The Daily telegraph is very vexed today that there are £1 million of benefit payment errors a day in the UK.
To put this in context, that's 0.16% of all benefit payments.
Now let's note that tax avoidance and tax evasion in my estimate (£25 billion of avoidance and £70 billion of evasion a year, figures embraced by the EU) cost the UK just over £260 million a day.
So that's more than 260 times as much in absolute terms.
And in total over 14% of all anticipated UK tax revenues (including those lost), at least.
Now which one of those issues should be given more attention, do you think?
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Hasn’t the 25bn figure been widely discredited?
No
Your figures seem to include pensions, should these be classified as welfare or benefits? Most state pensions are deferred wages covered by subscribing to national insurance. Calling these welfare or benefits as if these were a form of charity is a way of stigmatizing the most stable and reliable form of insurance that can be established. The government is going back to the majority poor law report of 1909 and pushing policy towards a modern form of Poor Law and work house mentality, so dispensations to those in need is cast in a punitive and demeaning way.
The other point in regard to “benefits” is that both housing benefits and income credit go to support very high rents to land lords, which pump up the over valuation of houses , these should be a means of being homes and not there for speculation. In the case of income credit this is a subsidy to low pay employers. These is a Speenhamland quality in both cases.
So called benefits, are in reality insurance, run and backed up the state, that is all of us, potentially there for all when the need arrises. We are all with a second of being disabled at any time by bad luck or otherwise.
Are the bail outs to banks benefits? Or is the fire selling of rescued the Northern Rock, and now the Royal Mail to Fat Catland the City, are these also masked benefits? And now there is even talk of housing associations, built up from council housing, thinking of being flouting on the stock exchange. We will all be co-opted into the Fat Cats Casino want it or not. The big finance people control the Casino and in the end they come out on top.
I include pensions because I think all benefit shod be paid by right and I stigmatise none
Of course fraud is also possible with pensions
It’s hardly worth rising to the bait of the ‘Torygraph’ Richard -what do they mean by mistakes -clerical errors, claimant fraud? I imagine the drain to the holy tax payer supporting supposedly ‘private’ companies like the rail companies must dwarf this. According to reports I’ve read, 180 Million a year is NOT claimed that could be! So much for the poor playing the system even though if anyone has a moral case for ‘playing’ the system it would be the poor -but they don’t, certainly not on the scale of the oligarchy.
It is about £16 billion a year unclaimed
Didn’t realise that the figure was as large as that -makes the benefit bashrs’ arguments all the more fatuous!
Benefit avoidance?
“Every year, as much as £5.5bn of benefits that older people are entitled to go unclaimed – including Council Tax Benefit, Housing Benefit and Pension Credit”
http://www.ageuk.org.uk/money-matters/claiming-benefits/unclaimed-benefits/
“Earlier this year, HM Revenue & Customs revealed that around £5bn of working tax credit and child tax credit goes unclaimed annually, bringing the total of money that fails to reach those in need to £13bn”
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-1603804/8bn-of-benefits-unclaimed.html
It’s quite amusing really.
Nearly a trillion goes in welfare benefits to the financial industry, and the ‘papers are still harping-on about welfare benefits to the people.
Rolling the printing presses for their mates, labour and conservative, is OK, but people are no-k ?
£1m is “0.16% of all benefit payments”
More worrying for the UK is that statistic means there is £625m PER DAY of benefits being paid!
I thought benefits were only a short term stop gap. To help the needy when they were in trouble.
And when the government deliberately creates unemployment for 2.5 million people and says the minimum wage is way below what is needed to live how long is the short term?
The following seem to have lost none of their poignancy:-
“When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about ‘lazy idle loafers on the dole” and saying that “these men could find work if they wanted to’,….”
“….. The ‘My dear, I don’t believe in all this nonsense about unemployment. Why only last week we wanted a man to weed the garden and we simply couldn’t get one. They don’t want to work, that’s all it is!….'”
