How I learned to stop worrying and love the benefits cheats

I’m sure everyone’s seen the adverts. They’re on TV, in newspapers, on bustops and on the sides of the buses themselves. The “We’re closing in” ones designed to make so called “benefit thieves” look like right villains. Anyone who’s claimed benefits in the last few years might know too how unpleasant an experience it has become now with a mix of intimidation and surveillance everywhere in the system. There’s even handy phone numbers so that you can grass your friends, families, neighbours, or even total strangers.

Alister Darling and those two brain caterpillars that control you. You are not going to enjoy this…

I fully support workers who cheat the benefits system! There! I said it! I’m not suggesting for one moment that I personally cheat the system. I’m paid by BACS, directly to my credit union account. The government, sadly, knows exactly how much I earn and in their infinite wisdom, believe that I £4k a year in wages is enough to live off without support other than £60 of my rent paying. More’s the pity.

Those that have found a way to fiddle the system. Good on you!

We in the UK have some real drains on our system. They don’t live in council houses on estates, or come from abroad (who are actually denied all state welfare, despite BNP propaganda saying otherwise). They live off us whether we like it or not and they’re taking hundreds of billions a year.

Drains like Fred Goodwin, ex-CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland and one of the biggest causes of the recession, that’s put millions of people worldwide on the dole. He’s only in his 40′s, but he’s retired with a £600k a year pension. We’re paying for that when against our will, the government bailed out RBS. Lord Ashcroft receives protection from the police and has the British Army fighting to keep him and his buddies in power, at the expense of the taxpayer, while he is not one himself. We’ve had MP’s who already “earn” over £60k a year, claiming for moat cleaning, duck houses and using their second homes as a property development company.

On a more everyday scale though, we are robbed every day by our employers. We provide the labour that customers want and pay for, while our bosses, take our money for it to pay themselves better than what we get. At the end of the day, a business can always run without a boss, or managers, but it cannot run without workers, which are the most vital part, yet paid the least.

These are our work-shy “sponges” on the system. Hopefully you agree with me that it is wrong that they take this money from us. However, it is perfectly legal. No doubt because these same people are the ones who dictate what the law is in the first place, either directly, or through funding the parties in power with the condition that the party pleases these rich funders.

Now, I know that the Daily Mail might tell us that people who smuggle away £65 a week extra in dole are somehow the scum of the earth, but lets actually think about this like adults for a moment. Job Seeker’s Allowance for a single person under 25 is £45 a week, over 25 it’s £65 a week. Housing benefit is capped at around £40 a week for under 25′s and £60 a week for over 25′s. These are what single people get, couples get even less.

Now, that gives you a grand total of £85 a week income for an under 25 to pay your rent, bills, eat, and try get a little entertainment in there to stop you going nuts. The grand total of £125 a week for over 25′s isn’t much better.

Consider for a moment whether you could live on that kind of an income. Forget about your Internet, credit card bills, running your car and phone and entertainment for a moment. Can you even pay your rent/mortgage, gas and electric and feed yourself on that? The answer is no.

Yet currently, nearly two million people on benefits in the UK are told to do just that. This doesn’t even include people, such as cleaners, like myself who’s wages are below this income! There is no question here that we are talking about peoples’ health and welfare here and in a world where the rich irresponsibly put a price tag on water, food, shelter and warmth, to deny those things means death.

So, I do not consider it wrong if somebody tops up their benefits with a bit of cash in hand work, or tops up their undeclared wages with a bit of benefits. This however is not only illegal, but also criminal. Break these rules and not only will the money be forcibly removed from you by sequestion and bailiffs, but you can also get jail time. I’m sure this comes as no surprise though that this double standard exists, as we as the poorest workers do not fund parties with large donations. Even if we wanted to fund the parties, we couldn’t match the donations of the rich, seeing as though “the richest 1pc in the UK hold some 70pc of the country’s wealth” . We simply can’t ever match that kind of political bribe and as a result it is the poor, not the rich, who are declared the outlaws for a far lesser crime.

The intention of making benefits so unpleasant is to encourage us to accept substandard working conditions and pay and even to scab, join the army, or police, or do other such things that in the end only harm our other workers more. If benefits were fit for purpose, to support those who have been forbidden to work by the rich, then maybe there’d be a slight case for having a pop at “benefit thieves”, but at the end of the day, there’s not and there’s far bigger fish to fry before you do that anyway.

The lesson here is to understand that what is right and lawful and what’s wrong and illegal are not allways one and the same. Justice and the law are not the same thing.

Taken from And cleaners shall inherit the Earth!

Tories Harsh Crackdown on Benefits

Welcome to Reality Check. Today I’m taking a close look at the Conservative pledge to cut billions from the welfare bill.

