Ten years ago, I had received a financial package to leave my job as a benefit fraud investigator for the Department for Work and Pensions. Despite the longer term financial hit, it enabled me to retire from working full time some nine years before retirement age. It was one of the best decisions of my life to take the package but I am not sure pensioning off some of the best fraud investigators in one go (I do not categorise myself as one of those, by the way) benefited the taxpayer. Let me rephrase that: it didn’t. Quite the opposite. Today, I read that the new Labour government is instigating a new crackdown on benefit fraud. The far left is appalled. With one small reservation, my comment is this: about time, too.
My reservation concerns the use of the word ‘crackdown’. Under 14 long years of Conservative misrule, a crackdown meant the very opposite of what it was supposed to convey. If the Tories announced a crackdown on benefit fraud, the red tops got very excited. On the ground, we knew this meant going after the easy hits and letting the more complex stuff go. If Labour is going to crackdown against high value fraud, as we did in the 2000s, everyone will be happy.
It appears that The Times newspaper has been briefed about parts of Keir Starmer’s leader’s speech today and it will include these lines about a new fraud bill in parliament:
“The legislation will allow fraud investigators to compel banks to hand over information about people’s finances if there is a suspicion they are claiming benefits they are not entitled to.It will also give them powers of “search and seizure” of people’s property in cases involving organised criminal gangs that are exploiting the benefits system.
“The crackdown is designed to save the taxpayer £1.6 billion over the next five years by tackling fraud and reducing overpayments. Starmer will say that he wants to ensure that “every penny” of taxpayers’ money is spent on Labour’s pledge to “rebuild public services” ….
“Banks will be required to tell the benefit system if people have savings of more than £16,000, the cut-off point for claiming benefits, or have been abroad for more than the four weeks allowed for universal credit claimants. Inspectors will then investigate and seek to recover overpayments.”
I don’t have a problem with any of this. I still have friends up and down the country who still work on the benefit fraud department and the stories they tell me about the way fraud is, or rather isn’t, investigated these days are more than a little alarming. The numbers being prosecuted are miniscule.
During Covid, benefit fraud investigators became concerned as to the levels of new fraud, much of which appeared to be organised fraud. They also sent messages up the line that the all singing, all dancing Universal Credit was riddled with holes and that fraud was widespread. They were ignored for years, at a likely cost of billions to the taxpayer, but finally the government has woken up to the levels of abuse. (To be fair, the awakening occurred in the dying days of the last Conservative government, even if they did precious little about it.)
John McDonnell, the hard left former chancellor under the wretched Jeremy Corbyn era (thank God neither ever won office) is furious. He said this:
“I don’t say this lightly. If you close your eyes, and you listen to the language being used, it’s almost like George Osborne speaking again in 2010.
“And when you hear politicians talk about “tough choices” or “painful decisions”, and then you hear some of the rhetoric around fraud and social security, literally that’s a replica of a speech made by George Osborne in 2010.”
I don’t say this lightly, but this is bollocks. Osborne did indeed talk about “strivers and shirkers” when chancellor of the austerity heavy Tory government between 2010 and 2015, in which some Liberal Democrats took jobs, but here’s the difference. The government in which Osborne served did the opposite of what it said it would do. Theirs was the government that handed out voluntary redundancy payments to investigators, presided over the exit of huge numbers of investigators to better paid jobs in other government departments and made a conscious decision to go after the easy hits, like compliance cases, rather than complex investigations.
It astounds me that McDonnell doesn’t seem to realise what was going on, especially since for many of the years of the so-called coalition government, he was a parliamentary advisor to the hard left civil service union, PCS, itself no friend of the benefit investigators they were supposedly there to represent. Perhaps the comrades only told McDonnell what he wanted to hear rather than what was actually going on at the coal face. Few of us wanted easy hits. We were public servants who were in post to do the best job for the government of the day and the public we served. You’d have thought McDonnell would have been thrilled by Osborne’s actions in government, rather than his empty rhetoric. Perhaps, the old boy believed everything Osborne was saying? Few of us on the front line did.
Some on the hard left complain that that governments should not be going after benefit fraudsters when tax avoidance and evasion costs the exchequer far more. I am not talking about prosecuting people for fiddling a few quid, but when people are having the DWP over for tens of thousands of pounds, often much more than that, why should the government let them get away with it? And if organised fraud is involved – and former colleagues are sure it is – then should we really give them a free pass? Isn’t a crime just a crime and only the punishments should differ?
I don’t want the government to talk about “crackdowns” any more than I want it to talk about “difficult” and “painful” decisions. Difficult and painful decisions generally mean making poor people poorer and a crackdown almost always means the opposite, as if using the word means it’s true. Trust me when I say it doesn’t. It’s a vacuous exercise in truth-twisting. But I do want fraud rooted out of the benefits system, as I would wanted it rooted out everywhere else.
The Conservative crackdowns were anything but crackdowns and were essentially cover for razing the investigation system to the ground, as it did with so many aspects of the public sector. (NHS, anyone?) Crackdown when used as an action for governments is a discredited term. Let’s just say that the government should be doing its job properly and not allowing thieves to prosper by allowing and enabling investigators to do their jobs. Substance might not sound as glamorous as spin, but maybe for once government should try it.
Abraham Lincoln was supposed to have said, but no one knows when, or even if, he did, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Osborne and the coalition government to which he belonged, as well as the governments that followed, did exactly that. It would be nice, and indeed novel, to imagine this one being different.
