Incapacity benefit fraud understated

Alice Thomson contrasts those who want to work with those who want to do anything but.

Mr and Mrs Chawner and their two daughters insist that they are “too fat to work” because they have a combined weight of 83 stone - so they watch television all day living off their £22,000 benefits. In the past 11 years, only the youngest daughter, Emma, has attended a job interview and that was on The X Factor, where she was kicked out in the first round. Mr Chawner explains: “Often I'm so tired from watching TV I have to have a nap. I certainly couldn't work. I deserve more.”

Nearly eight million people of working age in Britain have been “economically inactive” for the past few years, she says - through the boom years.

More than 2.5 million of them are on incapacity benefit - of these 2,130 people are too “fat” to work; 1,100 can't work because they have trouble getting to sleep; 4,000 get headaches; 380 are confined to the sofa by haemorrhoids; 3,000 are kept at home by gout; and half a million are too depressed to get a job. According to Dame Carol Black, the National Director of Health and Work, one child in five now comes from a family where neither parent works, yet at the end of last year there were half a million job vacancies.

Consider this alongside the government's numbers for benefit fraud. Their fictitious £800m total includes a mere £10m for incapacity benefit - 0.1% of the total.

David Freud has estimated that over a third of incapacity benefit claimants could work. So a total incapacity benefit fraud figure of £10m is fiction.