THE REAL BENEFIT SCROUNGERS

Den of thieves

They want a 15% pay rise;

They claim for food and drink;

The expect subsidized bars and restaurants;

They claim for travel expenses and spin the system so that they can travel first class, like their backsides were too special for second class travel that most of us use;

They claim for second homes;

They claim for decorating;

They claim for gardening;

They claim for furniture;

They claim for office stationery;

They claim for council tax;

They claim for tv subscriptions and tv licences;

They claim for household bills, including domestic servants;

They will claim for anything they can 

And then they call the unemployed, the old and the sick benefit scroungers.

David Freud, failed merchant banker rewarded with a blue blood transfusion

And their neighbours are just as bad. They manage to avoid paying taxes on their salary by calling expenses, which are paid regardless of any expense involved. And from their number, without ever being elected are chosen ministers of the crown like this piece of garbage, a failed merchant banker who lies through his teeth about benefit fraud in the working classes, insults the very poor by insisting that they beg for food at food banks because he assumes that, like his "noble" colleagues, they will do anything for free food...  but doesn't mention that he sits in a house full of people who take non stop from the state, and in some cases, from anyone else who will offer them any money to subvert the will of parliament.

These people really do make me sick, and although I accept that there are probably some who aren't on the make, I will be damned glad to get rid of all of them. 

Note: I am aware that the Edinburgh parliament is not perfect and that there are benefits there too, and I'm sure people taking every advantage of them. But the conditions were set up by Westminster members, who have or had a sense of entitlement.

I'd be happy to see the subsidies there go too in an independent state.

BUSTING MYTHS ON BENEFITS, (WITH THANKS TO RED PEPPER AND GEORGE POTTER)

I read on The Potter Blogger, this series of Myth Busters about sickness/disability, and other benefits claimants, originally produced by Red Pepper.

At a time when the government in Westminster is allowing/encouraging us to believe that 88% of people who have been claiming this kind of benefit, have, in fact, been cheating the country out of money, because they ARE capable of work, while, ironically, the government is closing down Remploy factories left, right and centre, and when disability hate crime is increasing, I thought it was worth a repeat run here and so, with George's permission, here it is:

Welfare reform is almost inevitably contentious. Answering the question of who should receive how much financial support relies on often competing conceptions of fairness, with rival views about who needs, and who deserves, our help, not to mention the most just and efficient way of providing it. These issues are worth debating – but the current debate is being conducted on shoddy terms. Myths and stereotypes abound. These serve not only to unfairly stigmatise claimants, but to obscure the questions we might want to answer about how best the state can provide support to people who need it. 

Myth: There is a major problem of ‘families where generations have never worked’ 

Reality: The academics Paul Gregg and Lindsay MacMillan looked at the Labour Force Survey, the large-scale survey of households from which we get most of our statistics about who’s in work. In households with two or more generations of working age, there were only 0.3 per cent where neither generation had ever worked. In a third of these, the member of the younger generation had been out of work for less than a year. 

When they looked at longer-term data, they found that only 1 per cent of sons in the families they tracked had never worked by the time they were 29. What’s more, while sons whose fathers had experienced unemployment were more likely to be unemployed, this only applied where there were few jobs in the local labour market. So ‘inter-generational worklessness’ is much more likely to be explained by a lack of jobs than a lack of a ‘work ethic’. 

Myth: Most benefits spending goes to unemployed people of working age 

Reality: The largest element of social security expenditure (42 per cent) goes to pensioners. Housing benefit accounts for 20 per cent per cent (and about one fifth of these claimants are in work); 15 per cent goes on children, through child benefit and child tax credit; 8 per cent on disability living allowance, which helps disabled people (both in and out of work) with extra costs; 4 per cent on employment and support allowance to those who cannot work due to sickness or disability; 4 per cent on income support, mainly for single parents, carers and some disabled people; 3 per cent on jobseeker’s allowance; and 2 per cent on carer’s allowance and maternity pay, leaving 3 per cent on other benefits. 

