The Dirt on Sadiq Khan

[Hermit]

The best estimate for the amount of moneys lost due to welfare fraud is £1.3bn a year out of a total of its £164bn welfare payments.

Who says that's the best estimate? The same people who are responsible for preventing the fraud?
"Oh look what a good job we are doing ! "

No. It is the best estimate in my opinion - certainly better than yours, which was "a load of cheats", supported by the anecdotal "I know that for a fact, because I personally know some of them." Feel free to improve on either.

[pErvinalia]

I predict overuse of smiley

[Brian Peacock]

Disability benefit was and still is a cheat's ticket to easy money.

Disability and sickness benefits traditionally have a low fraudulent claim rate. In 2010 when the Libdem/Tory coalition took over the fraudulant claim rate was estimated at 0.3%, due in large part to the strict conditionality of the qualification criteria. That conditionality has been significantly tightened since then - some would argue it has been made too tight - with both 'disability' and 'sickness' for the purposes of welfare no longer being defined by medical and social care professionals but as a function of one's assessed 'fitness for work' according to the terms of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA).

Figures from the year-ending 2013/14 had the overpayment rate for all benefits due to fraudulent claims at 0.7% while the overpayment rate due to claimant and official error at 1.3%. Together that's a 2% overpayment rate, and while that still amounts to quite a bit of money across a welfare budget of c.£160bn (including state pensions and housing benefit) it is still proportionately low considering the complexity and bureaucracy inherent in the system.

Additionally, for that period underpayments on disability and sickness benefit significantly outstripped overpayments by a factor of c.9:1 though the estimated combined overpayment rate (error and fraud) was 1.3% for disability benefit claims.

At this point the government changed the way they categorised overpayments, most significantly changing what had been considered claimant error before 2014 now being considered claimant fraud after and making it an offence to not provide accurate information as part of a claim - one that carries possible punitive consequences (both financial and legal) for making an error in a claim. This of course has had the knock-on effect of raising at a stroke the official level of fraud while reducing the official level of error. Even so, the figures for the year to April 2016 have the overpayment rate at 0.8% for all benefits (including state pension and housing benefit).

For Employment and Support Allowance (ESA: the benefit which replaced the old Incapacity and Sickness benefit) official figures for 2015/16 estimate that overpayment due to error decreased by 0.1% to 0.5% of claimant on the previous year, while underpayments increased by 0.3% to 2.3% of expenditure. This makes both the error rate for ESA lower than the error rate for all benefits (1.0%) in the same period and the underpayment rate for ESA higher that the rates for all benefits (1.8%).

Now, given all this, are you going to maintain that "Disability benefit was and still is a cheat's ticket to easy money,", implying as it does that i) making a fraudulent claim is somehow an easy or trivial matter, ii) that many who claim such a benefit are not really disabled or sick, and ii) that people who claim such a benefit are on an 'easy money' something-for-nothing free ride?

Your attitude is typical of those who have swallowed the government's guff about disabled people being a group dominated by 'shirkers not workers, skivvers not strikers', which is in large part a consequence of the disproportionate amount of coverage fraudulent claims have received in the press and the hasty generalisations extrapolated from these case to sick and disabled people as a whole.

Once the word got around, that once you were on it, the money kept coming, and you didn't have to look for work, the cheats piled onto it as well as the genuine claimants.

There's a few things to say about this. First, sick people often get better, disabled people generally don't. Someone with a chronic illness (treatable but not curable) may be functionally disabled but only classed as sick for the purposes of a claim.

ESA is split into two groups to reflect this; for the sick there is the work-related activity group (WRAG) which has conditionality similar to JobSeekers Allowance (regular interviews, training programmes, personal adviser etc) for those who can do some work or who are expected to be able to move into work - or at least off ESA and onto full JobSeekers) within 12 months, and; the support group (SG) for those with long-term and/or life limiting illness or conditions who are unlikely to ever mange to hold down a regular job.

