And we can assume that that number is going to rocket, as more and more people decide that they can't face the ATOS/tribunal x n nightmare of claiming, let alone what it's going to be like once UC kicks in, not to mention the massively increased potential for errors in the DWP's favour caused by the increasing pressure on an increasingly deskilled benefits workforce...
There used to be a number floating around of the amount of benefits UNclaimed, and it dwarfed the amount overpaid due to all causes. That seems to have conveniently disappeared, now, but if people are going to conflate all the sources of overpayment as "fraud", then by rights the amount underpaid also should be included...
Thank you for that. I think this bit of information needs spreading around as much as possible.
What trick have I fallen for? I noted the report provided by weepiper states that £2.1 billion was lost to fraud and error and over 50% (£1.2 billion) is their estimate of fraud. The only issue with combining the two in their report is that the estimated £0.9 billion paid out in error is probably a reasonable estimate, whereas the fraudulent one, by its nature, is likely to be a conservative estimate.
Why that way around and not the other? I would have thought it would be quite likely that the DWP might well tend to err in exactly the opposite direction - ie., to minimise the estimated size of its own mistakes, and exaggerate the amount lost to fraud...only I'm not the one making categorical claims about these numbers: you are.
Neither the amount overpaid in benefits (be it by fraud or error) nor the FO admin costs are chickenfeed. Sadly, the idea that these huge sums are "chickenfeed" probably leads to the government not worrying about how much it overpays.
By treating them - even rhetorically - in the same breath you conflate them, thereby doubling - again, if only rhetorically - the amount of money that appears as going on fraud, and thereby further hammering home associations of benefit claims with fraud. This is the trick that govt pulled when it claimed over £5billion was going in this way two years ago, and as IDS was caught out doing this week. This is what the TUC report is all about, the way these things slowly build up and appear over time, the drip drip of small misiniformations becoming unquestioned social assumptions (despite the real figures) which are then used by the state to attack the conditions of the poorest.
Not worrying? Have you just missed two years of propaganda preparing attacks on legitimately claimed benefits by attempting to associate them with fraud in the popular imagination? These are some odd lines you're taking here.
etc. However the question it raises for me is what leads to people forming such a view. Of course there's the effect of sensationalist media reporting and so on, but I'd suggest that personal experience may also play a part.
You're making the same mistake you made about that infographic - it is not so much about the absolute sums of money as the fact that the fuss made about them seems to be in inverse proportion to the size. We are watching the Government flail itself into a self-righteous frenzy about an amount of money lost to fraud which is smaller than (say) the amount spent running the FCO, or that underpaid to benefits claimants, and THAT is what is remarkable - not the fact that an arbitrary sum of government expenditure happens to seem like a lot of money to you.
I'm not making categorical claims about the numbers. Perhaps it is the other way around. I'm just stating that it's easier to calculate errors in payments than estimating fraud. If the DWP were exaggerating the amount lost to fraud to prove a point, why would they only have it at 0.7% of the whole budget when public perception is so much higher?
They're not "exaggerating the amount lost to fraud to prove a point," they're bundling the given figure together with error and legitimate claims in order to produce certain associations in the popular imagination with the intention of undermining the basis of the widespread social understanding of the legitimacy of benefits full stop.
I think that the government bears some culpability for this, too, though.
Close, but I was expecting a confessional "Dear Razzle, you'll never believe it but..." letter. Disappointed.
Why would it be?
If you pay out 50% of your salary in housing costs and someone is either fraudulently using your credit card or there are errors on your credit card of 1% of your salary, then what do you focus on changing? The 50% that you cant change much or the 1% that you are overpaying? What you focus on doesn't necessarily equate to the percentage of the expenditure. It's on where you can make savings.
What is their story?
So by combining them they get to 1.2% of the budget compared to a public perception of 27% due to fraud alone. I can't see bundling the figures together in the report changes anything.
That's a hypothetical, and an irrelevant one at that. Governments aren't people, and their budgets aren't family budgets - that's a straw man that gets trotted out far too much as it is.
Who said the estimate of public perception doubled? If you were to ask the public about fraud and error bundled together, do you think their estimate would double from 27%?
Well it certainly wasn't me. You, however, did seem to when you suggested a rough doubling of the fraud figures via bundling them with the error stats produced a 27% public estimation.
