The “War on Poverty” – is it benefiting the “Working Poor”?

The original idea of conservative government was actually that this form of government is supposed to be anchored to a central pillar of cautious spending and attempting to preserve a high standard of living for all.

Along the way, however, the Tory party has been straying farther and farther from this path, until it has in effect assumed the persona of a “Sheriff of Nottingham” type of figure, taking from the poor to line the pockets of the rich. This has not only been becoming more notable, but more blatant. They are not even trying very hard to hide this diabolical agenda any more.

Of course it will come as no surprise to anyone that those who head this government (and other political parties for that matter) are considerably wealthy. Everyone can have their own definition or waterline whereby somebody could be thought of as wealthy, but for me the clear demarcation is that you could take away 50% of a person’s income and they would still have more than enough to meet their basic needs.

Our government is supposed to be fighting a war on poverty. Instead it is fighting a war on the poor. This is an absolute outrage and nobody, regardless of their political affiliation or beliefs should be tolerating it.

Austerity is not conservative; it’s wasteful

There has been nothing truly conservative about the austerity measures that are actually creating great hardship for the vast majority of low-income UK citizens and permanent residents. Quite the opposite is true, in fact.

Perhaps the saddest outcome is that a recent media report claims that one in five doctors are now referring people to food banks.

The cuts have affected people’s lives in many ways, including higher levels of homelessness, increased dependency on food hand-outs, unsustainable pressure on the health service, and even problems with providing reasonable and safe levels of emergency services.

Benefit fraud crackdown even more wasteful

In every way, the government has consistently proved that Austerity doesn’t work. And for every pound they save by prosecuting a benefit fraud ‘cheat’, how many thousands of pounds are being wasted on detection, investigation, prosecution and in severe cases, incarceration?

Well that’s actually a very interesting question and one that we all deserve an answer to. According to a story that appeared in the Guardian titled Benefit Fraud: spies in the welfare war, the DWP promised in 2011 to allocate “an additional £425 million funding to combat the problem over the next four years”.

The actual data of what they were adding this £425 million extra to is very difficult to pin down. But we could estimate that the full sum allocated to this matter is well over half a billion.

Since we know the total amount lost due to bona fide fraud is only around £1 billion, and that this is even offset by the amount the government is not paying out that it should be, you’d have to wonder if this crackdown allocation is a very good investment. It’s highly likely, as well, that £500,000,000 is actually a very large under-estimate of the actual amount allocated.

Reading the Guardian article, you will get a good grasp of just how expensive each investigation is, and then you’ll need to consider that according to a report from Welfare Weekly, only 7 in every 100 cases reported on the Benefit Fraud hotline turns out to be a legitimate case of fraud, and that the vast majority of those frauds tend to be for really tiny sums.

More revealingly, Iain Duncan Smith actually claimed in the same year the Guardian article was written that the government had “saved £100 million” by prosecuting benefit fraud. That’s where it is most interesting… spending at least £500 million to recover £100 million. Am I the only one who can see that this results in a loss of at least £400 million, and the government is claiming that as a success?

Many prosecutions, particularly if they are contested, can cost over £10,000. In that year, it was claimed that the government had prosecuted 10,000 benefit fraud cases. This means if a ballpark figure of £10,000 is applied per prosecution, the total cost of these prosecutions is £100 million, or in other words equal to the amount that IDS claimed was being saved.

So in effect there was no saving at all for that year, just based on the straight prosecution figures alone, and that does not even take into account the costs involved in running the hotline or the minimum of £140,000 that it costs to imprison an individual for a year.

Supposing that 10% of those prosecuted received custodial sentences of at least one year, that would be 1,000 people going to prison at a cost of at least £140,000 each (far more than they would typically have received on benefits) for a total cost of £140 million. So now the bill for investigating, prosecuting, and punishing these cases has reached at least £740 million, and IDS is crowing about saving £100 million. Meanwhile the actual deficit has actually increased by at least £640 million!

Then you have to consider the cost of actually punishing those people. As we’ve pointed out many times, quite a number of those prosecuted are not actually guilty. They may be tricked into a confession, they may have evidence manufactured against them, or they may simply not understand exactly the process they are being subjected to (bear in mind that many benefits claimants have disabilities, which can include learning difficulties, mental illness, dementia, and various other afflictions).