Myth: Benefit fraud is high and increasing 

Reality: The latest Department for Work and Pensions estimates show that in 2011/12 just 0.7 per cent of benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud, including a 2.8 per cent fraud rate for jobseeker’s allowance and a mere 0.3 per cent for incapacity benefits. Even if we put together fraud with ‘customer error’ – people who are not entitled to benefits but not deliberately defrauding the state – the rate of false claims is 3.4 per cent for JSA and 1.2 per cent for incapacity benefit. 

The claim that benefit fraud is increasing is similarly false. Because there have been changes in how fraud has been calculated over time, we have to look at combined fraud and ‘customer error’ for JSA and income support. This declined from 9.4 per cent to 4.8 per cent of spending from 1997/98 to 2004/05, and has since stayed roughly flat. 

Myth: Couples on benefits are better off if they split up 

Reality: This one has recently been comprehensively disproved by research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who concluded: ‘The simplest question that can be asked in testing the couple penalty is: does the benefits system provide a different proportion of a family’s daily living needs if they live together and if they live apart? The clear answer from the calculations in this paper is no. The benefits system provides very similar living standards to families living together and apart.’ 

Research in 2009 for the Department for Work and Pensions looked at whether different benefit systems had any impact on people’s decisions about whether to stay together or not. They concluded that ‘on balance, the reviewed literature shows that there is no consistent and robust evidence to support claims that the welfare system has a significant impact upon family structure’. 

Myth: The welfare bill has ballooned out of control 

Reality: The government has repeatedly claimed that welfare expenditure grew unsustainably under Labour. In fact, total expenditure on welfare was 11.6 per cent of GDP in 1996/97; under Labour it averaged 10.7 per cent up to the crash. Afterwards benefits for children and working age adults rose from an average 4.9 per cent of GDP up to 2007/08 to 6 per cent. This is what you would expect during a recession. 

Myth: Most benefit claims are long term 

Reality: The government persistently frames benefit claimants as ‘languishing in dependency’. So how much of the benefit caseload is long-term? It depends whether you count people at a single point in time or look at people moving on and off benefits over a period. The numbers paint a completely different picture. For example, in 2008, some 75 per cent of incapacity benefit claimants had been receiving the benefit for more than five years, and only 13 per cent for less than one year. But over the period 2003–8, only 37 per cent were long-term while 38 per cent were on benefit for less than a year. So if you count claimants at just one point in time, as government tends to do, you will overestimate how much of the caseload is long-term – and underestimate how many people move on and off benefits over time. 

Myth: Social security benefits are too generous 

Reality: Out of work benefit levels fall well below income standards based on detailed research into what ordinary people think should go into a minimum household budget. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that while pensioners do in fact receive 100 per cent of what people think they need, a single adult of working age receives 40 per cent of the weekly minimum income standard and a couple with two children receives 62 per cent of the weekly minimum. 

Myth: Most people who claim disability benefits could be working 

Reality: There are two main kinds of disability benefits: disability living allowance (to cover the extra costs of disability) and employment and support allowance (income replacement for those not in employment). The most basic misunderstanding is that the latter is only for people who are ‘completely incapable of work’. The welfare reformer Sidney Webb commented in 1914 – in the midst of one of many previous panics about ‘true disability’ – that the only people who could do no work at all were ‘literally unconscious or asleep’. The question is whether suitable jobs exist, and whether these people would be able to get them. 

Once we understand this, three problems face us. First, just because we’re living longer doesn’t mean we’re in better health; improved medical care means that many people born with impairments or suffering traumatic injuries are able to live longer. Second, jobs are in some ways worse than in the early 1990s: people have to work harder and have less control over their job, which makes it more difficult for people with health problems to stay in work. And while we now have anti-discrimination legislation, this only forces employers to make ‘reasonable’ adjustments; the evidence not only suggests these are often limited, but that employers are less willing to employ disabled people as a result. 

