It seems virtually impossible for a politician of any persuasion to mention 'Welfare' these days without, in the same breath, making some reference to 'fraud'. This drip, drip approach has had much the same impact on public attitudes to benefit claimants as the word association game played by the right wing press did with 'asylum-seeker' and 'bogus' - eventually, they could dispense with the 'bogus' because 'asylum-seeker' had become a toxic phrase on its own. We're a long way down that road already with 'Welfare' with a frighteningly high number of people perceiving it as a 'bad thing'.
So, how common is benefit fraud? When politicians throw a figure with lots of zeros on the end at us, it's almost invariably the sum for 'fraud and error'. Note the order they always say those words - 'fraud and error'. You hear 'fraud' first, you're thinking 'fraud' when the big scary number gets quoted. But the truth of the matter is that the bigger proportion - actually two-thirds of the total - is 'error' and that a good proportion of that - approximately a third - is official error, not than claimant error.
For 2011/12 across all benefits, the official Government figure was £3.4 billion overpaid due to 'fraud and error', or 2.1% of total benefit expenditure. Offset against this is £1.3 billion of underpayments, 0.8% of total expenditure. £840m of overpaid benefit was recovered by the DWP or Councils in that year.
So, for each £100 spent on benefits, approximately 70p is therefore overpaid due to fraud. We don't have a detailed breakdown for what that fraud looks like. In the media, it looks like a bloke who said he couldn't walk running a marathon or a woman who said she was a single parent when she had a boyfriend living with her. In reality, I suspect the really big bucks are being lost to landlords putting in fraudulent claims from phatom tenants in areas where rents are expensive, and other organised crime. We certainly know from the official stats that the proportion of fraud in Disability Living Allowance claims is actually lower than the average across benefits as a whole at 0.5%.
I'll come back to this issue in a future post, as there are also matters about the way allegations of benefit fraud are dealt with by the Courts, but I'll leave this one with this thought. The key difference between 'fraud' and 'error' is intent; if the intention is to deceive, then the action is fraud. We have a Government intent on persuading us all that abuse of the Social Security system is a much greater problem than it is in reality, and they are doing so by using figures they know are three times higher than those for dishonest claims alone.
So who exactly is guilty of fraud?
