There is something odd about the modern British Left reflected in this.

Why should anyone care what the bureaucracy investigating itself has to say? Is anyone surprised that if you ask the pen-pushers to look into how well they are doing their jobs they give themselves a clean bill of health?

I expect that next LC will be publishing articles praising the Army’s investigations into the total lack of human rights abuses by soldiers in Iraq or by the Police on how British people of Afro-Caribbean origin are no more Stopped and Searched than anyone else.

Which is where the strangeness comes in. Since when did the Left become the vessel for the bureaucrats that run the system and not the people it is supposed to help? Or even the taxpayers who pay for it all.

This report is nonsense.

If they were able to identify that they had overpaid £3.4 billion they could presumably have chosen not to pay it? The whole point about fraud is that you don’t know you’re being defrauded- if you did you wouldn’t let it happen.

So these figures either refer to identified fraud or, more probably, to a sample survey and the projection some randomly constructed computer model.

Either way, the true level of benefit fraud cannot, by its nature, be identified so the figures are nonsense.

There were some 1.9 million people claiming Disability in 1997 when Labour came to power. A decade later and there was over 2.8 million. Claims don’t double so rapidly without massive fraud.

According to the Guardian of all papers, there is a massive problem:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) figures, which cover the period from 27 October 2008 to 31 August 2010, show that 887,300 of the 1,175,700 applicants for ESA failed to qualify for any assistance. Of those, 458,500 (39%) were judged fit to work, while 428,800 (36%) ditched their claim. A further 16% were placed in the “work-related activity group”, in which individuals are deemed able to take on some level of work but still receive a level of ESA support.

It is just absurd to claim there is so little fraud in the system. In fact it might be argued from these figures that the *majority* of people on Disability should not be claiming.

Estimates are exactly that. They do provide a useful comparison with previous estimates as the method of preparing them remains a constant. The trolls try to spin the point away from the incredibly low level of fraud compared with overpayment and underclaiming. The figures also make a useful comparison with the government’s estimates for tax fraud and an interesting contrast can be made over the resources devoted to prevention of those types of fraud.

The main point today is the government’s reluctance to publicise these figures the way they publicise those that support their arguments however spurious – see every utterance from Grayling whose use of ficticious statistics is a disgrace.

Hey, ivory tower dwelling righties.

Try reading diary of a benefit scrounger if you well and truly believe the crap peddled about benefits.

Thanks.

“There were some 1.9 million people claiming Disability in 1997 when Labour came to power. A decade later and there was over 2.8 million. Claims don’t double so rapidly without massive fraud.”

Indeed claims don’t “double so rapidly”. If you double 1.9 million, then you don’t get 2.8 million.

4. Schmidt – “They do provide a useful comparison with previous estimates as the method of preparing them remains a constant.”

Sure. They go out an interview a small sample of claimants. “We’re from the Government. Are you committing fraud?”. Why would anyone take it seriously?

“The trolls try to spin the point away from the incredibly low level of fraud compared with overpayment and underclaiming.”

Why would they as neither figure is as useful as, say, toilet paper?

“The figures also make a useful comparison with the government’s estimates for tax fraud and an interesting contrast can be made over the resources devoted to prevention of those types of fraud.”

Only if you want to spin away from the real topic to something else. What are the government’s estimates for tax fraud by the way? Richard Murphy has his own ideosyncratic method of estimating – but by that basis everyone who ever claimed benefits could be accused of fraud if we used his methods. There is no useful comparison here.

5. Cahal – “Hey, ivory tower dwelling righties. Try reading diary of a benefit scrounger if you well and truly believe the crap peddled about benefits.”

Isn’t that kind of the point? That life on the dole is incredibly destructive of the well being and good health, as well as the long term prospects, of people on the dole? And so for their own good we should get them off as soon as possible?

I have known a lot of people on the dole. Some perfectly able-bodied teenagers who chose not to work until they reached forty for instance. Utterly wasted lives.

Here are some more easily determinable figures I’d like to see: how much fraud can previous crackdowns be shown to have prevented, and how does the money saved compare with the cost of the crackdowns themselves?

