| Topic: | Benefit fraud figures | |
| Posted by: | Thomas Barry | |
| Date/Time: | 10/07/13 17:24:00 |
| "If it's below 1% in a system as complex as the benefit system" I also varies between individual benefits, fraud on Child Benefit, for instance, is almost immeasurably tiny while housing benefit fraud is far higher, much of it down to landlords (who unaccountably aren't generally included in the 'scrounger' hate figure). Landlords have quite incredible scope to defraud us over HB, this is one of the hidden costs of privatising low income housing, but there you go. Actually, the spiralling HB bill is one area where it's perfectly clear to everyone that a non-moralising rational policy would both cut benefits and improve life for people on lower incomes. If anyone's interested the official figures for fraud are here, which also shows that overpayment by the DWP costs considerably more than would be saved even if you could reduce fraud to zero, but obviously the government isn't going to play that up to the same extent. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fraud-and-error-in-the-benefit-system-preliminary-201213-estimates 4.6%, or £250m, of Income Support expenditure (£5.5bn) was overpaid; 4.2%, or £220m, of Jobseeker’s Allowance expenditure (£5.3bn) was overpaid; 5.5%, or £420m, of Pension Credit expenditure (£7.6bn) was overpaid; 5.3%, or £1,270m, of Housing Benefit expenditure (£23.8bn) was overpaid Basically, if you're trying to pretend, even after this and numerous other surveys, that we shouldn't proceed on the working assumption that Joe British Public knows nothing but prejudiced evidence free suppositions about most areas of current Government policy I'd like to sell you Tower Bridge, which I've got the exclusive marketing rights for. Honest. |