Indeed the churches have confirmed what I said about Osborne's Commons speech, that he too referred to £5bn of benefit fraud.
The Treasury has indeed rowed back from this, saying it is the total of fraud and error.
The churches said the £5bn figure Mr Osborne quoted in his spending review speech wrongly depicted the poorest and most vulnerable in society as thieves, reports the BBC. The President of the Methodist Conference said:
Exaggerating benefit fraud points the finger of blame at the poor.Nonsense. No one is claiming that most people with below average incomes are benefit cheats. No one is saying that most poor people cheat the system.
However, most people who do cheat the benefits system probably are "poor" - though plenty aren't, as comments here from front line benefits officials make clear.
If something immoral is being done by people who are poor, there is nothing wrong in expressing blame. The poor are not exempt from moral judgements. To claim otherwise is patronising and sanctimonious.
But lookee here. Three-quarters of people who applied for new benefits for the long-term sick failed tests to prove they were too ill to work.
As the Mail says, this raises fresh questions over how many of the 2.6million people on the existing incapacity benefit are really incapable of being employed.
The figures suggest that if they were tested to the same extent the number would fall as low as 650,000.Could all of this £8.5bn be down to honest mistakes? Highly unlikely. If half of it is fraudulent, there in one stroke you have the missing £4bn of benefit fraud to add to the government's fictitious numbers.
This would slash the £12.5billion bill for incapacity benefit to just over £4billion a year.
The churches' faux indignation is ill timed.
5 comments:
My council's Fraud team can only investigate fraud when its cost effective, so the complex fraud goes unchecked but the easier ones are prosecuted. So they tick enough boxes to pretend their vigilant.
But lookee here. Three-quarters of people who applied for new benefits for the long-term sick failed tests to prove they were too ill to work.
John, have you not heard of 'confirmation bias'? The Mail is not exactly going to give a balanced view.
ESA is a new benefit, it is not IB. The two have very different tests to decide eligibility. Therefore, to attempt to forcibly apply the new (and different) standard for ESA onto existing IB claimants is to malign thousands of people on the basis of a falsehood.
The IB test was considered to be one of the toughest gateways to disability benefit in Western Europe. Now the ESA test is downright draconian and is resulting in cases like this:
http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/press_20100323
Furthermore, these tests are being carried out by a private company, Atos healthcare, and their findings are being overturned on appeal in high numbers (approx 60-70%)
These new tests are about pretending that disabled people are not disabled.
It's immoral to paint a false picture with dubious figures and extrapolations that are neither qualified nor quantified properly.
But thanks for the acknowledgement, John.
Correction: After looking at the figures, it turns out that 40% of people win their ESA appeals at present. Still not bad for a country that now hates and brutalises disabled people.
AS someone who used to work for the Tribunal Service, the vast majority of Incap cases were bad backs and stress/depression. Not many people would consider these "disabled" and so entitled to spend the rest of their lives on benefits.
Both Labour and now the Tories are both trying to limit the numbers as a nation we are getting healthy but Incap/ESA claims keep going up so IT MUST BE FRAUD!
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100061653/george-osborne-must-correct-his-claims-about-benefit-fraud-and-his-portrayal-of-the-poor-as-mean-minded-and-cheating/
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