Even though that sum makes up roughly 0.1 per cent of the annual benefits bill, £1.5bn is still a lot of money by anyone’s measure. Benefits fraud is also tied up in voters’ wider perceptions of the system not working properly: most of the people they see and resent for being “benefits cheats” are entitled to the money they receive, even if they are the symptom of a broken system that isn’t doing enough to help people back into jobs that they can hold down, or to treat and prevent long-term health problems. So tackling benefit fraud is often political shorthand for taking the overall benefits bill seriously.
This frustration is, by the way, rather ironic given the Labour Party itself has been such a block to any serious talk of benefits reform, even in opposition. The benefits bill does need to be cut, just as the state needs to take its responsibility towards people with long-term health conditions far more seriously.
The NHS has given its most ominous warning yet
Read MoreThose warnings have been doing the rounds for a while, as this new level of snooping isn’t a Labour brainwave, but the resurrection of something the Conservatives had planned to do before they called an election last year. Similarly, the charity Age UK joined forces with campaign group Big Brother Watch in September to say the plans represented “mass financial surveillance powers”.
When the state makes itself more powerful, even for just a relatively small number of cases in relation to the huge wider benefits bill, it risks damaging the lives of perfectly innocent but vulnerable citizens. We have just seen from explosive scandals like the Post Office Horizon case that systems everyone insists have all the safeguards and oversight they need can go wildly off-piste.
The state regularly makes mistakes and also befuddles perfectly decent and well-meaning people with its reams of paperwork and layers of complexity. Anyone who has witnessed an MP’s constituency surgery knows that the more the state gets involved in someone’s life, the higher the risk of that life being upended by a dysfunctional bureaucracy.
The risks of messing up and allowing the state to intrude – and make more mistakes as it does – are much higher than the rewards of cutting a tiny proportion of money that amounts to little more than tough-sounding headlines. There is very little reason to trust big systems, and policies should be made on that basis, rather than because a government needs a symbol of its wider resolve on cutting benefits.
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