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On-the-spot fines for benefit cheats; a good idea but not as simple as it sounds

May 9th, 2012 FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

By
Steve Doughty


PUBLISHED:

09:35 EST, 8 May 2012

|

UPDATED:

02:04 EST, 9 May 2012

However hard-boiled they may be, politicians still tend to arrive in government with fine dreams of the difference they are going to make to the world. There are various ways to tell when the dreams are dying.

A classic is the sudden invention of an on-the-spot fine that is going to punish wrongdoers and put things to right at a stroke. Tony Blair had one of these in July 2000, when he had been in power for just over three years.

There were going to be £100 on-the-spot fines for drunken louts. Police officers were to be given powers to march anti-social youths to the nearest cashpoint and force them to cough up the money.

There will be 'tough new fines' even for those who steal only small amounts

There will be ‘tough new fines’ even for those who steal only small amounts

Cynics thought there might be a flaw or two in this plan.

For some reason I was spending the day chasing Mr Blair around a small town in Germany, where he was giving a speech of extraordinary vapidity about religion. I had the opportunity to ask Alastair Campbell about the cashpoint scheme, but I can’t tell you how he explained it, because all I got was a few minutes of sweary abuse.

Sadly for Mr Blair, this tactic failed to work on police chiefs, who killed the idea off in a hurry, to the accompaniment of mockery on all sides.

It is not necessarily good news for Mr Cameron’s Coalition that a similar plan is now being brought in to deal with benefit cheats.

There will be on-the-spot fines of up to £2,000, according to the version ladled out in one popular newspaper today. There will be ‘tough new fines’ even for those who steal only small amounts, and welfare reform minister Lord Freud added: ‘No one will escape justice with a mere slap on the wrists.’

Some will think Lord Freud optimistic, but, in fairness, his fines are not a matter of Blairite smoke and mirrors. They have actually reached the statute book, in the new Welfare Reform Act. As you would expect from anything connected with the benefits system, they are not quite as simple as they have been sold.

For a start, these are not on-the-spot fines. They are ‘administrative penalties’, which, in the case of benefit dependent cheats, will amount to the Department of Work and Pensions claiming back some of its own money. Or, more accurately, our own money.

There are a range of new punishments, which include a £350 fine for benefit fraud, or, if it comes to more, half of the amount stolen up to £2,000. Some offenders will be banned from receiving benefits, for up to three years in the case of gang members engaged in organised fraud.

A new ‘civil penalty’ of £50 will be introduced to deal with cases in which claimants accidentally on purpose fail to tell their benefit office that their boyfriend has moved in, or that they have got a new better paid job, and so on.  

All very laudable. Trouble is, it won’t make much difference, and the Department of Work and Pensions knows it.

I know they know because these days when ministries bring in new legislation they pump out documents called ‘impact assessments’.

Secret spending: Three in ten adults admit to making secret purchases or splashing out on expensive items without discussing it with their partners

Secret spending: Those who earn undeclared income, or who’s partner moves in on the sly may face an on-the-spot fine of up to £2,000

Ministers do not do much to encourage you to read these. This is because more often than not, the impact assessment will tell you far more about some politician’s grand scheme than his speeches, his press releases, his interactive DVDs, his specially-launched website, and all the briefings Whitehall can muster.

In this case the impact assessment on fraud penalties and sanctions from the DWP and Revenue and Customs announces that ‘the annual cost of welfare benefit fraud and error, including tax credits, is assessed to be £5.3 billion’.

It goes on to estimate that the grand savings total achieved by the new penalties over the next three years will amount to £73 million. Net savings will be £45 million, presumably because of the cost of running the tough new system.

So, by the end of March 2015 the not quite on-the-spot fines will have saved us £15 million a year from £5.3 billion. I get nervous with big numbers, so I could be wrong, but I make this just over a quarter of one per cent.

It is safe to say that Lord Freud’s worthy efforts won’t be reducing our taxes by much.

The supposedly tough fines are no more than tinkering, and the Coalition is fighting shy of reforms that would really make a difference to the benefits system and make a serious dent in benefit fraud.

Let’s take an example: how about the couple penalty, the notorious benefit bias in favour of single people and single parent families? This can mean a single mother loses £200 a week if her partner moves in with her. We have a million couples thought to be ‘living apart together’ because it would cost them too much to live as a proper family.

A couple of months ago Lord Freud was lecturing people who fail to tell the DWP they are shacked up with someone. ‘Pretending you a single parent to get benefits when you are actually living with a partner is stealing money from the people who genuinely need help,’ he announced.

Well, how about changing the welfare system so that benefit-dependent single parents are no longer much better off than couples who try to raise their children together? Or would that be too much like a real welfare reform?

Here’s what other readers have said. Why not add your thoughts,
or debate this issue live on our message boards.

The comments below have been moderated in advance.



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This writer doesn’t seem to have heard about how many homeless people have resulted from kicking-the-vulnerable-to-the-gutter policies of these fascist tories nor of the many suicides every day from the terrible poverty this administraton is causing by the constant and unremitting snatching of people’s life-line benefts. Or maybe more likely, he/she doesnt give a damn.
Tax the rich and the well-heeled more extensively.

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It won’t work because they will have to take money from their benefits and it will cause hardship so they will pay a £1 a week for the next 1000 years. I don’t think it is fair to fine somebody if there is a change in circumstances but they haven’t been informed by tax credits, the benefit office get the change in 3 days but the person claiming it takes weeks for tax credit office to send them the change. I know somebody hadn’t received a tax credit change in money paid and their hosung and council tax benefit claim was suspended what caused them trouble when they couldn’t pay the rent for a month until the mess was sorted out. No apologies from council tax or housing benefit office the trouble they caused. I would like to see when the rich don’t pay their taxes they hit with a £50’000 minimum fine but that won’t happen because it would affect all the tories chums and mp’s, lords and ministers.

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It’s the Department for Work and Pensions, not ‘OF Work…………and the Administrative Penalty / Caution regime has been in existence for years as a means of sanctioning benefit cheats, it is being re-worked. One relatively simple measure the government – any government – should take, is to limit the payment of Income Support (or Child Tax Credits) to lone parent claimants to the number of children on the claim at the start. It is astounding how many ‘single’ mothers come on to benefit with one or two children, and add two or three more as the years go by, often fathered by the same man. Each child is paid for at the rate of over £60 a week. Those of us who work and pay taxes limit the size of our families for financial reasons, no such considerations apply in benefit world. This really must be stopped; other countries have done it – why not the UK?

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Benefits should be given in the form of vouchers,for housing, food and transport all at a uniform rate per person for a set period. This is the only way to control the dependency that has developed on cash handouts and prevent fraud.

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Benefit fraud costs us £5.2bn per year, and has to be reined in. Although interestingly, approx £16bn in benefits gets unclaimed every year by people who actually qualify! ——————— Some other interesting numbers, illegal tax evasion costs £17bn per year, and ‘legal’ tax avoidance costs £70bn. Plenty of work to do isn’t there…….

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