Your .8% figure includes payments for benefits that are virtually impossible to defraud (like pensions, disability benefits and council tax benefits).

Looking at other benefits, the report says (for instance) that 4.1% of job seeker allowance is claimed fraudulently and that 3.9% of carer’s allowance is claimed fraudulently – far higher than your .8% figure.

Even then the 4.1% of money lost in jobseeker fraud could represent a small number of fraudsters making big claims, or many, many fraudsters making small claims.

These figures are no use in making any assessment in how many fraudsters there are, nor how well they are being tacked.

@ SMFS

I have known a lot of people on the dole. Some perfectly able-bodied teenagers who chose not to work until they reached forty for instance. Utterly wasted lives.

This is the point. The left tend to characterise anyone who opposes our current welfare system as evil Tories- too selfish to make a contribution to save others from poverty.

My opposition is because the current welfare system has unintended consequences- that it creates a permanent underclass and blights the lives of so many by killing aspiration.

@9

“Your .8% figure includes payments for benefits that are virtually impossible to defraud (like pensions, disability benefits and council tax benefits).”

Erm, what?? All three of these things can be defrauded if a person is that way inclined. “Impossible” my foot.

@7

“Some perfectly able-bodied teenagers who chose not to work until they reached forty for instance. ”

For someone to be in their 40s now they’d've been a teenager in the ’80s – glad to see you bashing Thatcher

Don’t you think it’s a strange idea that people would rather live on a meagre amount of money each week rather than have a job which provides a good standard of living? Most low skilled jobs pay only the miniumum wage and, unless you have children, you cannot claim tax credits. That’s why unemployment levels are high for the 16 to 24 year olds.
And the right-wing press don’t want to know that the level of benefits fraud is low, they want to continue giving their readers the notion that the reason why the country is in the state it’s in, is because of the usual suspects, – scroungers, single-mothers, ferel youth, fake disability claimants etc.

I for one will not let my insane, bar-room opinions be influenced in any way by official statistics unless they appear to agree with my prejudices. In fact, I have developed a technique for typing with my fingers in my ears. I bash my face into my keyboard until the correct words are formed. It takes a while, but then I wipe away the blood, and hey presto! Fresh banality of evil.

The government and the media are different things.

You complain thee government dont publiscise figures whilst quoting the figures they published

Yeah, if there’s more unemployed than employment opportunities I don’t think blaming it all on laziness is gonna wash.

@Dave #14:

“The government and the media are different things.

You complain thee government dont publiscise figures whilst quoting the figures they published” (speeling eerors in originul).

Oddly, I can’t find the press release about this on the DWP site:

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/newsroom/press%2Dreleases/

So when are Freud or IDS going to make a speech on benefit fraud publicising this; or are they going to stick on their contribution last month:

“Ministers say they are not amused, pointing out fraudulent benefit claims cost taxpayers £1.6bn a year.

“Benefit fraud is no joke, and yet our investigators are routinely dealing with bare-faced cheek and ridiculous excuses for stealing money from the taxpayer,” said welfare reform minister David Freud.”

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Benefits-Fraud-Ministers-Reveal-The-Most-Ridiculous-Excuses-Used-By-Benefit-Cheats/Article/201105416001752?f=rss

Note the reference to investigators “routinely dealing with …”; and the overstatement of benefit fraud.

Just shows me that many of the readers of this blog haven’t a clue.

Given the fact that well over esa fit for work assessments are overturned at appeal.

0.8 % is the number for DETECTED fraud.

@15. Cylux

And where do these unemployment opportunities come from? The govt? Mars?

The idea that job creation is some mysterious, exogenous process is a popular one on leftist blogs, but not, I feel, particularly helpful.

Not to go off like some irate gamer / libertarian crank (because I’m not, you know, a libertarian), but liberal bureaucracy really is the straw that stirs the drink–the life and soul of the party. How will anything move, if we’re not there to turn the wheel?