Finally, many of the people claiming incapacity benefits are people with low employability in areas of few jobs. These are the very employers that are less likely to make adjustments. Some people end up in a situation where they are not fit enough to do the jobs they can get, but can’t get the jobs they can do. 

Completely incapable of work? Not necessarily. Penalised for their disability by a labour market that has no place for them? Definitely. 

*Cartoon from here.

Labour Councillor's Benefit Fraud Catches up with Him

We have all been so busy concentrating on the corruption involving News International and the Metropolitan Police, happening in far off London town that a case of corruption far closer to home, whilst not as life changing, is certainly serious, and needs a good deal of further investigation.

John Holden, a Labour councillor on Highland Council, awaits sentencing having been found guilty of stealing £43,000 of Income Support from the London government and nearly £10,000 from his own council in council tax rebates (council tax benefit of £6,925 and single occupancy of more than £2,309).

Mr Holden had claimed that he lived alone, that he had no savings and that he had no job, whereas the truth was that he was living with his wife, had (and you’ll love this) savings of £200,000...which he claims to have saved in the period 2002 to 2008... and had his council salary of £16,000 pa which he had been drawing since his election in 2007.

It amazes me, but apparently it is true, that he may keep his position on Highland Council unless he is sent to prison. It seems that you can only be removed as a councillor if you are unable to do the job for some reason: in this case because you have been incarcerated.

The thing that I found most strange was that he had managed to save £200,000 in a period of 6 years. Given that his income during that period amounted to £53k in stolen benefits plus his salary as a councillor, unless his wife is a merchant banker, a lord, or a member of the royal family, I suspect that we might want to ask how exactly he managed to amass this substantial sum.

But as Granny would say “Everything’s mixed with mercy. It is indeed fortunately for the taxpayers that he did manage to make savings, because he will find it easy to make good the ‘proceeds of crime order’ that has been placed on him confiscating the cash he has stolen. And I’d be surprised if there were not substantial costs to pay.

FIT FOR WORK? LABOUR'S SCHEME LETS PEOPLE DIE WAITING FOR TRIBUNAL

Inspired by an excellent piece by John Souter, on Subrosa’s blog, about the Welfare Reforms introduced by the last government and pursued vigorously by this one, I was encouraged to develop the theme a little, both by comments on the story, and by this story I read relating to deaths of people found fit under the new scheme.

Let’s start of by making it clear that I know that people abuse the system; work and claim benefits, lie about circumstances. There will always be. Just as at the other end of the scale there are and always will be people who avoid paying millions in tax.

Of course one benefit cheat may fiddle a few thousands; a tax cheat, a few million a year.

I condemn both whilst accepting that they as inevitable as the sunrise.

But I caution that whatever the Daily Mail says, most "welfare" goes to people who do need it; people who would work if there was decent and suitable work, or people who desperately need help in their illnesses, or old age.

The new Welfare laws, as well as clamping down on the cheats, put these people’s lives at risk. Witness the stories told in After Atos. In one case the representative of a claimant went to Tribunal to say that his client would be unable to attend due to the unfortunate fact that he had died.

And the decision to cut pensioners’ benefits (Tory policy) is unspeakable. Private or company pensions are flat lining, bank interest which used to be a mainstay of elderly people, is practically zero (unless of course you have your money in the British Virgin Islands), domestic fuel prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation so far this year and more increases are predicted before winter, we already have a jaw-dropping annual death rate from cold related illness, and Osborne cuts £100 from old people’s winter fuel payment?

How would the cabinet feel if their own parents were shivering in the house, wrapped in blankets with one bar of a fire to keep them warm, checking the meter every half hour and spending most of the day in bed, eventually giving up trying to keep warm and just slowly slipping away, alone, cold and miserable?

