How do these people (the work shy) manage to sail through all the medicals/assessments with no problems and get every benefit available whereas many of us with genuine problems have great difficulty.
They go down the mental health route claiming to suffer from anxiety, depression, sleeplessness etc. or have experienced a traumatic event. Chuck in a dependancy on alcohol and you’ve cracked it!
Personally I don’t think there are many people who get away with it. The government & tabloid press have done a good job of making out there are hoardes of people fiddling the system, but the stats don’t agree. A recent poll showed people think 27% of of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, whereas DWP figures estimate benefit fraud at just 0.3%. The number of households where two generations have never worked is 1% - that’s not 1% of all households in the UK, but 1% of the number of unemployed households.
The few ‘horror’ stories that come out in the press really are, in my opinion, negligible, and I think are the government’s way of softening up the public so that they lose sympathy for us and think benefit cuts are justified. The real horror story is that the government are getting away with it.
Dan
To my feeble mind there is a problem with the DWP statistics in that they are statistics produced by statisticians.How do they come up with the ESTIMATED figure of 0.3%? How do they know that people are claiming fraudulently until they are accused and found guilty.There is no motivation for people to tell the truth about a false claim,'cos prosecution for truthfulness doesn’t sound like the best ever motivation…I wonder if the figure of 0.3% is the number caught of the total number of claimants.
The DWP would look even more incompetant if the 0.3% is found to be on the low side,so where is the motivation to change the figure.The professional scroungers will always be ahead of the game and the mental health ticket is very difficult to disprove
Wb
I wasn’t suggesting that those pwms who have genuine problems with working but who after a physical assessment are categorised as being capable of work should go down the mental health route to amass enough points…or was I?
my ex cousin, was scamming the dwp, she was claiming as a single mother but had her working partner living with her, she went for the assessment and used the bi polar to say she cannot work, a few weeks later she was kicked off benefits as she failed the assessment as there was no mental health history in her medical records, and the dwp prosecuted her for benefit fraud due to her having a working partner at home with her, she got a £1000 fine to pay, of course she disputed it and they showed her video footage of her partner coming and going to the house and had statements from various people saying he lived there(statements were kept confidential to protect those who made them), it also backfired on her as he opened the door when they came round and when they asked who he was and did he live there he said yes and he was her partner, so of course the fine stood with her and she had to pay it, this im glad about coz it teaches her a lesson, but for us who arent faking anything and are genuine get the rought tough luck treatment and are expected to keep quiet
A couple of years ago I was living abroad in a village which was full of ex-pats. There was one man who was in the local bar almost every evening who was receiving incapacity benefit and dls. Admittedly he had several years earlier had a bad bike accident which meant several operations on his leg. Whilst living abroad he had a job as a delivery driver for a local shop and he also had his own market stall selling hot food. He would stand for hours behind his stall and would carry all his food and equipment several hundred yards to and from his van. I was also claiming incapacity benefit, but certainly couldn’t work or stand for more than a few minutes. The reason we came back to the UK was my health began do decline quite sharply and I felt I needed to be near family and friends. I’m wondering if these ex-pats are being re-assessed whilst living abroad?
Getting us to argue about benefits is a classic Tory ploy and neatly avoids the real problem. The Banksters in the City and serial tax avoiders are the ones we need to bring to account, as that would make a serious financial (and moral) difference.
Large donations made to the Tory Party should not allow them to get away with it.
whats the stratagy they are going by? divide us to conquer us all, its about time everyone realises what they are doing instead of some of us seeing what they are doing, as soon as everyone see’s the truth then they stand no chance, its easy to pick on the vunerable rather than to stick up for them to protect them
Wb, I know Vic Reeves once said 88.2% of stats are made up on the spot, and it can be easy to think statistics is little more than just counting. But statistical modelling is a bit more complicated than that. It won’t be a case of the number of people they’ve found divided by the total number of people claiming - at the very least I’d have thought it would be 0.3% of a sample size which they’ve extrapolated out, and they’ll no doubt be a load more statistical wizardry going on.
Personally I reckon the government won’t be happy about the low fraud figure as it’ll undermine the hatchet job they’re trying to do on those in need of welfare. But that, obviously, is just my opinion and sadly it’ll be tricky to prove it’s true.
Dan
id dare the government to hook me up to a lie detector machine to prove im telling the truth about my medical conditions…mind you they would probably fail me on that aswell