ESA is awarded only after a successful work capability assessment (WCA). So yes, one might expect that if one is categorised into the support group then 'once you're on it the money keeps coming in' but this doesn't account for the fact that those in the support group have to reclaim every 3 years and those in the the WRAG group can only claim for 12 months.

The under- and overpayment figures for ESA for 2015/16 don't break down between the groups but it is noted that the majority of fraudulent claim comes from those who fail to declare earnings or employment. Considering the stringency of the WCA one would imagine that the majority of this fraud comes from those ascribed into the work group rather than the support group, and while circumstance breakdowns are obviously not available one can also imagine that the majority of this come from those who have been awarded ESA for a genuine claim and who then go back to work without letting the Benefits Agency know.

So this implicit assumption that there are 'a load of cheats' and people are specifically setting out to get something-for-nothing by pretending to be sick or disabled doesn't bear much scrutiny, even if a few (and by that I mean a small proportion of those who do claim fraudulently) think that pretending to be sick and/or disabled is an easy ride to free money forever - which it isn't.

Depression was the best one to use. If you fake a bad back, or angina or something, they can video you playing football while supposed to be disabled. But depression is invisible, and can't really be proved or disproved.

Yes, depressed people don't necessarily look sick, but you cannot get ESA just by saying you are depressed. You need a diagnosis and you still have to pass the ultimate and final test which is the Work Capability Assessment: In other words a mental health diagnosis on its own is not enough to make a successful claim for ESA, just as being diagnosed as deaf, blind, or paraplegic etc isn't. So again, in your scenario of people faking depression to get free money forever is more of an assumption based on a misconceptions about the system and depression, even as it impugns the motivation and intent of those with an actual mental health diagnosis.

The problem here is mainly that the government have relied on a manufactured sense of outrage about the tiny number of people who do think that faking it is way to get free money forever as representing some kind of overwhelming problem for the system - which in turns justifies cutting back on spending for all and making it far more difficult for the vast majority of sick and disabled people to claim, and to be granted, some form of social support.

What I would do would be to have such a drastic deterrent regime against cheating, that very few people would risk it. Have really draconian sentences for people who make false claims.
And make them very very public. That might work.

While I think this is fine in principle, and those who set out to make a faked claim, and succeed, should have as much of the money reclaimed as possible and perhaps spend some considerable time in prison (depending on the circumstances) the government does has some effective weapons. Not only are the claiming procedures long and complex but that nice Mr Duncan Smith has brought into law a very effect measure to deal with those who make bad claims (either by error or intent) - the benefits sanction regime.

If sanctioned the minimum period you will be unable to claim for is 3 months - this means all benefits including housing benefit. If you're out of work, on housing benefit, and try it on you risk destitution. Other changes mean that you can no longer claim arrears from the point you make a claim - now you only get paid from the day of the decision to award, and back payments are limited only to those claims that take longer than 13 weeks to process. That means you may have to wait for up to 3 months to get a decision and then you only get support from the day of the decision onwards.

Now while this probably isn't going to bother someone who trying on a fake claim, it has had a severe impact on those in genuine or dire need, with JobCentre staff 'signposting' referrals to food banks for those in the process of making a claim up by around 70% in the last year alone. The Trussell Trust estimate that around 85% of the people they help through their network of food banks are those awaiting decisions on work-related benefit claims (that includes in-work and out-of-work benefits).

Calls to fully implement the government's own 'Oakley Review' into the application of benefits sanctions, by motion in the House of Commons, and twice by the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee, have gone unheeded. The government is currently undertaking a review of the review with no publication due date in the offing.

Nonetheless, one cannot claim that there is nothing that can be done about cheating. While the ability of the government to demotivate those who think it's worth faking a claim is limited, there are a number of mechanism which might be said to limit cheating, chiefly making it harder to claim any benefit and ensuring that benefits are awarded under increasingly strict conditionality.