Despite their best efforts to make us forget it by encouraging a wild orgy of celebration over this extended bank holiday (on credit cards), which is estimated to have cost the British economy in excess of £6 billion in lost productivity, and to have had a -0.25% effect on next quarter’s figures, they can’t hide that we are suffering with static wages, reduced in-work benefits, increased taxation (direct and indirect) and horrific price increases (4% inflation my butt!).

And in the meantime we are fighting two wars from which we are detached, and can afford weddings which they say make the country more cohesive. Well tell that to the “benefit cheat” who died before the tribunal could reverse the stopping of his benefits. He’ll not be feeling like he was part of one big happy Britain.

And remember, that could be you. Not today maybe, but next year, or in 5 years’ time. The stories in “After Atos” happened in Scotland. Ahead of Thursday’s elections I’d love to know if Iain Gray, Annabel Goldie and Tavish Scott support this very unScottish treatment of Scots perpetrated by their London counterparts.

ARE WE SERIOUS ABOUT TAX FRAUD AND AVOIDANCE?

The country is broke because of a collapse in our national income, which was caused by the collapse of the banking sector.

Although the income of the government collapsed and they had to lend the banks unimaginable amounts of money, the government carried on spending money elsewhere pretty much as it had planned. Of course unemployment has risen and that has meant a bigger bill in JSA and Housing Benefits and the bill for interest of government debt has gone up.

We are not taking in enough money in tax to pay for our outgoings including interest on our loans. There is a tax gap.

What is the tax gap? Well, it has three parts. The first part comprises tax avoidance, which has been estimated at around £25bn a year. Tax avoidance is the exploitation of loopholes in UK tax law and the careful use of tax havens which we have talked about before on Munguin’s Republic. There is absolutely nothing at all that is illegal about using tax havens. They are inefficiencies in the tax law of the country which have been allowed to continue by successive governments who wish to stay friendly with rich people, and in some cases which actually consist of rich people. Several Cabinet Ministers in the present government are reputed to have large amounts of money in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands (pic rt), including George Osborne (below with David Cameron), none other than the Finance Minister, the International Aid Minister and the English Transport Minister.

The second part is tax evasion. That is the one that is a criminal offence. This has been estimated to be in the region of £70bn a year. That's a lot of money.

HM Revenue & Customs claims it is much less, but they use what many would describe as dubious methods for estimating unpaid tax.

The third part is unpaid and late-paid tax which, for this year may be in the order of £26bn.

If the government is even half way serious about collecting any of this tax, they are going about it in a weird way. Labour has cut and cut and cut again the number of staff in HMRC. 26,000 jobs have gone since 2005 including 5000 last year. This government intends to carry on sacking. This is utter madness. It is estimated that each front line member of staff can bring in as much as 30 times what it costs to pay them, so why, of all the departments to lose staff in, would they choose this one? The result is that tax that is so badly needed to keep services going is being given away.

The coalition keep banging a drum about benefit fraud, which is estimated at somewhere over £1 bn a year. A frightening amount without any doubt. Much more too, is lost because of inefficiencies in the system and staff or systems which make too many mistakes in their calculations.

But still week in week out we hear about ways to reduce this, and the iniquities of benefit thieves. This of course goes down very well with the Daily Mail and the Sun, which big the figures up and fail to point out when the government put the above two together and describe it all as fraud. Nothing like bashing the layabouts!!

The Tory manifesto did not include anything about tax fraud, but as the Liberals’ did, the coalition is promising to “make every effort to tackle tax avoidance, including detailed development of Liberal Democrat proposals and a review of the taxation of non-domiciled individuals.

In other words ... nothing.

I agree with the efforts being made to ensure that we do not lose more than £1 bn a year in benefit fraud, I’d just be very happy to see the same level of effort going into fraud at a higher level.

Maybe if that happened, we could hope to live for the next 10 years in a little less discomfort than we appear to have coming to us.

Figures estimated by Richard Murphy, director of Tax Research LLP