prevention at local authorities. Cannock Chase District Council has announced that it will be taking part in the National Fraud Initiative (NFI), "a biennial data matching exercise run by the Audit Commission to identify fraudulent and erroneous payments from the public purse".

Cannock Chase District Council will be providing council tax single person discount and electoral register data to the Audit Commission for cross-system comparison for the prevention and detection of fraud

- apparently they can't run this check themselves; why not?

The council reports that

A trial of this pilot exercise undertaken by the London Borough of Hillingdon identified £1million in savings.

The cost of the data matching would have been trivial. So why is this not going live nationally now?

========

The Audit Commission's summary of the NFI for 2004/05 (yes, I know, but this is the state sector) reveals that the number of participating public sector bodies contributing data was just under 1,300. Detected fraud was £111m. It's not all benefit fraud, but it found housing benefit overpayments of more than £22m.

Despite these successes, the NFI team’s site visits established that many sites had missed the opportunities this new area offered by failing to review the reports containing these matches. The sequence and structure of the NFI reports has now been revised and in NFI 2006/07 the reports will be placed more prominently alongside the other key housing benefit reports. In addition NFI communications and guidelines will emphasise the importance of these matches.

In these days of databases, this must be one big way forward for fraud detection. But is it being used as fully as possible? Come on, Mr Plaskitt!

Today's benefit fraud

Worth looking at a case today in some detail. Naomi Welford-Hill, 22, from Chorley, has pleaded guilty to claiming over £3,500 in benefits that she wasn't entitled to, encompassing Housing and Council Tax Benefits and Income Support.

Previously she had legitimately claimed Income Support, Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit as a single parent at her old address. However, she failed to notify Chorley Council and the DWP that her partner had moved in and that he was in full-time employment. She withdrew her claim for benefits when she moved to her present address.

• The council acted on information received - they don't seem to have discovered the fraudulent claims themselves.
  
  
• She had to find her way through claiming three different benefits.
  
  
• Her entitlements ended when her partner moved in with her. Two parent families are generally agreed to be better than one. This is an example where the state rewarded the woman for being a single parent. Financially, she and her partner might well have been better off if they'd continued living apart.
  
  
• It was up to her to take the initiative to stop her benefits. If there were clear, standard penalties, maybe there would have been less temptation for her. But £3,500 is doubtless a lot of money to them.

========

Continuing our tour of local authorities, we see Kennet District Council announcing that they have uncovered more than £60,000 in overpaid housing and council tax benefit as a result of benefit fraud in the first 9 months of the financial year.

However, there is probably more to find.

During this period the Councils Investigations Team has prosecuted 11 fraudulent benefits claimants in the Courts, handed out 7 administrative penalties against fraudsters in excess of £2000 and given 18 official cautions.

Thus fewer than half the detected cases came to court.

The council are not telling us how much they pay out each year, or how many claims they process. That's probably significant.

We do know that Harrow Council has saved around £336,711 in benefit payouts. And we know that Scarborough Council is paying out more than £35m a year in rent and council tax benefits, dealing with with around 150 new claims and 210 changes in circumstances each week.

So Kennet District Council probably has a lot more to find. Come on, Mr Plaskitt!

Stresses in the EU

In his Telegraph blog Bruno Waterfield reports on a press conference given by Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament.

Asked why the Parliament did not clean up its act, the institution’s President claimed that in the EU one man’s expense scam could be another man’s legitimate claim on allowances. It’s a cultural thing, don't you know?

Mr Pöttering explained that MEPs come from various cultures.

“If I was to employ someone from my own family, and this person was one of my sons and he got money from me. I could say goodbye to politics. I would lose my job. Obviously it is different in the UK. This is a crude example of how different our cultures are.”

But, says Waterfield, he didn't explain why the rules that have been agreed, "notwithstanding the EU’s 27 different cultures", are not properly applied. Stern claims that between 2004 and 2005 receipts for expenditure on MEP allowances worth over £58 million are missing.