I just don’t know boys. Maybe the unemployed could themselves contribute. I mean, I thought it was called the private sector for a reason. Or perhaps the shame unemployment, of competing with Polish immigrant hotel bartenders, is just too much…

How the right wing trolls hang onto their hatred of the poor and their conviction that these loathesome parasites must be taking “their” tax money fraudulently. Meanwhile they completely ignore the tax dodgers who finesse billions of pounds into their own pockets instead of contributing to the national coffers. Of course, they are probably doing that, and regard dodging tax as “natural”, something “anyone would do”. Everyone plays the system, no? Which makes it highly likely that they would be the ones defrauding the benefits system if they were receiving them. Because it’s “natural” and something “anyone would do”.

“So these figures either refer to identified fraud or, more probably, to a sample survey and the projection some randomly constructed computer model.”

What do you expect? How do you think any financial figures are arrived at? Do you think somebody sits there counting £ coins to work out GDP? Even day to day accountancy involves huge amounts of assumptions and guesswork.

This article makes a good point. If the DWP were getting 99.2% in customer satisfaction surveys you wouldn’t here the end of it and the law of diminishing returns must be approaching as far as increasing efforts to reduce fraud are concerned. Yet the rhetoric from successive governments is that fraud is out of control.

“Your .8% figure includes payments for benefits that are virtually impossible to defraud (like pensions, disability benefits and council tax benefits).”

Retirement pension is difficult to defraud, the small amount of fraud that does occur is probably based on identity. However pension credit is means tested so is as easy to defraud as any benefit. Disability benefits can be defrauded by misrepresenting the level of disability which governments repeatedly tell us is rife yet in my experience it’s far more common for the benefits authorities to under-assess disability. Council tax benefit again is means tested so has the same vulnerabilities as the rest of this class of benefits.

So Much For Subtlety, please bare in mind I’m now a regular here and specialise in welfare; of you mis-use figures, I’ll know it.

For starters, what do you mean by ‘claiming disability’?

“There were some 1.9 million people *claiming Disability* in 1997 when Labour came to power.”

DLA or Incapacity Benefit? Because if you’re talking about Incapacity Benefit: it was introduced in 1995 and has remained stable ever since. DLA has risen because of artificial positive forcing the last Conservative government included in it: it siphons would-be Attendance Allowance claimants among pensioners onto DLA. So it has gone up simply because the population has gotten older and it will stop going up once it catches up with the life expectancy for mid-90s retirement cohorts.

(apologies to LC for linking to my own blog) http://masondixonautistic.blogspot.com/2011/04/case-5-playing-simon-says-with.html

You then miss-source a claim, falsely attributing it to the Guardian who merely reported it:

“The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) figures, which cover the period from 27 October 2008 to 31 August 2010, show that 887,300 of the 1,175,700 applicants for ESA failed to qualify for any assistance. Of those, 458,500 (39%) were judged fit to work, while 428,800 (36%) ditched their claim. A further 16% were placed in the “work-related activity group”, in which individuals are deemed able to take on some level of work but still receive a level of ESA support. ”

These the claims made by the DWP, or Chris Grayling misusing department resources to make overtly political and misleading press releases. It made no mention of the number of appeals and the success of them, nor did it explain what was meant by people who ‘stopped their claim before or during assessment’.

This is in question because after two years, over half of all ESA claimants were still in the Assessment phase: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r7Unoj_m12g/TffG6WujYCI/AAAAAAAAAEM/zQJqHIMqBxI/s1600/ESAphasesNOV10.jpg

The time a claimant is supposed to spend waiting for an assessment is 13 weeks, so there’s something wrong there. It looks like people who pass their assessment are then put back into the assessment phase until Atos delivers the ‘correct’ result or they give up.

The DWP says the data for fraud comes from their fraud investigators, if you find it questionable then maybe someone should tell the Sun to stop encouraging their readers to waste the investigators time. The fraud hotline gets 600 calls a day, most of them malicious and false.

@ vimothy

And where do these unemployment opportunities come from? The govt?

Well once the cuts get underway, yes. Yes they will.

heh

Excellent post Mason Dixon, Autistic.