Tory 3-strikes Policy
First-time offenders would lose benefits for three months
Second-time offenders would lose benefits for six months
Third-time offenders would lose benefits for up to three years

The party says that benefit fraud and error has cost £80 every second under Labour.

Their answer is what they call a “crackdown” on cheats. Anyone who is cautioned or convicted of benefit fraud three times will have their payments stopped for up to three years.

So how much will their “three strikes and you’re out” policy actually save?

We asked the Conservatives and they said “We can’t say”, so I have attempted to do the sums instead.

How many people have been convicted of benefit fraud three times? The Department for Work and Pensions tells me the answer is… zero. No-one. Ever.

How many have had their benefits stopped after two convictions? Last year the figure was 69 people.

Stopping their benefits for twice as long, as the Tories propose, would save roughly £100,000 a year or less than one penny a second. Thus reducing the cost from £80 a second to £79.99.

Even if we include those people cautioned as well as convicted, it is clear that this proposal is not going to save much money.

Theresa May was asked if she knew there was no record of anyone being convicted three times for such an offence

The shadow work and pensions secretary, Theresa May, was asked by Reality Check if she knew there was no record of anyone being convicted three times for benefit fraud.

She declined to give a direct answer, but said the policy was intended to send out a clear message to benefit fraudsters.

More savings

The Conservatives’ bigger promises on welfare rely on saving £600m within three years. Not by targeting cheats, but getting people off Incapacity Benefit (IB).

Basically, the Tories argue that one in five of the 2.6 million people currently on IB is fit for work. That’s just over half-a-million claimants.

They would be moved onto Jobseekers Allowance which gives them about £1,300 a year less.

The government is already planning to do the same thing and last month calculated moving people off IB would save £300m a year over the next five years.

The Conservatives’ figures suggest a saving of £200m a year – significantly less than Labour.

But there’s a problem with both figures.

They are based on an assumption that significant numbers can be moved off IB. But no-one knows if that is right because it’s not been tried.

We do know that with new claimants, a quarter of those told they were fit to work appealed against the decision, and of those, more than a third had their appeal upheld.

Neil Coyle of the Disability Alliance prefers to get benefits right the first time

And Neil Coyle, of the Disability Alliance, believes the policy would hit the vulnerable. He prefers to get benefits right first time

Both Labour and the Conservatives believe that getting tough with benefit claimants goes down well with voters.

But if the consequence of reform is thousands of vulnerable individuals with long-term health conditions being treated unfairly, it’s a policy with built-in dangers.

Taken from BBC News

The real benefit cheats? The Stasi ranks of Hard Labour

I’d love to see the benefit cheat ­advertisements remodelled, to target public sector expenses fraud. You could have a lord, ­pegging out the washing, and then big, scary writing … “You in the wig! We’re on to you. Your mother’s house in Carmarthenshire is not your primary residence … You do not spend £174 a day in legitimate expenses … One day soon, we’re going to be very peeved.”

Of all the cheats civilisation can conceive – from MPs through dodgy tax-domicilers, insider dealers and hedge-fund scamsters to cheats so rotten with bad faith that they nearly brought down global finance before anybody stopped to think whether or not they should be illegal – nobody gets it stuck to them worse than the person who did a night cash-in-hand in the pub, as well as claiming jobseeker’s allowance.

Benefit cheats might account for 6,000 prosecutions a year, but their cost to society – an estimated £1.1bn annually – is considerably less than the combined loss, to the benefits office, caused by honest mistakes (£1.1bn in punter-error, £800m in mistakes committed by the Department for Work and Pensions). It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the DWP makes that many errors in its own system: it must be pretty complicated. In fact, it’s so complicated that means-tested benefits, combined with means-tested tax credits, go unclaimed to the sum of £16bn.

For every pound you spend, ­taxpayer, on the dishonest underclass, you save nearly £16 by virtue of bureaucracy so complicated that neither the underclass nor the overclass can understand it. What a result! It’s all so obvious, it sounds like 1980s agitprop. I’ll be on about single mothers next, and how most of them are doing a really good job.

It’s not, however, so obvious that Labour’s manifesto team isn’t re-examining the issue, really trying to think outside the box of human decency and push the envelope way past out of order, all the way to “are you kidding?”.

Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary, has suggested to Ed Miliband, Labour’s manifesto co-ordinator, that people who inform on benefit cheats should get a share of any cash saved. This probably won’t even make it as an election promise: they just leaked it so they could sound like tough guys, talking turkey with the Tories. “Huh! Remember that soppy liberal you couldn’t stand? We binned him! Adios old Labour, goodbye New – hello Hard Labour. Feel my pecs.” I’ve heard nothing from any party that sounds more like the Stasi. How much more old Labour can you get?

