Well, okay, but…

Wouldn’t you *always* expect the official estimate to be very low? They can only record fraud they catch, and fraud they catch is stopped.

I’m not saying there is a high level of fraud; I’m saying these figures don’t seem like real evidence.

Not that most benefit fraudsters would come forward and report their fraud in order to be included in these statistics.

ALL sides have to be honest: we have NO way of knowing how much benefits are claimed fraudulently.

Having worked in the DWP in the DLA/AA renewals section I wouldn’t be surprised if those figures were over-estimates.

So pensioners are fiddling more than three times as much than the sick and disabled. I don’t see any politicians or red rags gunning for these crooks.

@1:

“Wouldn’t you *always* expect the official estimate to be very low?”

Not when there is a clear campaign on the part of the government and its echo chambers in the media to portray all benefit claimants as ‘scroungers’, ‘fraudsters’, ‘drag anchors on the dynamic, thrusting, wealth creating private sector’, ‘responsible for bad weather’, etc., etc.

The fact that these figures have received no perceptible coverage in the corporate media can be explained solely by the fact that they (yet again) expose the DWP’s policies as being based entirely on lies.

@1 – Perhaps you could say they’re over-estimates or under-estimates; but they’re the evidence we have and the evidence government policy should be based on.

Unless the government has some other accurate statistics to work from, they should be basing decisions on these – not some ‘idea’ that there are a huge percentage of benefit scroungers ruining the system.

OK, those are the figures for *overpayement* of benefit (at a still fairly enourmous 1.2bn a year)

What are the numbers for fraudulently claiming benefits people aren’t otherwise entitled to?

It looks very much like the OP is taking one type of low volume benefit fraud and spinning that this is an indication for benefit fraud as a whole…

@7

What are the numbers for fraudulently claiming benefits people aren’t otherwise entitled to?

The most prolific case of fraud is by criminal gangs exploiting the NI numbers of dead children. The ‘make shit up on the application forms’ type of fraud isn’t actually all that prolific or, much more importantly, successful.

Funny isn’t it, how so many believe people these cannot be the REAL fraud figures.

Just shows how successful the government’s propaganda war against benefit claimants in the media has been.

They will believe any old made up government spin without question in the Daily Mail, cos that’s true obviously. Yet when faced with the government’s official figures, year after year, THAT’s when people start asking questions, because it doesn’t fit with what they have been TOLD to believe.

Why not ask why the government is not harrassing pensioners, since they are committing more fraud than the sick and disabled? Oh, because the elderly are more likely to vote than any other section of the population and they are more likely to vote Conservative. Or don’t you believe those oficial statistics either?

“Wouldn’t you *always* expect the official estimate to be very low? They can only record fraud they catch, and fraud they catch is stopped.”

– I would always expect government policy to be based on their official figures. If their own figures are so low, why are they making such a campaign of it?

How for instance do these compare with official estimate of tax evasion / avoidance? or fraud within welfare services contracts?

@ 10 davidh

“How for instance do these compare with official estimate of tax evasion / avoidance?”

Tax avoidance is legal, so there’s nothing to enforce. As for evasion, benefit claimants are easier targets (you don’t have to go through huge amount of admin to find the place where they deliberately forgot to carry the 3) and, for some reason, seem to be more effective political targets as well (probably thanks to the Mail and its smelly brethren, there seems to be more public anger at poor people who steal a few quid a week in benefits than at rich people who embezzle thousands of pounds a year in dodged tax). Plus, of course, the Tories don’t want to alienate the well-off, as they’re a key voter base.

Now you come to mention it, we have all these poster asking people to shop benefit fraudsters, but I’ve never seen one encouraging people to whistleblow if they know that a rich individual or company is cheating on taxes.

“0.8 per cent of benefit spending is overpaid due to fraud, amounting to £1.2 billion, and
This proportion is the same as in 2009/10.”

For basis comparison, the British public spent almost exactly £1.2 Billion in just one week between Christmas and New Year last year on downloading Apps.

That’s going to be my favorite smart-Alec Lefty statistic to quote to people now for the next few weeks, I’m sure of it.

an ode to 1% ers

Through hard work, regressive pay & taxes
We carry your amoral, scrounging asses

@12 Spike,
lol, nice way to compare it…

@13 Ta. I’ll bet you, the next time I hear some no-neck loudmouth fuming about “scroungers” and “why should I pay my hard earned money, when they’re getting something for nothing” (as if hancapped and disabled people didn’t pay taxes too, every time they do the weekly shop)…

Five will get you Ten, that bloke saying all those things has got a phone loaded chock-full of porn and paid-for Apps of girls in their underwear.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course… It’s just that most houses generally come equipped with curtains for a reason.