@11. Mr S. Pill: “Erm, what?? All three of these things can be defrauded if a person is that way inclined. “Impossible” my foot.”

Mr S. Pill prays against power cuts in case the effluvia of granny in the freezer exposes him.

@2. pagar: “If they were able to identify that they had overpaid £3.4 billion…”

Retrospective evaluation of personal statements to government is used for quality checking. It is based on sampling rather than examining every statement. Similar methodology is applied to tax submissions and benefit claims. If the benefit over payment or tax under claim is modest, the error will not be pursued. If there is a systematic error affecting large numbers of people and large sums of money, the beneficiaries are asked to cough up.

This is commonly known as economic efficiency. Smart people do not try to collect debts that are smaller than the cost of recovery.

@3 So Much for Subtlety

There were some 1.9 million people claiming Disability in 1997 when Labour came to power. A decade later and there was over 2.8 million. Claims don’t double so rapidly without massive fraud.

According to the Guardian of all papers, there is a massive problem:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) figures, which cover the period from 27 October 2008 to 31 August 2010, show that 887,300 of the 1,175,700 applicants for ESA failed to qualify for any assistance. Of those, 458,500 (39%) were judged fit to work, while 428,800 (36%) ditched their claim. A further 16% were placed in the “work-related activity group”, in which individuals are deemed able to take on some level of work but still receive a level of ESA support.

It is just absurd to claim there is so little fraud in the system. In fact it might be argued from these figures that the *majority* of people on Disability should not be claiming.

FFS we already went over this on another thread did we not?
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/06/01/will-ministers-finally-accept-these-tests-drive-people-to-suicide/
Where we demonstrated conclusively to you that the current flawed test for ESA is finding large numbers of seriously ill people “fit for work”.

But if I remember, you decided to stick your fingers in your ears and sing “La la la” when confronted with evidence which contradicted your prejudices.

15. Cylux

Yeah, if there’s more unemployed than employment opportunities I don’t think blaming it all on laziness is gonna wash.

Sure. But there isn’t. And I wouldn’t blame laziness per se. Rather people are economically rational. If it makes more sense for some people to collect benefits, they will collect benefits. The solution is to make sure it makes more sense to get a job. There is simply never going to be a lack of employment opportunities. There can only be 1. temporary disruptions to the market and 2. a distinction between what workers are worth and what we allow them to be paid.

The solution is to subsidise wages. We should top up wages until everyone has a job. Not pay people to sit at home.

17. gnome

Given the fact that well over esa fit for work assessments are overturned at appeal.

It is not that simple. Well it would be if that was a clear English sentence. From that well known Tory rag, the Guardian:

“Of those, 458,500 (39%) were judged fit to work, while 428,800 (36%) ditched their claim. A further 16% were placed in the “work-related activity group”, in which individuals are deemed able to take on some level of work but still receive a level of ESA support. Over a third (36%) of people who made a claim for ESA between October 2008 and February 2010 and who were found to fit to work at assessment have appealed, with the original decision overturned in almost four in 10 cases (39%).”

So about 450,000 people were found fit to work. About 150,000 of them appealed this decision. About 60,000 of them won their case. So we have gone from some 900,000 people claiming to just 60,000 winning their court cases. I would call that a massive improvement and a win for the British people. Wouldn’t you?

20. Briar – “How the right wing trolls hang onto their hatred of the poor and their conviction that these loathesome parasites must be taking “their” tax money fraudulently. Meanwhile they completely ignore the tax dodgers who finesse billions of pounds into their own pockets instead of contributing to the national coffers.”

I think this speaks volumes about you but little about anyone else. Has anyone here expressed hatred of the poor? Notice that people who are cheating the welfare system are not “the poor”. They are also taking my money fraudulently. Why do you think otherwise?

As for people dodging tax, there is little evidence there are any numbers of people doing so. The British remain astonishingly law abiding and by and large pay the extortionate sums demanded of them entirely voluntarily.

@28 SMFS

Sure. But there isn’t.