Some links:
https://www.gov.uk/employment-support-a ... e/overview
https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/emplo ... vity-group
https://www.trusselltrust.org/what-we-do/
https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... ent-review
https://www.rethink.org/living-with-men ... assessment
https://www.gov.uk/government/collectio ... or-reports

[pErvinalia]

[JimC]

A good post from Brian, but not wildly humorous, I would have thought...

[Brian Peacock]

It's the way I tell 'em.

[DaveDodo007]

Disability benefit was and still is a cheat's ticket to easy money.

Disability and sickness benefits traditionally have a low fraudulent claim rate. In 2010 when the Libdem/Tory coalition took over the fraudulant claim rate was estimated at 0.3%, due in large part to the strict conditionality of the qualification criteria. That conditionality has been significantly tightened since then - some would argue it has been made too tight - with both 'disability' and 'sickness' for the purposes of welfare no longer being defined by medical and social care professionals but as a function of one's assessed 'fitness for work' according to the terms of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA).

Figures from the year-ending 2013/14 had the overpayment rate for all benefits due to fraudulent claims at 0.7% while the overpayment rate due to claimant and official error at 1.3%. Together that's a 2% overpayment rate, and while that still amounts to quite a bit of money across a welfare budget of c.£160bn (including state pensions and housing benefit) it is still proportionately low considering the complexity and bureaucracy inherent in the system.

Additionally, for that period underpayments on disability and sickness benefit significantly outstripped overpayments by a factor of c.9:1 though the estimated combined overpayment rate (error and fraud) was 1.3% for disability benefit claims.

At this point the government changed the way they categorised overpayments, most significantly changing what had been considered claimant error before 2014 now being considered claimant fraud after and making it an offence to not provide accurate information as part of a claim - one that carries possible punitive consequences (both financial and legal) for making an error in a claim. This of course has had the knock-on effect of raising at a stroke the official level of fraud while reducing the official level of error. Even so, the figures for the year to April 2016 have the overpayment rate at 0.8% for all benefits (including state pension and housing benefit).

For Employment and Support Allowance (ESA: the benefit which replaced the old Incapacity and Sickness benefit) official figures for 2015/16 estimate that overpayment due to error decreased by 0.1% to 0.5% of claimant on the previous year, while underpayments increased by 0.3% to 2.3% of expenditure. This makes both the error rate for ESA lower than the error rate for all benefits (1.0%) in the same period and the underpayment rate for ESA higher that the rates for all benefits (1.8%).

Now, given all this, are you going to maintain that "Disability benefit was and still is a cheat's ticket to easy money,", implying as it does that i) making a fraudulent claim is somehow an easy or trivial matter, ii) that many who claim such a benefit are not really disabled or sick, and ii) that people who claim such a benefit are on an 'easy money' something-for-nothing free ride?

Your attitude is typical of those who have swallowed the government's guff about disabled people being a group dominated by 'shirkers not workers, skivvers not strikers', which is in large part a consequence of the disproportionate amount of coverage fraudulent claims have received in the press and the hasty generalisations extrapolated from these case to sick and disabled people as a whole.

Once the word got around, that once you were on it, the money kept coming, and you didn't have to look for work, the cheats piled onto it as well as the genuine claimants.

There's a few things to say about this. First, sick people often get better, disabled people generally don't. Someone with a chronic illness (treatable but not curable) may be functionally disabled but only classed as sick for the purposes of a claim.

ESA is split into two groups to reflect this; for the sick there is the work-related activity group (WRAG) which has conditionality similar to JobSeekers Allowance (regular interviews, training programmes, personal adviser etc) for those who can do some work or who are expected to be able to move into work - or at least off ESA and onto full JobSeekers) within 12 months, and; the support group (SG) for those with long-term and/or life limiting illness or conditions who are unlikely to ever mange to hold down a regular job.

ESA is awarded only after a successful work capability assessment (WCA). So yes, one might expect that if one is categorised into the support group then 'once you're on it the money keeps coming in' but this doesn't account for the fact that those in the support group have to reclaim every 3 years and those in the the WRAG group can only claim for 12 months.