“…..Take, for instance, the fact that the working class think nothing of getting married on the dole. It annoys the old ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realise that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being…”
Yes, the above are taken from “The Road to Wigan Pier”.
It would appear that not much has changed since then, apart from the Daily Telegraph deciding to take the role of Orwell’s uninformed disdainful “old ladies in Brighton”!
Surely the point – however much we hate the concept of rich people avoiding tax – is not the amount misled on benefits through fraudulent claims. It’s the amount of people on benefits – legally entitled to, and thus not on a benefit scam – who have no intention of working or getting a job.
I’ve yet to see any evidence about the numbers of such people and how this would affect the figures. From my own experience, which I do not class as empirical on any level, there are people who will never get a job – don’t have the skills, or the desire – and are happy to live life on little money and in state provided or subsidised homes.
Any info on this? I’m not stigmatising these people either – education, family background, poverty etc – it is what it is – but I cant see how purely talking about benefit fraud in the legal sense is a realistic view of the situation when there are, or at least it seems to me, a lot of people on benefits who although not breaking rules in terms of fraud, could still physically get a job if they really wanted to.
As an aside, the reasons they don’t want to – cant be arsed, not worth it for the increase in cash they would get, etc – are not what I am getting at. That’s a different topic, IMO.
thanks for your site, its always interesting reading.
Aaron
Now please tell me what work you would have these people do?
And explain why the recession seems to have increased unemployment by well over 1 million?
Do you really think all those are voluntarily unemployed? If so welcome to the ranks of neoliberal economic dementia – this is the basis for their theory
I chose the word dementia with care
Hi Richard,
Of course I don’t think “all those” are voluntarily unemployed – not at all. I was brought up on a council estate in Liverpool in a single parent family – I understand the hardships of not having a lot of money quite well and the pressures of living in a place with very low employment, prospects and economic wealth. It’s very tough out there.
However, there are people who don’t want to get a job, at least it seems to me, and to deny this is to overlook a large part of the unemployment problem. What percentage of people on job seekers allowance do you think this accounts for?
It’s fairly obvious that there are jobs on the market for people who are prepared to take them – see immigration figures. However, if you’ve been made redundant from a 25k a year skilled job you’re going to be pretty depressed at the proposition of working in a kitchen on minimum wage. Part of the overall problem (note the word “part” before going off on one about neoliberal dementia) is that some people are happier to live on the benefits the state gives – and who can blame them when the alternative is to earn in real terms 20 to 30 quid a week more than you can get from the state?
It’s an extremely complex situation and all aspects of it need to be realised. I wonder if a better use of the money spent on benefits would be to reduce benefits overall and use that money to increase the minimum wage through subsidy – widening the gap between benefits and low income and minimising the benefits trap?
You have not answered the question
Where are these jobs?
And how are people to live on them?
Answers please
Not rather naked, raw and unseemly prejudice
You seem to want to insult rather than discuss. Good luck with your work moving forward.
I asked you to discuss
You insulted people who cannot find work, not me
I asked you to justify your insults
You haven’t
Aaron, there will always be a small proportion of people that play the system. I imagine this was no different in the 1930s – before the “Welfare State” was established.
Why should the vast majority, who do want to work be punished due to circumstances beyond their control?
It is a mark of a decent civilised society not to force all the unemployed into work camps, in doing so we would be well on the road to, if not at, a ghastly totalitarian state.
For instance, part of the neo-liberal dementia is to believe that the private sector will create all the jobs that are necessary. This ignores the obvious fact that capitalism is essentially an unstable system euphemistically alluded to by reference to the “business cycle”. At the bottom of the “business cycle” the private sector simply can’t or won’t create jobs, but the madness is not to allow Government to help, because it would crowd out the private sector!
Richard is the above a fair summary?
Totally fair
What Aaron is actually suggesting is that people be left to starve – and even then there would not be work
He may not realise it – but that is the fact of it