He also failed to properly tell us why the Parliament has refused, despite rulings from its own Ombudsman, to give details of allowance payments.

Mr Pöttering’s own evasiveness and secrecy is indeed the product of a unique culture: the euro-culture of “not in front of the children” that tends to universally prevail in the EU institutions.

Stricter rules generally apply in the north of the EU than in the south. If MEPs' expenses were set out in detail, northern voters might start asking why they should tolerate the lax standards of the southern members. That would never do.

Out in the currency markets, some money is moving from the US dollar into the euro as a safer haven. This is naturally leading economists to point out that the euro is not risk free. They particularly highlight the growing gulf between the economic performance of the northern and southern eurozone countries.

Publication of southern MEPs' expenses might add a little political strain to the growing economic strains. That would never do either.

P.S. Open Europe relays a Finnish daily Vasabladet report that Finns are becoming increasingly sceptical about their country's EU membership. "A new poll shows that 35% are against membership altogether - the highest figure ever - versus 36% in favour. 66% think the membership costs too much and 79% that the EU imposes too many rules on Finland".

A couple of numbers

An estimated 700,000 people in the UK have Alzheimer's disease. However, the Alzheimer's Research Trust estimates that just £11 per patient is spent annually on research into the disease - compared with £289 for each cancer patient.

Proponents of man-made global warming have been funded over the past decade to the tune of $50 billion whereas the sceptics have received a meagre $19 million.

Benefit fraud pays, Mr Plaskitt

More cases. Gordon Cullen, from West Kirby, has admitted benefit fraud (and counterfeiting). He has been sent to prison and is to pay £130,000 compensation.

Two Essex Tory councillors have been jailed for swindling their own council in a benefits scam. They had their own business, a US holiday home, and a rented-out flat but claimed £3,400 in council tax benefits. The council has been repaid.

Keith McNiffe has stood down as Mayor of Pembroke. He has been charged with claiming thousands of pounds in disability living allowance while continuing to referee at football matches, and appears in court on Monday.

Robert Marsh, from Cosham, has admitted six offences of benefit fraud worth £12,600. Earlier this week, Barry Marsh, his father, was sentenced for swindling £30,000 in incapacity and council tax benefits. They had a business and enjoyed foreign holidays.

Nilesh Patel, from Greenwich, claimed incapacity benefit, Income Support, housing benefit and council tax benefit as he was unable to work due to osteoarthritis, but he did not mention while he was claiming that his wife had £85,258 in a building society account, which disqualified him from income-based benefits. Having conned the benefits system out of £17,478, he was ordered to pay costs of £300, as well as £700 to the Council (as well as community service - has he repaid the rest?).

An asylum seeker who fiddled £25,000 in benefits – while he had £500,000 in the bank – has been ordered to pay back just £1 because he's made away with the rest of his money.

A North Tyneside woman who fraudulently claimed benefits of more than £10,000 has been given a community order and told to pay the money back, after submitting false benefit application forms to North Tyneside Council.

An Elstree woman has been convicted of benefit fraud totalling £1,260. She had failed to declare more than £50,000 she had made from the sale of a repossessed property.

A Hadfield woman claimed £4,018 in Income Support, Job Seekers Allowance, Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit for periods between 2004 and 2007. During this time, she worked for five different employers in part time, low paid cleaning jobs, but failed to disclose this. Reading the report, one feels some sympathy for her. It's a crime, but the system makes it easy for weak people to slip into continuing to claim dishonestly.

A Northumberland property tycoon who owns houses worth more than £3m has admitted a £6,000 benefit fraud. After he finally changed his plea to guilty, Judge David Hodson gave him a conditional discharge! James Plaskitt, the Fraud Minister, said, ""We are taking a tough line on benefit fraudsters because they steal £20m a year in the North East - money that should be spent on those who really need it." Where did you get that number, James? - bearing in mind that the DWP alone lost £690m to fraud in one year. Are people in the North East outstandingly honest, perhaps?

