More than 85% of fraud allegations made by the public over the last five years were false, according to figures obtained by the Observer.
A freedom of information request to the Department for Work and Pensions discloses that between 2010 and 2015 the government closed 1,041,219 alleged cases of benefit fraud put forward by the public. Insufficient or no evidence of fraud was discovered in 887,468 of these. In 2015 alone, of the 153,038 cases closed by the DWP’s Fraud and Error Service, 132,772 led to no action.
Explains how the Stasi got away with it, doesn’t it?
Well, hold up there! ‘Insufficient or no evidence..’ How many in each category?
And ‘led to no action’ doesn’t mean that the accusation was false, only that the useless CPS declined to do the legwork.
Or at least, that’s what we are always told about rape stats by the feminists…
What JuliaM said.
Remember how the police and social work departments found “insufficient evidence” (or similar weasel excuses) in Rotherham and other towns for ten years.
Of course, we are still a nation of snitches. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t secretly hate your neighbours and long for the day when you can bludgeon open their skulls with their own femur and feast on the raw, pulsing, meaty goodness within.
Hence those “This is a Neighbourhood Watch Area” stickers.
I think it’s still mostly local authorities and the DWP, not the CPS, who bring these prosecutions. Pendantic point, distinction without a difference, I accept.
In all probability many of these complaints are made against people successfully playing the system e.g. single parents with children by different fathers, working part time for minimum wage, and getting large amounts in tax credits, child benefit and housing benefit, thus enjoying a very comfortable lifestyle for minimum effort. Entirely legal, but the volume of complaints indicates it it not very popular.
So, at least 15% of cases are justified.
Or the complainants don’t know what they are talking about.
Twitter should have told us what sort of country we are. You can whip a censorious mob on that in under ten minutes.
Or they are acting out of malice.
Having worked in the civil service and had thousands of fraud complaints its usually envy or revenge.
Mr X who is missing both legs is reported as being able to go jogging every evening? Mrs Y who is able to have a free car and go on holiday 4 times a year? Severe problems a medical report confirmed.
Mrs Z who reports her ex husband is hiding his money as he has much more income than that from his self employment.
Have had hundreds of fraud letters where it was literally just 3 or 4 lines relating to seeing them shopping twice a week. Lots of disabled go shopping twice a week. Might be all they can manage that day but gets them out.
It is moot if the few shining examples of the human spirit outweigh a mass of shite .
With varying degrees of gutless custard making up the numbers.
Steve
IanB will be along soon to say that cannibalism like incest is objectionable only because of Puritanism. Or something.
I agree with Martin Davies. The quality of the reports submitted by the public are very poor. I’ve seen in previous work men ( for it is usually them ) reporting child benefit fraud because they are still paying maintenance to their ex for a young person who has dropped out of education, with no name of the last college attended.
We want evidence – a college administrator, an employer, a friend who can corroborate, something you can work with, but many of them don’t give you a bone.
So the report gets filed but not acted on.
I am along to ignore Theophrastus and his silly straw men, to say that this is typical of the nasty curtain twitchers that infest this country. Who tend to also fall on the Puritan side of things. But they normally call themselves “conservative” and have endless discussions with people like themselves about how the only people who should be allowed to live are people like themselves.
My general point being that Britain really needs to revive that fine old British virtue of people minding their own fucking business.
Cannibalism like incest is objectionable only because of Puritanism. There you go.
In other news vast numbers of hard working families object to having to get up at sparrows fart and go out to work when he’s the same age as Arthur across the road who has been on the pan crack for the past 7-years with a bullshit medical condition (agoraphobia, lardyarseis or similar), hence writing letters to the people whose wages they are paying complaining about Arthur’s terminal boneidleness.
whatcha gonna do?
Put posters up around the neighbourhood saying “Snitches get stitches”?
Please feel free to ignore the widening gulf between “fit for work” and “somebody wants to employ them”. Now due to get even worse thanks to the Tories and their insane jacking up of the minimum wage.
Fit to do £6.00/hr of work, no jobs allowed below £6.70, and no jobs anyway because there’s always a younger, fitter migrant to do it instead.
“…the nasty curtain twitchers that infest this country. Who tend to also fall on the Puritan side of things…Britain really needs to revive that fine old British virtue of people minding their own fucking business.”
When the welfare state – you know, that product of the period 1945-79, which you prefer to 1980 onwards – stops subsidising the feckless and idle (and their breeding) at the expense of the prudent and hard-working, people will be more inclined to mind their own business. Reduce the financial incentive for snitching and you’ll get much less curtain-twitching and snitching.