The under- and overpayment figures for ESA for 2015/16 don't break down between the groups but it is noted that the majority of fraudulent claim comes from those who fail to declare earnings or employment. Considering the stringency of the WCA one would imagine that the majority of this fraud comes from those ascribed into the work group rather than the support group, and while circumstance breakdowns are obviously not available one can also imagine that the majority of this come from those who have been awarded ESA for a genuine claim and who then go back to work without letting the Benefits Agency know.

So this implicit assumption that there are 'a load of cheats' and people are specifically setting out to get something-for-nothing by pretending to be sick or disabled doesn't bear much scrutiny, even if a few (and by that I mean a small proportion of those who do claim fraudulently) think that pretending to be sick and/or disabled is an easy ride to free money forever - which it isn't.

Depression was the best one to use. If you fake a bad back, or angina or something, they can video you playing football while supposed to be disabled. But depression is invisible, and can't really be proved or disproved.

Yes, depressed people don't necessarily look sick, but you cannot get ESA just by saying you are depressed. You need a diagnosis and you still have to pass the ultimate and final test which is the Work Capability Assessment: In other words a mental health diagnosis on its own is not enough to make a successful claim for ESA, just as being diagnosed as deaf, blind, or paraplegic etc isn't. So again, in your scenario of people faking depression to get free money forever is more of an assumption based on a misconceptions about the system and depression, even as it impugns the motivation and intent of those with an actual mental health diagnosis.

The problem here is mainly that the government have relied on a manufactured sense of outrage about the tiny number of people who do think that faking it is way to get free money forever as representing some kind of overwhelming problem for the system - which in turns justifies cutting back on spending for all and making it far more difficult for the vast majority of sick and disabled people to claim, and to be granted, some form of social support.

What I would do would be to have such a drastic deterrent regime against cheating, that very few people would risk it. Have really draconian sentences for people who make false claims.
And make them very very public. That might work.

While I think this is fine in principle, and those who set out to make a faked claim, and succeed, should have as much of the money reclaimed as possible and perhaps spend some considerable time in prison (depending on the circumstances) the government does has some effective weapons. Not only are the claiming procedures long and complex but that nice Mr Duncan Smith has brought into law a very effect measure to deal with those who make bad claims (either by error or intent) - the benefits sanction regime.

If sanctioned the minimum period you will be unable to claim for is 3 months - this means all benefits including housing benefit. If you're out of work, on housing benefit, and try it on you risk destitution. Other changes mean that you can no longer claim arrears from the point you make a claim - now you only get paid from the day of the decision to award, and back payments are limited only to those claims that take longer than 13 weeks to process. That means you may have to wait for up to 3 months to get a decision and then you only get support from the day of the decision onwards.

Now while this probably isn't going to bother someone who trying on a fake claim, it has had a severe impact on those in genuine or dire need, with JobCentre staff 'signposting' referrals to food banks for those in the process of making a claim up by around 70% in the last year alone. The Trussell Trust estimate that around 85% of the people they help through their network of food banks are those awaiting decisions on work-related benefit claims (that includes in-work and out-of-work benefits).

Calls to fully implement the government's own 'Oakley Review' into the application of benefits sanctions, by motion in the House of Commons, and twice by the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee, have gone unheeded. The government is currently undertaking a review of the review with no publication due date in the offing.

Nonetheless, one cannot claim that there is nothing that can be done about cheating. While the ability of the government to demotivate those who think it's worth faking a claim is limited, there are a number of mechanism which might be said to limit cheating, chiefly making it harder to claim any benefit and ensuring that benefits are awarded under increasingly strict conditionality.

