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i was wondering if anyone had found time to look at these tables critically? : )
we know that there are long standing problems with fraud and error statistics, and we know that the subject has been a major spin area. the tables cover several years, rely heavily on estimated figures, and do not appear to me to reflect any effects of the major upheavals in the structural reorganisation throughourt the department which i would expect to see impacting on the figures, knowing from experience that CMS and local office closures have had a major impact on er... the customer experience. sorry to say i feel extremely sceptical regarding the usefulness of these figures to anyone, despite the huge amount of work which has obviously gone into their production. there's a heading for underpayments due to fraud, (table 2) and in that oxymoronic concept there is an ocean of lessons to be learned...
isn't it time to come out of the tail-spin and look seriously at the issue of underpayments?
the statistics in and of themselves are not the major issue, although if they are unreliable and policy is based on them it will be bad policy, and there's another story... the significance is in what the statistics represent. there are good grounds to believe the amount and prevalence of underpayment is understated, possibly massively understated - eg not counting benefit disallowed incorrectly is a major omission, and then there are the unrecorded cases where a claim is incorrectly deterred before it is made...
with all the brouhaha about fraud, underpayments have been the neglected area - even by Parliament, as far as i have been able to see. underpayments result in injustices suffered by the individual, and social injustice if the problems are widespread and not isolated, and not quickly put right. perhaps justice is an abstract concept, but the the effects of injustice on real peoples' lives have consequences.
i've felt, rightly or wrongly, that the reason for neglect of underpayment figures has come from the notion that only losses to the public purse matter. if so, this is a profoundly serious error and misunderstanding on the part of the government... all emphasis on 'security' and none on 'social' is a recipe for dysfunction, imo, as well as sending a message that the government cares only about stopping people who are not entitled to payments and doesn't care about making sure those who are entitled, get their entitlement. the ultimate disrespect message, received loud and clear...
I suppose the question is, where do we go from here? do we want to correct it? deny it? ignore it and keep quiet about it? who is 'we' anyway?
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