Interesting article, but I’m sure how relevant it is to the overall debate. There may be a relatively low level of fraud/overpayment, but this is only one of the perceived shortcomings of the benefits system (albeit one that is given a high profile by the Tories and in the rightwing press). More significant are a whole range of outcomes which people see as unfair and significant disincentives to work and save at low income levels. There are lots of cases where people remain on benefits because they would be poorer off them, or so marginally better off that it is not worth the effort. In other words, there are a number of ways that the system may be abused without breaking the letter of DWP rules. Instead of defending every aspect of the benefits system, we on the left should remember that the welfare state was introduced to provide some help and dignity to people when they can’t work, not as permanent support for those who’d rather not.

Try this:

Britain enjoys ‘second-highest standard of living in EU’

Figures from official statistics body Eurostat shows Britain ahead of several major European countries, but it falls back under the GDP measure
Guardian: 13 December 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/dec/13/britain-second-highest-standard-of-living-eu

Britain’s high ranking in living standards derives from adding in the benefits of social provision of valued services – such as NHS healthcare – to purchased goods and services.

@ 13 Daz

Those would be the 1%ers who pay 30% of all taxes is it? Of the top 50% who pay 90% of taxes?

Looks like through hard work those people are doing all the carrying…..

Tyler, are you really thinking a 1%er actually generates that wealth??

It has been discovered that a chimpanzee throwing a few darts at a board performs better than city trading firms. It could probably do better than the average banking executive too, & I don’t see THEM paying 70% of THEIR income out in regressive taxes – which you call stealth taxes…

What is work for an exec? Since working in an American owned corporation – for shit pay – the Management there provided me with the perfect strapline to describe it “i don’t care, get the goddam job done”, really worth a self awarded multi megabuck pay rise…

It has been calculated that people simply do not need more than $70-80k income too, above that level it tends to become counter productive, so why are there obscene levels of pay awarded to 1%ers, by 1%ers?

@ 17 Tyler

“Those would be the 1%ers who pay 30% of all taxes is it? Of the top 50% who pay 90% of taxes?

Looks like through hard work those people are doing all the carrying…..”

Alongside what Daz says above, that’s a pretty brave leap from “rich” to “hard-working”. Who works harder: someone holding down two minimum wage jobs totalling 60 hours a week, or someone who gets massive amounts of money from the propety portfolio they inherited off their parents, the management of which takes a few hours a week?

That’s not to say that there aren’t lazy poor people and hard-working rich people. But automatically equating wealth with affluence, like you just did, is simply silly.

@Tyler

Bugger.

I was getting all geared up to back you to the hilt there until you went and included the “hard” in there.

Even if you had used “fruits of their labours”, I may’ve been able to let that one slide since yes, as will be correctly argued, the jobs and positions they occupy at or near the top of large companies allows them to be a key driver of ecconomic growth, companies expanding, which can (but sadly doesn’t always) lead to new job opportunities towards the bottom and get people off the dole and back into paid employment.

But no. Bollocks.

Almost to a man, what they do is not “hard”. “Stressful”, possibly, which is generallt why they are paid as well as they are, largely to ensure their loyalty to the firm and prevent them quitting and leaving them in the lurch when things start to go tits up and the boss starts getting lumbered with taking the bulk of the blame, creating far more serious problems when they walk out. They “take care of you” in those jobs by paying you at a level that encompases a “Sod this for a lark, I’m off” premium. But that doesn’t mean the job itself is harder per se, merely that you can create far more damage to the organisations balance sheet and ongoing operational capacity by leaving suddenly than by staying on for a few years and putting in a mediocre performance or effort.

Working in a coal mine is hard. Working as an insurance broker or a partner in a mid-level management consultancy is not hard.

14 hr days behind a desk and conference calls conducted via Blackberry in a business class seat the 06:50 non-stop from Kings Cross to Glasgow to attend a major industry conference is in no way comparable to an entire working week spent half a mile underground, in conditions sometimes of total blackness, carrying out backbreaking physical label in hot, cramped, poorly ventilated conditions, whilst facing the constant high risk of premature death or serious injury resulting from such ever- present dangers as cave ins, fires, suffocation, pneumoconiosis or the Black Lung.