Some links:
https://www.gov.uk/employment-support-a ... e/overview
https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/emplo ... vity-group
https://www.trusselltrust.org/what-we-do/
https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... ent-review
https://www.rethink.org/living-with-men ... assessment
https://www.gov.uk/government/collectio ... or-reports

The fact is cheats exist and the Tories have every right to rout them out. Any draconian methods used by the Tory party lays at the feet of the cheaters and not at the ebil Tory party. You are using emotive language to make the Tory party out to be monsters when they have every right to be careful with taxpayers money. A lot of people work very hard in shitty jobs but fuck them right, lets just throw their money away as we wouldn't want to upset the lazy cheating cunts would we.

[pErvinalia]

A good post from Brian, but not wildly humorous, I would have thought...

I was imitating MM.

[Brian Peacock]

The fact is cheats exist and the Tories have every right to rout them out. Any draconian methods used by the Tory party lays at the feet of the cheaters and not at the ebil Tory party. You are using emotive language to make the Tory party out to be monsters when they have every right to be careful with taxpayers money. A lot of people work very hard in shitty jobs but fuck them right, lets just throw their money away as we wouldn't want to upset the lazy cheating cunts would we.

I do not think that you can really claim that I have resorted to 'emotive language' in my previous remarks - not by a long chalk. If you genuinely think this, rather than perhaps just resenting having you conscience tweaked as someone who personally identifies with the current government's mindset, then by all means feel free to lead by example.

I didn't say there were no people faking disability benefits claims or that the government shouldn't do something about it - I am simply challenging the view that the existence of fraud does not justify whatever action the government decides to take. I said that fakers should have as much money as possible reclaimed and prison should certainly be an option in the most egregious cases, but even in that I think the disability benefits system should be predicated on helping the vulnerable and not on excluding cheats and fakers at any and all costs. So, if you read my remarks again you see that I acknowledged that fraud and error exist and were, to some extent, inherent in the system, but the point is that it remains low - very low. Fraud is inherent in the taxation system too, as well as in many areas of society, so lets not cite disability fakers as some kind of special case as the government has been inclined to do.

Nonetheless, I was pointing out that when overpayments due to error or fraud amount to c.2% of claims, and underpayment rates far outstrip overpayment rates for disability/sickness benefits then a system that is heavily weighted against the 98% of so-called 'genuine' claimants appears disproportionately stringent, and indeed is having some serious adverse effects for a major chunk of that 98% of genuinely, non-faking claimants. The idea that it is justifiable to make the lives of disabled people more difficult and more financially precarious in order to prevent fraud by tiny fraction of claimants is, imo, unbecoming of any society that aspires to calling itself civilised.

I know the government like to play the dichotomous 'deserving' vs the 'undeserving' card here, with their talk of 'genuine' claimants in receipt of social support and, by implication, 'bogus' claimants when applications are refused, but let us not forget how we came upon this issue here. It cropped up when I used disabled people as an example of what can happen when a particular group is, to all intents and purposes, officially demonised for their apparent inherent moral laxity. Let us also not forget that the reason I dug up the figures in reply to mistermack was to highlight that the idea of disability and sickness benefit claimants being a 'load of cheats' is not supported by the evidence even while this seems to be a commonly held opinion in society at large. And finally let us not forget that because of the low status of disabled people and the low regard in which disabled people are currently held they seem to have become a fair-game target for opportunist bullies and abusers - both among members of the press and the government as well as among those who appear to have no compunction about abusing disabled people in their everyday lives in their communities and in their homes. You may also like to refer to a previous reply I gave to you on this matter here.

[pErvinalia]

What it all comes down to is conservative moralising. It's fucking sick and twisted.

[DaveDodo007]

The fact is cheats exist and the Tories have every right to rout them out. Any draconian methods used by the Tory party lays at the feet of the cheaters and not at the ebil Tory party. You are using emotive language to make the Tory party out to be monsters when they have every right to be careful with taxpayers money. A lot of people work very hard in shitty jobs but fuck them right, lets just throw their money away as we wouldn't want to upset the lazy cheating cunts would we.

