Welfare fraud must never pay

THERE have been several notorious incidents of town halls going to extraordinary lengths to use legislation intended for counter-terrorism purposes to spy on people who allow their dogs to foul local parks – or who are suspected of supplying bogus information to enable their children to attend their school of choice. In many of these cases, the final outcome has not justified the cost of the investigation.

Given this, it is perplexing that so many Yorkshire councils are not, however, prepared to use Proceeds of Crime legislation to recoup public money that has been fraudulently acquired by welfare cheats. The reasons are varied – some councils, like Doncaster, believe their remit does not extend to the employment of financial investigators while others, like Rotherham, say their efforts did not yield the results expected by Eric Pickles, the Communities and Local Government Secretary.

Yet, given that many of this region’s biggest spending councils have not used this legislation at all during the past five years, perhaps they need to follow the example of Scarborough Council which clawed back more than £500,000 in one case – or Ryedale District Council, one of Yorkshire’s smallest authorities, which recouped £55,000 from a claimant who did not disclose that she owned a property empire outside the authority’s area of jurisdiction.

One solution would be for Mr Pickles to provide greater incentives for councils to combat fraud, spelling out to chief executives that it is their duty to ensure that housing benefit payments are legitimate. Yet it should not come to this. This is public money – fraud costs local government £2bn a year – and it should be the first duty of councils to allocate their resources wisely, even more so at a time when the spending squeeze is threatening the so many essential services.

However, by failing to act, they run the risk of signalling that fraud can pay – a totally irresponsible message which needs countering without delay.