The Sun swallows the DWP's lies

A DWP spokesman has told The Sun that "benefit fraud is at its lowest level ever, but we know there is more to be done".

Latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that around £900million was claimed fraudulently in the UK in the year to September 2008. Of this, around £200million is estimated to be fake disability claims. The most common fraud is for housing benefit.

To start with, benefit fraud is running at £2bn a year.

In 2006/7 about 200,000 cases of potential fraud were investigated where the DWP considered there was a high possibility of prosecution - but only 7,483 of them were taken to court.

The paper admits that it is impossible to say how many people in the UK are sponging off the system. "But we do know the problem has been declining over the past decade."

Strange, that. Between 1997 and 2007, the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) budget had risen from £5.7bn to £8.8bn a year.

• The number of drug addicts and alcoholics claiming the £60-a-week payment rose five-fold, from 3,000 to almost 17,000
• Claimants suffering from 'psychosis' (a form of mental illness often caused by smoking cannabis) increased from 63,000 to 148,000
• The claim of 'back pain - not specified' more than doubled from 56,000 to 123,000, costing the taxpayer an extra £291m
• The number of deaf people in the UK almost tripled from 13,000 to 34,600, costing a total of £79m
• Claimants citing 'learning difficulties' rose from 182,000 to 282,000 - up from £532m to £781m.

DLA alone now totals £9.9bn a year. Yet the government claims that only £50m of this is fraud. Look at those numbers and ask: how likely is that?

The Sun reports that DLA is not means tested, so no matter how much money you earn or have in savings, you are entitled to benefit up to the age of 65.

One of the problems for the fraud team is that people are awarded a “lifetime award” and do not need to go through any kind of regular review to ensure they are claiming the right amount.

“In the 1990s, the benefit claim form only needed the person to get a friend or family member to verify what he or she was saying,” says John. “Now they are required to have a doctor’s signature.

“Those people who are given a lifetime award — because their disability is regarded as permanent — are sent a letter every year informing them of how much their benefits will go up by and asking them to tell us of any change in circumstance. We suspect a lot of them just read the amount they’re going to get and then ignore the rest of the three-page letter explaining changes in circumstance.”

But The Sun still prints the claim that benefit fraud is falling. What they have done is to swallow the DWP's claims, in order to be allowed to watch a stake out operation. It's like being an embedded journalist with the army. You don't rock the boat.

But in fact the very shape of the sting itself shows the problem. This stake-out alone has seven investigators. And it gets worse.

The investigators apply for permission from within the DWP to use surveillance. If granted, they have a three-month window in which to prove the person is making false claims.

“We try to get three positive observations over, say, a three or four-week period,” John explains. “We can’t just watch them Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday because the person could argue that that had been a good week, when their disability was not affecting them as much.

“Depending on what you’ve got after that first month, we may need to carry on surveillance or we may have enough to call the person in for interview.”