I do not think that you can really claim that I have resorted to 'emotive language' in my previous remarks - not by a long chalk. If you genuinely think this, rather than perhaps just resenting having you conscience tweaked as someone who personally identifies with the current government's mindset, then by all means feel free to lead by example.

I didn't say there were no people faking disability benefits claims or that the government shouldn't do something about it - I am simply challenging the view that the existence of fraud does not justify whatever action the government decides to take. I said that fakers should have as much money as possible reclaimed and prison should certainly be an option in the most egregious cases, but even in that I think the disability benefits system should be predicated on helping the vulnerable and not on excluding cheats and fakers at any and all costs. So, if you read my remarks again you see that I acknowledged that fraud and error exist and were, to some extent, inherent in the system, but the point is that it remains low - very low. Fraud is inherent in the taxation system too, as well as in many areas of society, so lets not cite disability fakers as some kind of special case as the government has been inclined to do.

Nonetheless, I was pointing out that when overpayments due to error or fraud amount to c.2% of claims, and underpayment rates far outstrip overpayment rates for disability/sickness benefits then a system that is heavily weighted against the 98% of so-called 'genuine' claimants appears disproportionately stringent, and indeed is having some serious adverse effects for a major chunk of that 98% of genuinely, non-faking claimants. The idea that it is justifiable to make the lives of disabled people more difficult and more financially precarious in order to prevent fraud by tiny fraction of claimants is, imo, unbecoming of any society that aspires to calling itself civilised.

I know the government like to play the dichotomous 'deserving' vs the 'undeserving' card here, with their talk of 'genuine' claimants in receipt of social support and, by implication, 'bogus' claimants when applications are refused, but let us not forget how we came upon this issue here. It cropped up when I used disabled people as an example of what can happen when a particular group is, to all intents and purposes, officially demonised for their apparent inherent moral laxity. Let us also not forget that the reason I dug up the figures in reply to mistermack was to highlight that the idea of disability and sickness benefit claimants being a 'load of cheats' is not supported by the evidence even while this seems to be a commonly held opinion in society at large. And finally let us not forget that because of the low status of disabled people and the low regard in which disabled people are currently held they seem to have become a fair-game target for opportunist bullies and abusers - both among members of the press and the government as well as among those who appear to have no compunction about abusing disabled people in their everyday lives in their communities and in their homes. You may also like to refer to a previous reply I gave to you on this matter here.

Look it is easy to hold the moral high ground when you are spending other peoples money, god aren't you so generous. There is a limit to how much the government can give to worthy causes and no amount of virtual signaling from you is going to increase that. There isn't a magic money tree to pick ripe fruit from and god help inflation if there was. The budget is what it is and has a thousand other causes demanding money for their pet projects. Increasing taxation on the wealthy just either disincentivizes them or they move to another country. Being an entrepreneur is not easy as everyone would be doing it and they are hard to replace let alone discouraging them in the first place. Yes disabled people have a shit time of it and if I had a magic wand I would wish it all away but I don't and nobody else has one either.Do corporations take the piss when it comes to taxation, well yes they do but they hold all the cards and tell any government to fuck off. I'm a capitalist not a corporalist though a country needs big business to employ people, when people are employed it helps the country whether they are good tax payers or not.

[DaveDodo007]

What it all comes down to is conservative moralising. It's fucking sick and twisted.

#magicmoneytree, #iamgenerouswithotherpeoplesmoney.

[pErvinalia]

Increasing taxation on the wealthy just either disincentivizes them or they move to another country.

So why aren't all the global wealthy living in Ireland then? :scratch:

[pErvinalia]

What it all comes down to is conservative moralising. It's fucking sick and twisted.

#magicmoneytree, #iamgenerouswithotherpeoplesmoney.

#idontunderstandeconomics

[JimC]

Increasing taxation on the wealthy just either disincentivizes them or they move to another country.

So why aren't all the global wealthy living in Ireland then? :scratch:

Fear of leprechauns?