Let's look at a few numbers in recent news stories. Scarborough Council has revealed that it is paying out more than £35m a year in rent and council tax benefits. It deals with with around 150 new claims and 210 changes in circumstances each week. How many of these can they realistically check manually?

Set that against North Shropshire District Council, who proclaim that they are "in the process of recovering £48,000 of tax payers’ money after bringing charges against benefit cheats in the past year". What proportion of benefit fraudsters do we think they caught?

Wear Valley District Council announce that sixty five benefit fraudsters in their area have been "brought to justice" since last April through fines, cautions or prosecution. Note that not all of this meagre total were prosecuted, so not all the cases will have become public. The council say (my emphasis)

EVEN WHEN customers refuse to co-operate with our investigation officers, if the weight of the evidence is sufficient, we will ensure that those committing fraud receive the appropriate punishment.

When you look at these numbers, remember that new software has helped Harrow Council save around £336,711 in benefit payouts - a massive 34% more than the total fraud the council had thought they were suffering.

Then consider the Conservative claim that £28m in child benefit being sent to EU Accession States. How could anyone check any of this?

Conclusion - you can probably get away with a benefit fraud claim (as Fiona MacKeown appears to have done), just as you can probably get away with car tax evasion.

As we've said before, we need as a start to have stronger penalties, and to have the voice pattern software adopted nationally. Meanwhile if you are contemplating it, the chances are that benefit fraud pays. We pay as taxpayers.

Manhattan declaration - a bungled opportunity

The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change is a useful summary of the position that rejects the construct of man-made "Global Warming".

So why is it a missed opportunity?

First, the language.

"Global warming" is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed 'consensus' among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity's real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend --

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as "An Inconvenient Truth."

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

This colourless, unmemorable text reads as if it's been written by a committee. It's intended as a popular rallying cry - but where are the short, punchy sentences? Where are the striking phrases?

Second, would you like to sign up to support it? You can if you happen to chance upon this pdf here. Well, maybe you can. As far as I can see, you'd have to print the form off, sign it and "circle one of the above" on page 2, and then scan it and e-mail it as an enclosure - you cannot save data typed into the form.

Philip Stott takes you to a report in American Thinker which leads you to the "long-awaited un-IPCC report -- Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate: Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. But oh dear there's no summary.

Desperately worthy, but I'm afraid bungled in execution.

P.S. I understand the signing up form has now been removed as it was intended for people attending the conference.

Freedom to waste

Rachel Sylvester has space to fill this week so she has written a piece about which politicians are cavaliers and which roundheads / puritans. This would be sad as a parlour game after lunch on Sundays, and certainly didn't deserve publication.

Despite a fondness in some quarters around here for orotund language, most of our umbrellablog colleagues cleave to the roundhead tendency. Certainly none of them could be described as wrong but wromantic.

Quite apart from being unilluminating, Ms Sylvester's analysis is actually wrong. The government is not in the hands of puritans. How can we tell? Turn a few pages of the Telegraph and you will find a review by Gillian Reynolds of a recent File On 4.

It is a tale of Regional Development Agencies living high on the hog at taxpayers' expense. A modern puritan would have sacked the offenders at once. But there would be little to stop their successors doing it again.

In the tentacle state, local satraps run unfettered and unchallenged. In the nationalised health service, heads of hospitals spend large sums, and in some cases kill people, with no effective supervision. Lack of accountability could work if there was a gulag for these people, but our government's softness means they just get punished with a fat pay-off.

For the extravagances revealed in File on 4 there is no sanction at all.

In general, complaints to the minister responsible for RDAs, Margaret Hodge, receive comment but are handed back to the agencies for action. As the programme made abundantly clear, since there is no open accounting process, no public scrutiny of performance or probity, these expensive, shadowy, quangocracies are not being held duly responsible.

