"PS The Major points out that BOM's fraudsters all seem to have something else in common, other than fraud. Hmm."
This proves that it is not the number of immigrants who come but the type of immigrants.
We should only let people in who have got a clean criminal record and if they get a British passport they should do so on the understanding that they will never break the law. If they do so they should lose their passport. Also if you are not a British citizen you should not get benefits.
I know loads of immigrants who receive benefits and loads who have had to leave the UK. However I have NEVER known an immigrant who gets benefits who has had to leave the UK !!!!
It is like we want more lazy people.
I wonder how much of the stolen money we recovered?
Did we sell the taxi driver's seven bedroom mansion in Pakistan, did we empty his bank accounts? Will we deport him when his sentence ends?
How long did Kaduwanema steal from Birmingham City Council for and who was in charge of finance there, were they dismissed? Who hired him in Human Resources without checking his legal status to work - did they get financially penalised or their job downgraded, a small business owner apparantly can be punished by upto £10,000 which affects them personally. Did we get any of the public funds back?
If not, why doesn't some MP make this his/her project for this year and set about recovering our losses. The Home Sec needs a bit of help with her reputation at the moment doesn't she!
Great post Wat,
The unmentionable thing that the major mentions can have 2 meanings (be as careful as I can here):
1. That there are some portions of the criminal demographic that are just not clever enough to get away with (meaning there is a "majority", that are; which is even more worrying)
2.(AND THIS I DONT BELIEVE BUT I KNOW SOMEONE WOULD NO DOUBT BRING IT UP)That prosecuting these cases mainly revolves around certain parts of the demographic.
This is attrocious - the majors suggestion is very good but unworkable if the prisons service is incapable of dealing with the more obvious criminal fraternity. I have an idea though and it expands on the following phrase from the direct.gov website on benefits:
"The benefits system provides practical help and financial support if you are unemployed and looking for work. It also provides you with additional income when your earnings are low, if you are bringing up children, are retired, care for someone, are ill or have a disability."
Why does this have to be support in the form of money? As part of the wider question (and to make it personal) why do I support the young and single "jo-anne's" habit of 20 a day, junk food every night and 3 kids with no male role-model or right to interfere in a way I know is unhealthy for her and her kiddies? I'm a very pro-minarchist libertarian and live by a conservative moral code (understanding that anothers liberty to do what they like if they can afford to is their business) but I must admit this is where liberterianism breaks down - as much as it is the freedom of choice it is also the freedom to starve, as I see when "jo-anne's" kids come in to my youth group having not eaten in days. It is THESE people, these "self-made wards of the state", who are most active in benefit fraud and criminal circles and I have a solution which doesn't put mothers in jail, but in command of their own life - whether they like it or not. I will illustrate a time line to demonstrate this:
1. "Tommy" leaves school at 18 - he doesn't go to university or college or onto an apprenticeship.
2. He registers to claim benefits & for council housing.
3. He sees a DWP "representative" (name pending); a sort of psuedo social worker/CAB representative, who take details from him and identifies him an his national insurance details - they also take bank account details for direct payments.
4. The "representative" explains that he is entitled to 3 months unconditional benefits to help him find employment and also will look for housing for him if applicable.
5. Tommy then goes on to use this weekly money to fool around with friends, smoke, drink and as a kind of glorified pocket money, for the next 3 months.
6. Nearing the 3 month deadline he receives a notification of meeting with his "representative". He ignores this/cant read/actively hates authority.
7. Come week 13 he goes to the cash point only to find that his benefits haven't been deposited as prev
"...or right to interfere in a way I know is unhealthy for her and her kiddies?"
AHHHH!!!! sorry I think I should rephrase that - I mean to have a say in the upbringing of her children if she is being actively abusive in her actions.
Wat,
Sorry that last post was ridiculously long (and could be seriously misinterpreted!) and it appears to have cut off most of it - quite reasonable considering - so instead the gist of my opinion:
The DWP takes a more individual approach to its provision for the unemployed - it gives some leash in 3 months/12 weeks monetary provision to any who ask but then limits its provision to food stamps alone that cannot be used for luxury goods - this scheme is perfectly workable in modern supermarkets and they'd be more than happy to set up a tally system with the government when there is a steady source of income to be had.