But it is their business, because it is their local and national taxes picked from their pockets by a thieving government that pays for these layabouts.
If we have to chose a side then I’m on the side of the fucked off majority rather than the feckless minority. I’m not saying what they are doing is right, but what other alternative do they have?
Certainly no elected official will care unless the target of their accusations are “protected” (gypsies, Muslims, etc.) in which case the police will be knocking on their door to investigate a charges of incitement to racial hatred or some such bollocks.
Fine Theo, let’s have a free market then.
The period since 1980- not I hasten to add what Thatcher intended- has ended up as a massive job creation scheme for the “upper middle class” who, contrary to being the backbone of Britain as they once were now refers to an enormous, parasitic carbuncle living on government funding. The economy is in a catastrophic state. The old working class now virtually have to lie on their back with their legs open to get a job at Aldi.
Look, I don’t agree with the post-war dispensation. But most everyone seems to agree that at least people felt more free then, that their country was their own and there was some kind of future for us. My parents married in the 1950s, bought their own bungalow, had decent jobs, raised two children and moved up to semi-detached, all on a very ordinary income.
Look at the place now. The country is an authortarian, terrified shithole. We can’t predicate an entire economy on escalating property prices and flooding the country with bomb-wielding immigrants (however cheap their labour) forever.
I cannot comprehend how a self-described conservative can look at this disastrous clusterfark and think it’s an improvement. And before you say it, yes I do remember the Winter Of Discontent.
/rant
This is why the State stays as it is. It makes us all hate each other and blame each other, instead of them.
We have had systemic unemployment for decades, and it’s not due to people not wanting to work. The Residuum are a small minority. Don’t fall into the SMFS/Theo trap of thinking there are only two classes of people, the good middle class and the oxygen thieves.
There still exist those who believe in classifying by class.
There are also those of us, usually younger, who could not care about class and will not classify someone by class.
@ Martin D
“There are also those of us, usually younger, who could not care about class and will not classify someone by class.”
There’s also those folk who don’t take any notice of class nowadays as it’s bunk: I know lower class folk who work like stink and are rich and clever. Ditto for many of the posh. The cleverest person I ever met was lower middle class and terrifyingly well socialised and sharp. I also know very upper class folks who can mingle with anyone and get the best out of them in social or work circumstances. And the converse.
Me? People think I’m posh because I talk well, and are surprised to find I’m state schooled and from lowly brummie stock. It’s not the facts of class that cause problems in the UK: it’s the British fascination with it. It means nothing, and for every Prince Phillip, there’s a Marquis of Bath; every Alan Sugar a Richard Branson and every Danny Dyer a Lawrence Fox.
IanB
Who are the upper middle class that constitute this enormous parasitic carbuncle?
Examples, please. With numbers, preferably.
An “authoritarian, terrified shithole”?
You sound like Laurie Penny on a bad day. Have you thought of leaving, if it’s so bad?
And what is “systemic unemployment”? We live in an opportunity-rich society. It isn’t the government’s role to provide work for anyone. And the British working class has a poor work ethic, tends not to value education and has been failed by progressive schooling. The result is that employers prefer numerate and literate immigrants.
The majority of both the House of Commons and the Lords.
Cameron, Osbourn, Clegg and Miliband being perfect examples of the type.
JG
Some 1500 people do not constitute an “enormous parasitic carbuncle”. And not that many of them are upper middle class either.
They do when you remember they are backed up by the legislative force of this land and many millions of administrators, civil servants, NHS managers, consultants, etc.
All of which is eating 40% of our GDP. I would describe that as quite an “enormous parasitic carbuncle”. All controlled to a greater or lesser extent from the parasites in Whitehall and Westminster.
Sure you could argue that some of that 40% of GDP goes towards meaningful stuff, but I would argue that much of it is wasted or given to folks like Camila Batmanghelidjh who use it on their own fiefdoms and personal benefit rather than public good.
“I cannot comprehend how a self-described conservative can look at this disastrous clusterfark and think it’s an improvement. And before you say it, yes I do remember the Winter Of Discontent.”
Its not the Tories who got us here. As I recall, the country was fairly OK in the 90s, until that shyster Blair got elected, and proceeded to fuck the country royally up the arse.