It seems unlikely that Lady Hodge in her role as Culture Clown is also responsible for RDAs. Indeed, she would be better employed on the back benches, and it's inexplicable why she remains a minister (is she really the best the government can offer?). However, the minister responsible might compel the local satraps under their wing to introduce accountable transparency, so that all spending is itemised on their websites and they can be held to account, as increasingly happens in the States. They could make the RDAs more accessible (geddit?).

Support the Taxpayers' Alliance. A bunch of flowers to Gillian Reynolds for bringing this to another audience, and hair shirts all round for the Regional Development Agencies.

That money belongs to the people of our country, not to you.

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.

More benefit fraud

What's been happening in the past few days?

In London Josef Kolendowicz, who defrauded two local authorities and the DWP out of almost £100,000, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.

In Harrow a couple fraudulently claimed £7,626 from Harrow Council to decorate their house, not revealing they had over £30,000 in savings. A Swanley man concealed bank accounts and so fraudulently claimed over £7,000 from Sevenoaks District Council.

In Northampton Nomathemba Moche admitted receiving housing benefit, council tax benefit and incapacity benefit totalling almost £3,000 despite returning to work.

A Basingstoke woman unlawfully claimed £3,870 after failing to tell the council that her husband was working.

Javeid Akhtar and Banaras Ali from Leeds, described as brothers, made £225,000 over ten years from a benefit fraud scam involving their extended family. Both were sentenced to four and a half years in prison and they must pay almost £224,000 in compensation and £41,000 costs.

A Renfrewshire family of 13 have been charged with obtaining £569,000 in tax credits.

Huntingdonshire magistrates last week sentenced four fraudsters over a total of almost £14,000 in false claims.

And a woman from Dursley has pleaded guilty to benefit fraud after falsely claiming over £17,000. The account of her home life is (perhaps understandably) confusing, but the key point is that the fraud was deliberate.

It's reported that benefit fraudsters in Corby have stolen more than £160,000 of public money in the past year, "prompting a council crackdown on cheats". Hm. Didn't they realise it's happening everywhere?

But detection isn't always straightforward. For instance investigators in Wirral have a specially equipped vehicle to undertake covert surveillance on customers suspected of benefit fraud. The costs in time and money must be great. The fraud minister claims: "Our message to those people considering benefit theft is simple: don't do it - we will catch you". Not if detection is that time-consuming, they won't.

As for those legally on benefits, The Spectator's Coffee House blog points out that two disintegrating communities highlighted in Panorama have 28% of adults on welfare, but just 5% on jobseeker's allowance, while Peter Hitchens says 50,000 drug abusers are claiming incapacity benefit "and no doubt a lot of other benefits on top, presumably including exemption from council tax".

It is a defiance of the known laws of the land. And we reward them with pensions as if they had fought for their country, when all they've done is shame it, and all we owe them is a narrow cell and a bowl of porridge.

Worse, in a way, is the fact that the inadequate wages and pensions of postmen, school-dinner ladies and retired soldiers are plundered by the taxman and the town hall to keep these people idle in their squalid nests, where they no doubt bring misery to neighbours and to the thousands of children said (terrifyingly) to be in their care.

How did this happen? Who devised the regulations? Will anything bad happen to them?

When did we, as a people, sign this national suicide pact that rewards disgusting irresponsibility and punishes everyone else?

Separately the Daily Mail reports on film of radical Muslim preacher talking about fraudulently claiming benefits and giving advice on how to cheat the Government.

After a story about a wealthy man, he said: "There was one man, he had a lot of money - just like us, we have a lot of money today from the income support and the incapacity benefit.

"Obviously when you have the incapacity benefit, you want to make sure you walk with a limp when you leave the house just in case there's someone taking pictures.

"Obviously you don't need to tell them that, the Department of Work and Pensions."

The welfare state is spawning widespread abuse. Several of today's cases are deliberate frauds, planned from the outset. But poor people can get what for them are large amounts of money simply by not volunteering new information.