This statement is demonstrably false.
https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/reports/lmp/gor/2013265922/report.aspx
https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/reports/lmp/gor/2013265922/subreports/gor_vacs_compared/report.aspx

There are 6.3 JSA claimants to every unfilled jobcentre vacancy, nation-fucking-wide. Hell the lower end of the scale per area doesn’t get lower than 5.54. Once you start adding in those who are unemployed and claiming disability benefits rather than JSA that number will only get higher.
The only way to balance these figures in your favour is to claim that well over 7 out of ten employers prefer to advertise vacancies everywhere else but the jobcentre, and are going “where teh fooks me staff like? I advertised in the Staining Chronicle ten week ago!”. Or that self employment is right easy, usually successful, utilises skills everyone already has, and doesn’t involve start-up costs that someone on JSA would struggle with.

Once again So Much For Subtlety, most ESA claimants are perpetually kept in the assessment phase, of course they are going to be worn down and eventually give up. Those who have won appeals have had to wait a long time for them so that number is only ever going to go up and even then they can still be stuck right back in the assessment phase again in perpetuity. The DWP does not count or publish pending appeals or keep track of those found fit for work.

You keep citing the Guardian, the claim is made by Chris Grayling through the DWP and he has been reported for mis-using department resources twice now over it.

29. Cylux

This statement is demonstrably false. …. There are 6.3 JSA claimants to every unfilled jobcentre vacancy, nation-fucking-wide. Hell the lower end of the scale per area doesn’t get lower than 5.54. Once you start adding in those who are unemployed and claiming disability benefits rather than JSA that number will only get higher.

Sorry but no. You insist on misunderstanding. There may well be 6.3 claimants for every Jobcentre vacancy but that is not what I said. I said that there is more or less an unlimited amount of work that could be done. The Jobcentres do not show people the jobs that could be done if wages were lower. They show the jobs available now – at the prices set by the government, in competition with benefits and weighed down by regulations.

30. Mason Dixon, Autistic

Once again So Much For Subtlety, most ESA claimants are perpetually kept in the assessment phase, of course they are going to be worn down and eventually give up.

So you have said. I would like some evidence and a reason to think it matters.

@31 Yes but if the wage doesn’t pay them enough to live on, then it isn’t a job worth their time doing. Your essentially calling for the government to subsidise businesses so that they can hire people to do make-work jobs. You work to live, not live to work. Unless you believe in serfdom and can’t stand the peasantry standing around being idle…

http://83.244.183.180/100pc/esa/ccdate/esa_phase/a_carate_r_ccdate_c_esa_phase.html

I’m curious why you are a regular contributor to a topic you’re not interested in So Much For Subtlety: almost anyone that is knows where to get the figures and doesn’t rely on newspapers.

And I’ve given you the reason why this matters: your points about those found ‘fit for work’ and imaginary numbers of claimants who are fraudulent or ineligible falls into a black hole in light of it. You would see immediately what is wrong with a poll that is done repeatedly until it delivers the ‘correct’ result the pollsters want, but are blind to it when the practice is done with the Work Capability Assessment.

Mason Dixon

> someone should tell the Sun to stop encouraging their readers to waste the investigators time. The fraud hotline gets 600 calls a day, most of them malicious and false.

Have you a source for the hotline call statistics?

Indeed there are people who abuse the system but the politicians use that as an excuse for the system to abuse the people.

When people abuse the system, the government and beurocrats are always available for comment and speek out with great passion on individual cases, but when the system abuses the people, they are unavailable for comment or “cannot comment on individual cases”.

@35. Julian St Jude: “…but when the system abuses the people, they are unavailable for comment…”

I follow your argument about balance of argument and presentation in the media. But there is rightly an absolute No about government representatives (ministers, MPs, civil servants) discussing individual cases. Unless, perhaps, Julian St Jude becomes the subject of a public enquiry when it would be OK to talk about Julian St Jude’s life on telly.