This would have the dual effect of reducing the money that can end up in the hands of benefit thieves, and acts as a socially engineered fiscal barrier towards lifelong benefit reliance.
Abolish rewards for failure (benefits).
Abolish punishments for success (Taxes of income and gains).
Create a citizens dividend funded by a property value tax.
I love stories about incapacity benefit.
Having spent her working life as a teacher, my wife applied for it a couple of years ago. Her application was refused on the grounds that, as a teacher, she could do her job sitting down.
At the time, she had terminal cancer. She had lost all of her hair and her teeth and fingernails were starting to fall out. She had tumours in her breast, skin, lungs, bones and liver and she was connected to a battery operated pump that fed drugs into her 24/7 through a tube in her chest.
We were advised that we could appeal but that the appeal would not be heard until after my wife was dead.
P.S. Guess what my wife didn't have in common with the folks in your story?
"£3bn is down to benefits administered by the Department of Work and Pensions, especially Housing Benefit, Income Support, and Jobseekers Allowance"
Factual error - DWP do not process HB.
Also I do not know why you and many of your commentators seem to believe that if people are not British-by-birth then the system actively tries to make things easier for them as opposed to a British person in the same situation. This is absolutely not the case, and I would be grateful for your evidence that this is the case (anecdote is of no use, as I am sure I will have a greater number of anecdotes that challenge your theory.)
Cherry-picking a few fraud cases, essentially, on the basis of the race of the thief as you feel this supports your argument does you a dis-service and raises an unpleasant taste in the throat.
Hi Ben
1. On Housing Benefit fraud, all my figures are taken from the NAO Report linked in the blog. And while you reckon I've made a factual error because HB payments are processed by LA's, DWP have overall repsonsibility (including the HB PSA targets. And as I read the NAO report, of the £770m HB overpayment in 2005-06, only around £120m was down to LA's incorrect processing. The rest was down to fraud/customer error, or DWP processing errors.
2. I don't think my post says the benefits system favours immigrants. Other people may say that, but this post is about the inadequacy of punishment for benefit fraud, whatever the ethnic backgound of the fraudster.
3. I agree with you about cherry picking. That certainly wasn't the intention of the post, but when I searched back through the previous benefit fraud cases I'd blogged, the two big ones did turn out to be immigrants. And one of them was illegal (actually there was a third, which I didn't include in the post).
Now you may say that's because I never blog native born benefit fraudsters.
I'm not aware of selecting like that, but I'll specifically monitor myself in future. Let's see what stories come up over the next few months.
Ben
I've just take a further rootle though my blogs on state welfare scammers.
Actually, in terms of native white miscreants, all I've come up with is 8 kids multi-partner Alison Goulding (see this blog- http://burningourmoney.blogspot....is-
morning.html ) and 15 kid
"Shameless Mick" (see here- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
...shameless16.xml ).
Appalling stuff for sure, but they're classic shameless scroungers rather than out and out organised fraudsters.
But I'll look some more.
You have to remember the cost of jailing someone for a year is currently running at about £37,500 per annum. So if someone defrauds the tax payer of £100,000 and gets ten years for it he'll cost us just under half a million pounds in total. You better hope jail has a huge deterence effect else we'll just be pissing even more money away.
But your losses are others' gains.
Given that the government is robbing us blind through taxation, open and hidden, is it not surprising that some people think it's OK to rob the government blind. Makes sense really.
Wrong, BTW, but makes sense. The only way to stop this is to stop the government's theft.
Time for whoever is in charge at the DWP to go. No ifs. No buts.
Wat
I have just been discussing this article with my neighbour and she has berated me for using big numbers that she does not understand.
"...how much is that a week, I can only work out things on the basis of my weekly pension ...", she says.
So I have tried the following quick calc' on her.
Every week for every one of 25 million households in the UK, the government spends £452. It gets in from mugging taxpayers etc, about £418. It borrows the difference of £34. So; according to BOM the fraudsters are hitting each household for £58 a week.
"... am I a household, I live on my own".
Yes sweetheart, you are -(smack).
"So where has the rest of my 452 quid gone."
"I will ask BOM to work it all out on a weekly household basis for you, he is an accountant who used to work for the government"
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