Yes, the current lot haven’t managed to do anything to reverse all that, but to be honest no-one can in the current situation, as the entire State sector is rotten to the core, infested with SJW types and their ilk, who would violently resist any elected governments attempts to reform public administration. Short of a sort of military coup I can’t see any elected government, however nominally right wing, managing to turn back the clock now.
John Galt,
Yes, that’s who I meant.
Apologies Ian.
Didn’t mean to speak on your behalf.
Just annoyed and suffering from insomnia here in Penang.
Apology? I was thanking you! 🙂
Theophrastus – “IanB will be along soon to say that cannibalism like incest is objectionable only because of Puritanism. Or something.”
Damn straight. I will fight for my inalienable right to eat my niece.
And there isn’t much of a non-Christian argument why I shouldn’t be allowed to either.
And for the record, the Stasi relied on recruiting informers. They took neighbours who denounced each other too but the Soviet approach involved recruiting people to spy on each other.
The Gestapo on the other hand relied on denunciation. Partly because they were so small. There weren’t that many of them anywhere in Germany. They were also usually professional policemen rather than Nazis.
Allegedly the Gestapo tried to bring order to France. They provided special facilities for the French to denounce each other. The story goes the system collapsed because so many French people used it to settle personal scores with neighbours and employers that the Gestapo could not cope.
And if you want to find a middle class parasite, can I recommend the school teacher who called the police because a boy looked at UKIP’s website?
SMFS-
That is one example. The point I am trying to make being that the old “backbone” middle class has been shoved aside by the people now calling themselves middle class, who are basically the “state-sponsored” class. And who are empowered by the (new) moral system, as with that teacher.
I keep banging on about this because (it seems to me) many conservatives (in particular) characterise the “Left” as immoralists, or amoralists, when in fact they are driven by an intense moral fervour (which I characterise as you know as resurgent puritanism).
Nowadays you have to read illicit literature like UKIP websites behind the bike sheds. Then go back into the classroom for proper education in the correct method of anal sex.
Ian B – “The point I am trying to make being that the old “backbone” middle class has been shoved aside by the people now calling themselves middle class, who are basically the “state-sponsored” class. And who are empowered by the (new) moral system, as with that teacher.”
I am not disagreeing with you. When the State takes 40% of GDP, they are going to spend a large proportion of that on civil servants and NGOs and the like. That means they need to greatly expand the number of useless courses like sociology to provide enough paper pushers for the state.
These people are not middle class in the traditional sense. They are simply paid like the middle class. They are actually our equivalent of the Soviet functionary and just as supine to the powers-that-be.
In America this is even more obvious because virtually the entire Black middle class is made up of policemen, teachers, people who work in the DMV and so on. It is a pseudo-middle class because it does not involve any of the values that actually make someone middle class and so the children of this fantasy middle class often fall into the underclass.
The oddity is why you are making this argument. Don’t you usually claim there is nothing wrong with welfare for the poor and it does not change their values? Why would welfare for the middle class?
JG and IanB
The claim was that there is an enormous parasitic carbuncle of upper middle class people. When pressed, all you can do to identify these people is to refer to the 40% of gdp spent by the state and to members of the Houses of Parliament. But, as SMFS points out, most state employees are not truly middle class, never mind upper middle class. So the initial claim is class prejudice and bunk.
“And if you want to find a middle class parasite, can I recommend the school teacher who called the police because a boy looked at UKIP’s website?”
Indeed. But she (?) is most probably semi-educated, indoctrinated at a teacher training college, and certainly not upper middle class.
Theophrastus – “But, as SMFS points out, most state employees are not truly middle class, never mind upper middle class. So the initial claim is class prejudice and bunk.”
That depends on how you define Upper Middle Class. I prefer values. Some people would prefer income. Someone like Mary Warnock is famous for the fatuousness of her opinions. She has never held a proper job. She has been supported by the State her entire life. But a very well rewarded life it has been.
Theophrastus – “Indeed. But she (?) is most probably semi-educated, indoctrinated at a teacher training college, and certainly not upper middle class.”
A head master. People who can earn £60-100,000 a year are fairly upper middle class.
SMFS
£60-£100k — my plumber’s income — doesn’t make anyone upper middle class, and there are plenty of vulgar brutes on much more than that.
And headteachers are generally not what they were.
Someone on £100,000 a year just qualifies for the top 1%.
As I have said, I prefer values. Because a plumber may earn that and still not be middle class much less upper middle class. But there is a raft of parasitic scum who do earn that sort of money.
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