Charles Amos: Calling out phony benefits claimants is not mean spirited but a service to taxpayers

Britain needs a national benefits register so the public can snitch on phony benefit claimants.

The fact one in ten people of working age now claim incapacity or disability benefit shows the joke that is the welfare state today.

At a cost of £48.3bn a year, income taxpayers are shelling out about £1,290 each to support these two benefits alone. Sure, many people have serious problems which you can argue warrant help from the state, but millions of people on these hand outs are not disabled in a real sense and deserve no help whatsoever. Since 2019 a million people have been added to these two benefits, and, among the increase for 25-year-olds, 69 per cent of the new claims are due to mental health problems. Sure. How should the government stop free loaders taking advantage of what was always supposed to be a safety net?

Rachel Reeves is making a modest start by stopping under 22s from being able to claim incapacity benefit and shaving £5bn off the disability bill by 2030 by tightening up on criteria. Yet these small steps do not go far enough, indeed, even with the £5bn of “cuts” to health-related benefits are still forecast to be £15bn higher than today by 2030. It is time the government implemented a national benefits register where people on health benefits have their symptoms listed and taxpayers can look them up to report any benefit fraud that they believe might be occurring.

In contrast to a simple doctor’s note, this would act as a constant check on fraud in the welfare system, and, a disincentive to its use.

This national benefits register could simply link the name, address and type of benefits received to a person along with their symptoms. Should people see that their neighbour never goes out to work they could quickly look up their name and address and if they believe that it’s a phony claim report it to a special email or hotline anonymously. A greater number of reports from the public for the same person could then flag up the benefit claimant to be reassessed. This would certainly be an improvement on only 2 per cent of Personal Independence Payments assessments being made in person today down from over 80 per cent before the pandemic, a lack of oversight which obviously creates an incentive to lie.

Some people will object to the snitching deliberately encouraged by a national benefits register as undermining community cohesion. An irrelevant concern when discussing welfare policy, to my mind, but the same people who object to it take no issue with planning permission being in the public domain, even if its to change a window or build a conservatory on their own land, a process that definitely undermines community cohesion.

It might be objected that the result of planning permission effects the community so they should know who’s putting forward changes, but no effect comes from benefit claims. However, the result of benefit claims does effect the community via tax increases, so, taxpayers should know who the new burden is, as well.

Perhaps it is an intrusion into the privacy of the benefit claimant?

Maybe. However, your privacy is rightfully given up when you start to claim on the state. This is required to ensure welfare only goes to the  people it should. Before the welfare state in the Victorian Era friendly societies provided welfare out of their membership fees, and, importantly, the lodge system many of them had in place meant the members all knew each other. When friendly societies such as the Manchester Oddfellows, the Royal Hearts of Oak and the Ancient Foresters granted sickness or disability payments, a committee would typically sit on the applications for money and many people on that committee would personally know the applicant. Privacy was largely absent.  This prevented much fraud because there was no faking it.

Ideally, we ought to go back to this form of welfare provision.

Were we to go back to the private provision of welfare it is pretty certain that incapacity and disability benefits would be substantially reduced, because, paying members of friendly societies would not remain in organisations with higher fees with benefits they rarely used themselves or were abused. Certainly, the half a million people now receiving disability benefit for anxiety or depression would not receive that money where other members of a voluntary association had to finance it. No – they would leave it, because, they’d rightly think anxiety and depression does not stop people from supporting themselves.

I worked processing parcels at a DHL warehouse when I was young – neither depression and anxiety would have stopped me moving boxes from left to right.

The productive class needs to be protected against the leeches that are benefit fraudsters and a welfare state which increasingly gives out money like confetti for the everyday travails of working life.

Granting the total failure of assessment centres and doctors to genuinely pick up on the mickey taking, it is time the public were given a means to hold the purse strings of the welfare state themselves. A national benefits register to enable taxpayers to report on what they believe to be phony benefit claimants would be just the ticket.