Since it probably isn’t serious, should we even bite? But this kind of “initiative” is not just a short cut to an image makeover. Critics have said already that, were this measure to be introduced, it would unpick social cohesion and encourage neighbourly mischief rather than meaningful snitching. But this is to pass over the social dissonance that is created even before policy is drafted, when politicians engage in this coarse, wilfully ignorant rabble-rousing.

Numerous studies have established that people greatly overestimate the cost of benefit cheating, both absolutely and compared to white-collar crime. It has been found that people across the political spectrum are more judgmental towards the very poor than they were 20 years ago, often inaccurately assuming them to be lazier and more fiscally ­coddled than in fact they are.

“The extent to which people manage to fiddle the system to their own advantage is greatly overstated in popular imagination and fed by the tabloid press. But you only need one well-documented case to damage confidence.” That was John Denham, the Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, commenting just before the Labour conference last year. It’s not just the tabloids, though, is it? They get quite a lot of help from the top ranks of the party in government. And it’s not really one well-documented case. More like an amorphous mass of feckless, poor people that Hard Labour is going to get really, really tough on.

On the same day as this supergrass wheeze was leaked, a Populus poll, commissioned by the Times, found that 70% of voters believe Britain is now broken; three-fifths of respondents said they “hardly recognised the country they’re living in”; and 42% would emigrate if they could.

In fairness, much of this “broken” rhetoric was started by David Cameron. You can tell because, when you bite it for authenticity, like a jeweller from the olden days, it turns out to have no meaning at all. But a more courageous government wouldn’t even get into this landscape the Tories insist upon, where the feral unemployed run riot in town centres while their unmarried babymothers leech bennies off the state to spend on cigarettes and Diamond White.

A government of integrity and coherence would insist upon sticking to the facts: that the cheats are offset by the people who don’t claim, so the benefits bill is nothing like the spiralling cashfest it’s made out to be; that benefit cheats are not the scourge of the economy, their numbers are not huge, and their crimes are not major; and even the real eye-openers – the football referee on disability benefit, the couple claiming housing benefit for numerous addresses – are notable for their perversity, not to mention rarity. This is Primark policy-making: it looks cheap, and it is cheap. But it’s not free and it’s not victimless.

Taken from guardian.co.uk

Benefit informers could be given share of cash saved

How about we put more effort into investigating the rich who evade tax year after year, instead of once again making out that all claimants are scrounging scum? I’ve hear Rupert Murdoch owes a fair few quid to the taxman….

People who inform on benefit cheats could be given a share of the resulting savings to the state under proposals being examined by Labour‘s manifesto team.

The idea has been put to Ed Miliband, Labour’s manifesto co-ordinator, by Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary, as a way of making life harder for benefit cheats.

It has also been discussed by Downing Street as it looks at ways to bolster its Respect agenda, designed to persuade sceptics that the state is on the side of hard-working families.

Although some will see the proposals as wildly impractical or socially ­divisive, others say they will encourage white, working-class voters to stay loyal to Labour.

No 10 is said to be attracted to the idea as symbolic of a tough contract on fairness in which Labour offers support for those genuinely in need on the condition that they play by the rules.

In Labour’s successful byelection campaigns in Glenrothes and Glasgow North-East, Murphy was struck by how much Labour voters wanted to hear a message that emphasises “firm but fair rules”.

One Glasgow resident told Murphy he was fed up with going to work at eight in the morning knowing the man in the flat above was not – but would still be keeping him awake at two in the morning.

Murphy believes there is a large constituency that would like to see the government reward those who give tipoffs about cheats, pointing out that the proposal is designed to end antisocial behaviour that increases the taxes other people pay.

In Australia, billboards urge people to “dob” on their cheating mates, leading to an upsurge in tipoffs.

The government already has benefit hotlines where suspected cheats can be shopped, but this is the first time a minister has suggested that anyone who reveals a benefit cheat might secure a proportion of the money recovered, or that there should be a financial incentive. Critics claim it would lead to malicious accusations and difficulties in deciding whether the person that revealed the cheat was responsible for a benefit cheat being caught.

The government’s free and confidential benefit hotline started gathering systematic information only in 2007-08. The lines are open 7am until 11pm, seven days a week.

Last year, the Department for Work and Pensions claimed to have caught 56,493 benefit thieves.

It claims more than 677 calls a day were made to the hotline and a further 476 benefit thieves reported online every day.

Some critics have claimed that the hotlines reduced social cohesion and made innocent citizens the victims of deranged neighbours determined to cause misery.

The DWP convicts around 6,000 benefit cheats each year. Figures for 2005-06 show benefit expenditure cost £116bn.

Every £1bn of fraud and error is estimated to cost £35 for every taxpayer.

The DWP claimed to have cut the cost of fraud, as opposed to error, from £2bn to £1bn a year, but subsequently the department appeared to recognise that its sample size was so small that the figures might not be reliable.

Taken from guardian.co.uk