@34,

The DWP do not keep a record. A report by Amelia Gentleman in the Guardian about the work of a benefit fraud investigation office said they estimated the number of nationwide calls to be 600.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/feb/01/benefits-fraud-investigators?intcmp=239

An investigator describes the number of malicious allegations as ‘significant’. I’ve been meaning to write a blog post on it because when I look at the figures I’ve seen for fraud prevalence across all benefit types then an absurdly small number of those 600-per-day calls lead to anything even without counting the reports that must come through other channels. Will see what I can pull together.

The government doesn’t advertise the fact that around £16 billion of benefits went unclaimed in 2010 compared to an estimated £900 million in false claims.

Mason Dixon

So you don’t have evidence for your claim that ‘most’ calls to the hotline were maliciuos.

OK.

@38

Erm, how do you draw that conclusion exactly? I take it there’s no point me even compiling it then, so should delete these bookmarks because I answered you in good faith and you responded with that so I doubt even the most immense body of evidence would be acceptable to you.

As it is if I simply linked to the relevant data tables, it wouldn’t make any sense as evidence unless you took the cost of fraud for each benefit from the DWP’s latest report for 2010, divided it by the average weekly amount on the DWP tabulation tool, multiplied it by 52 and then added the sum for each benefit together to get a rough idea of the individual instances of fraud (which will be more than the number of actual people as some commit it multiple times). Then you multiply the fraud investigator’s figure of 600 by the number of days in a year to get 219,000 which if reports from the hotline were all there were then it would still be the case that at least two-thirds of calls were a waste of the investigators time.

So do you want that evidence, or do you simply refuse to believe it is evidence?

10. Pagar

My opposition is because the current welfare system has unintended consequences- that it creates a permanent underclass and blights the lives of so many by killing aspiration

This is reactionary and ill thought through.

Imagine how big the underclass would be WITHOUT a welfare system.

And think of the crime too.

The Right tends not to think. And it certainly doesn’t think on the issue of welfare.

I hope you get cancer in your big fucking mouth So much for subtlety.

Soon.

The tax dodgers get away with it because they have the connections in government. They got away with it under Labour, for exactly the same reason. A blind eye turned, a deal over a five course meal, it’s the way the system operates and has done for a long time. The rich have never payed their full share, the political class have never tried to hard to make them, a case of you scratch my back, I’ll watch yours. Wether it’s a straight forward bung, or a dodgy buisiness deal getting approval at the highest level, it will always happen unless we elect people who are genuinely striving for a better world to live in, rather than a better car, or a bigger house, paid for by you and me, the taxpayer. The rich see themselves as on a par with those in power, therefore, entitled to a seat on the gravy train. Time for a derailment.

The reason why the govt don’t tell you is that the likes of ‘ Work makes you free’ IDS don’t want you to know for ideological reasons. Neither it appears do the BBC as it was not given prime time.

Those on here arguing it is nonsense need to go back to school , it is possible to accurately assess the probability of stats being correct. It is also possible to account for error through good methodology.

Right wingers these days generally do Politics at Uni etc so they have little understanding of evidence based research like this.

So Much For Subtlety

‘The Jobcentres do not show people the jobs that could be done if wages were lower. They show the jobs available now – at the prices set by the government, in competition with benefits and weighed down by regulations.”

In the eighties my very best and dear departed friend earned four quid for a days work picking peas, They were in the good ol days before the min wage. He worked hard all day. Is that the world you want to return to Tory boy. I bet you wouldn’t want your children earning £4 for a ten hour day would you now.

He kicked the peas over and the police were called, he was arrested for criminal damage but when it came up in court he was acquitted.

But when people abuse the system and it gets headlines in the brown print press, government ministers and civil servants DO talk about individual cases. Next time the Sun carries a story about a single mum living in a house bigger than Buckingham Palace and at taxpayers expence, I think you will find that politicians and DWP spokesmen have much to say.

Talking as someone who is on benefits right now as I lost my job last year I am getting a bit sick of the government and media who make out we are all on the take and getting tons of cash I get £60 a week but if you listen to them I am on double that

the only good way to cut benefit costs is create jobs something this government cannot do