The problem with this hard-line approach to prosecution is that in the process it ruins the future employment prospects of those who get wrongly convicted. So that means many of them may be condemned to a life of being eternally on benefits in the future, or becoming a recidivism statistic, where a person just is continually in and out of prison as they are subsequently unable to successfully reintegrate into society.

HMRC finally outs itself as insane

There could be no better proof that HMRC is losing its grip on reality with each passing day than the action it has taken in cutting the benefits of a woman they accuse of being in a relationship with her local shop. Not a business relationship, of course, they mean a sexual relationship.

What is especially important to note about this particular case is that HMRC declared “Payments will be reinstated as soon as people have provided us with information requested and it has been reviewed”.

There are several problems with this. Cutting payments before the matter has been proved is a very harsh treatment that can result in severe hardship for those affected. Try getting your landlord to wait 2 or 3 months for the rent while DWP or HMRC endeavour to sort out your situation. That’s at least one reason why homelessness is now out of control.

The bottom line on Austerity

Not only are these investigations and prosecutions very costly in terms of money wasted, but the human and social costs also need to be taken into consideration. In summation, Austerity simply doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• More than 10,000 disabled people have died this year after the government declared them fit to work and pushed them into working when they should not have been.
• Cutting medical training opportunities in the UK has led to shortages in staffing for the NHS, which has in turn been required to spend incredibly large sums recruiting and paying foreign workers who cost far more to employ than British nationals (while they do not actually benefit more from their higher costs, as most of that money goes to the recruiting agencies who supply them). GPs are under great strain as a result of the shortages that are still not being adequately met, and there has been an increase in the number of doctors seeking early retirement, further increasing the severity of the shortage.
• Cuts to Legal Aid have created enormous social problems, and have resulted in more people incorrectly pleading guilty. This problem is so bad that judges and magistrates have been resigning due to the stress of knowingly convicting the innocent. When somebody pleads guilty, there is no opportunity for a judge to declare them not guilty. A guilty plea seals the fate of the accused in no uncertain terms.
• Child custody cases have become a nightmare for the court system, with many cases dragging on for months or even years due to very high numbers of people opting for self-representation because they can’t afford solicitors and don’t know about the less expensive option to retain legal consultants. Again, this is proving very troublesome to judges and magistrates, and of course to the families involved in these cases.
• Thousands of people have become homeless, and even the soaring homelessness statistics do not tell the full story, since a very high number of homeless people are not counted. Homelessness quite often results in hopelessness for many people, because it is so much harder for them to obtain employment in these circumstances, and they are given a hard time by DWP and many others in the system.
• Charities that help the poor are over-stretched and really struggling to cope with the social problems resulting from Austerity. It must be really tough on the hearts of these generous souls to have to turn people away because they have simply run out of food to distribute.

More Tax Credits Cuts on the way

In the latest Austerity drive, the government has promised to make substantial cuts to tax credits – a move that will leave millions of people worse off. These are not “scroungers” but a growing class of people that the media has started referring to as the Working Poor.

George Osborne has received heavy criticism since the announcement of the cuts, where critics have complained that these cuts will widen the gap between rich and poor. It’s curious indeed that the critics have not noticed that there really is no reason for Osborne to worry about that, and in fact it would appear it is even his intention if his track record is anything to go by.

At every opportunity the poor are having more and more of the rug pulled out from under them. Meanwhile, Osborne is clamouring to spend billions of pounds on high tech drones to “fight ISIS”.

Iain Duncan Smith even took the rare opportunity to discard the “nice guy” image he has been trying to cultivate, with a scathing rant in defence of the austere tax credit cuts, dismissing the whole tax credit scheme as merely a bribe.

The British have a remarkable love for comedy. Unfortunately, as we all are eventually destined to find out, there’s nothing really funny about Austerity.

For help with any matters of legal assistance, call Hylton-Potts on 020 7381 8111 or send an email to [email protected] .

We would be interested in your comments, please leave them below.