(although, I appreciate that those last two may in fact be one and the same thing… I must confess, I’ve been waiting literally years for the opportunity to write the word pneumoconiosis in a sentence and today, it seems, opportunity came a’knockin. Yay!)

So by the argument of two posters below, because we have no idea how much the fraud REALLY is, we should therefore just steamroll through and perform a bunch of cuts which are not even remotely going to hit the fraudulent is fine, is it?

Right, let’s use another analogy here to drive this home: one in seven women in the UK has been raped. If we assume that rape is nowhere near as reported as it should be (and it isn’t), then the number is much higher. Ergo, there are a lot of male rapists out there.

In order to cut down on rape, let’s require about 10 million men to go through a test to prove that they aren’t rapists, asking questions about what sexual fantasies they have on a regular basis, their sexual preferences, and if they have any young children. Then, we shall require about 1 million of these men to be castrated. Ergo, we are “curing” the rape problem as, naturally, a few men are rapists and therefore many men are now suspect.

…now, suddenly, it becomes a bit more scary. All I’ve done is change the type of person targeted. That’s all. The rest, essentially, is pretty in-line with changes. There are 10 million disabled people in the UK; these disabilities may be diabetes, epilepsy, or dyslexia, but it counts even if it’s invisible. There is a markedly tiny number of fraudulent people as a result because DLA is unclaimed – and yet the disabled are being the most targeted at the moment. Five hundred thousand people shall be cut off their support through no fault of their own but that they’re disabled.

No fraud rate is that high that it needs to be done. The fireworks display at the UK Olympics this year will cost more the fraud rate. It isn’t worth penalising people for.

@21

Right, let’s use another analogy here to drive this home:  one in seven women in the UK has been raped.  If we assume that rape is nowhere near as reported as it should be (and it isn’t), then the number is much higher.  

Hold it – back up a little a minute, you’re counting twice.

If one woman in seven admits having fallen victim to rape when asked as part of a confidential study, but some (probably many, if not most) don’t report it to the police, it’s still one woman in seven – not one woman in five.

The number of reports is not a reliable indicator of the number of instances of rape actually going on, but the number of victims *is* a good indicator of the number of rapes actually occurring over a given period of time… But even that isn’t as reliable as it might first appear in terms of understanding how many rapes are actually going on, today, right now, here in Britain.

Even if you exclude women that previously lived for extended periods in countries where rape is both common and a major, serious social problem (Balkan refugees, people fleeing ethnic violence or civil war in parts of Africa, someone’s Prussian Great Aunt in her 90s who was caught, fleeing out of Berlin with her mother in early 1945 and ran afoul of the Red Army), you’re still not going to get much of an accurate read on the actual scale and nature of the problem we’re currently facing because,

A) A not inconsiderable (but currently unknown) proportion of those 1 in 7 have fallen victim more than once, possibyl even several times, with very different circumstances and several different perpetrators otherwise totally unrelated. If they’re encompassed within the 1 in 7 group, you’re only counting them once. If they’ve been raped 5 times, you need to count them 5 times, which could mean that even if you’re confident that you’ve identified 4 million victims of rape, that may actually represent 5 or 6 million actual attacks, in which case you’ve drastically under estimated the scale of the problem you’re actually facing without being ever aware of the fact.

B) Even if you get an accurate report on the number of attack that are actually taking place (rather than get reported, the number of crime reports is pretty much a useless statistic, not reflective of pretty much anything), you’ve still got no idea of what’s actually going on – 5000 confirmed rapes most certainly does NOT imply the existence of 5000 rapists, who are by and large always habitual and repeat, serial offenders. 5000 might actually translate to the existence of 500 serial rapists at large in the country at any time – in fact, I suspect it may even be far closer to something like 100 rapists per 5000 attacks, since, if you ask yourself “Hmm, career criminal, violent sociopath, drink and drug problems, treats women like absolute dirt, no moral compass…. Is it possible someone like that could do this 50 times or more to various different anonymous or well-known women who happen to fall foul of him before he’s caught or held to account…. Does that sound massively unlikely…? Sadly, not really.” Less plausibly, the 5000 attacks may just relate to one or two guys who do practically nothing but, so long as they are awake and conscious.

The point is, although the number of people prepared to admit to suffering victimhood of an attack is a *better* measure than the number of crime reports by quite some way, it still isn’t really in any sense a *good* one for understanding what it is you’re actually facing.