What this series of posts strongly suggests is that benefit fraud is widespread and expensive. Not all court cases are reported on the internet. Not all cases get to court. Many are dealt with administratively. Doubtless huge numbers of cases go undetected.

There are evidently many people out there who find the temptation just too great. Detection needs to become swifter and surer, and penalties I'm afraid need to become harsher, so that they do deter.

FT writer attacks public sector cushiness

The analysis by Jonathan Guthrie is dense, the conclusion damning. A business in a financially tight corner like the government's would become more efficient. But

Both parties are addicted to the idea that they can buy popularity with spending pledges. Labour is nervous of the increasingly assertive public service unions. Cost reduction drives launched earlier this decade have run into the sand.

Median pay is higher in the state sector, people retire earlier on far better pensions, and sackings are much rarer.

The Gershon savings are mostly unattained, and the Lyons target of moving 20,000 jobs out of London looks likely to be missed. He quotes a few examples of poor value for money.

• This week, the Commons public accounts committee reported that the government is spending a jaw-dropping £2.3bn in administering £4.1bn in compensation to sick miners.
  
  
• Last week, taxpayers learnt they were paying GPs 58% more money to work fewer hours.
  
  
• Last year, "a Tory-sponsored study found no evidence that £12bn spent yearly by the public sector on business support supported anyone other than public servants".
  
  

Optimistically, he proposes that the job of state bodies is to supply services, not employment. "Most of all", he concludes, "chancellors and their opposition counterparts should stop spouting litanies of spending, either promised or delivered, as if these guaranteed better public services. They may as easily betoken epic wastage".

We do not despair of the Taxpayers' Alliance just because state sponsored waste continues. It just makes their important work more important. Today, for instance, they highlight the attempt of the highest paid Council Chief Executive in the country to ignore the Freedom of Information Act because it's more convenient for him and his colleagues.

Here, as in the other examples, the taxpayer is absent from the table. A business has its owners or outside shareholders to answer to. The taxpayer is supposedly represented by ministers. Most of them are kept too busy to delve into efficiency - and if they do stumble across over a problem, the last thing Downing Street wants them to volunteer to the media is that the government is wasting taxpayers' money, even though that money belongs to the people of our country.

That's why accountable transparency (first discussed on this blog here) is so important. It would save millions of pounds. Untold (literally untold) millions. Accountable transparency is spreading in the USA. So why not here? Too inconvenient, one suspects.

Bags of humbug

An excellent letter in today's Financial Times about the plastic bag initiative from Marks & Spencer. The "wonderful Marks and Spencer public relations", writes Malcolm Rasala, "is not the real story. Walk around the food department of any M&S store: everything is in plastic".

The idea that making people pay for carry-out bags will somehow halt global warming is intellectual nonsense. How many M&S stores were there when the last global warming happened, ending the ice age?

There are now 1.3bn Chinese starting to shop in supermarkets where once they bought from a local market. Ditto the 1bn in India. The population of the world is on course to grow 50 per cent to 9bn. Most of these will buy their orange juice in plasticised cartons. For M&S to pretend that its PR stunt will have any material effect in the real world is cynical marketing cant.

That applies just as much to Gordon Brown's plastic bag policy.

Maybe this supports the contention of Philip Stott: "I have consistently noticed that, the more organisations like the BBC and The Times appear ‘to promote’, rather than critically ‘to report’, an assumed ‘consensus’ over ‘global warming’, the more people take up the role of critics or just turn cynical."

People, he claims, are increasingly aware that politicians will be able to do virtually nothing of any significance about reducing worldwide CO2 emissions.

They witness too much hypocrisy, from carbon trading to Kyoto failures to Bali. Moreover, we are not fooled by such nonsensical tropes as ‘saving the planet’ and ‘stopping climate change’

Furthermore

people are increasingly sceptical over the idea that reducing CO2 will achieve any predictable climate outcomes, and they are now far more willing to focus on adaptation to climate change, rath