I personally am of the view that in this instance, were a particular fraction of one percent (say, 0.25% for the sake of argument) of the adult male population of Britain were to somehow just all drop dead tomorrow, the incidence of rapes and violent sexual assaults would pretty much immediately drop down by half overnight.

That’s my personal belief, not backed by any particular aspect of the various different figures that I can really point to by way of explanation, intuitively, that feels to be as if that’s more where the truth lies in this case.

More relevantly, though, most rape victims usually (although not always) realise that they’ve been the victim of a crime.

I guess when it comes to these fraudulently claimed stats, the real elephant in the room with them that no-one yet seems to have mentioned is this:- 2% all claims paid out on particular benefit last year were paid out on fraudulent claims. Actually, no….2% of all claims paid last year to fraudulent claims THAT WE SPOTTED.

Fraud is a crime of deceit. You have to realise and become aware of that deception in order to know you’ve been a victim of it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know a claim to be fraudulent. You’d just pay it and it doesn’t show up. Or, to put it another way,

Why doth treason never prosper?

For if it prospers, none dare call it treason.

2 % or 4% are REALLY low figures. But when you think about it, of course they would be. If the figure were more like 20 or 25% for JSA, say, that would indicate that half the people claiming JSA were actually working at the time they were entitled to have it and it took the whole of DWP 6months to realise and stop paying it to them before asking to have it back. That just wouldnt happen, so it’s NEVER going to 20 or 25% or come anywhere close to that, and 2% more likely means that 1 in 5 of the people claiming JSA claimed it for a month or two longer than they were entitled to have it before we stopped paying their claim. Which is NOT what a figure of 2% immedately suggests when you first see it.

It also conceals the true extent of how extensive some of the more organised and deliberate frauds are – we may have caught a particular fraudulent claim in June or July of 2011 after paying out £500 or since the start of the year before asking for it back or seeking a court order, but we might have been paying their claim for 10 years before we caught them and asked for it back.

The lesson here is that fraudulent claiming may well be a relatively minor drain on the popular purse as I, and most people around here would probably agree. On the other hand, it could be endemic and rife and currently escalating constantly contrary to everyone’s expectations.

The reality is, we just don’t know. We don’t have a clue, because most of the people who commit the fraud will probably never get caught and we won’t ever know it’s happened.

So:- how can we go about getting some better information? Any ideas?

One in seven women has been raped, it’s actually one in four in the UK. Not fun, hm?

Since you’ve decided to take numbers, run, and completely derail the thread with numbers, I’ll steer back to the initial issue here, and that’s this: – there are people who are going to lose their benefits solely because we’re trying to catch a nebulous number of fraudsters who, as you’ve already admitted:

The reality is, we just don’t know. We don’t have a clue, because most of the people who commit the fraud will probably never get caught and we won’t ever know it’s happened.

Exactly, but in the MEANTIME, a bunch of people who are legitimately claiming are going to get kicked off benefits and find themselves hungry and homeless. A fair few people who are disabled are planning their own deaths in the event the changes come down the wire. This is the issue here – people are going to die. Are people seriously, truly, okay with this?

Because herein is the problem – getting statistics has never been the issue. Statistics can be done, and many of the disabled community has managed it. The problem is no one wants to believe the stats, no matter how many times the figures are put forward. No matter how much it can be said that benefit fraud is miniscule, indeed, completely bloody DWARFED by the other fraud out there which even the House of Lords seems to have dug up (15 trillion pounds apparently…hm, wonder why that never made the papers?) – people still want to quibble about it. It is a fiddly amount of fraud – and while it COULD be rife, are we really okay with demonising an entire group of people? It could be rife, yes, and potentially every man is a rapist, but that is a slippery slope to go down.

At the end of the day, statistics are found that no one wants to believe – so then disabled people try to tell stories about what it’s like living on said benefits, and what it’s like to be abused in the street. This is immediately refuted and the demand for statistics is demanded again – which is then denied.

So…I guess I’ve got a better question – what would you POSSIBLY need to believe that things are getting very, very bad for the disabled and about to get a hell of a lot worse?

@23

So…I guess I’ve got a better question – what would you POSSIBLY need to believe that things are getting very, very bad for the disabled and about to get a hell of a lot worse?

Glancing across at present government front benches, I feel I would have to say… Wheelchair Hooverville on the South Bank..?