biophile
Places I'd rather be.
- Messages
- 8,977
Is the UK economy really struggling because of welfare fraud?
I saw Dr John H Greensmith's post on CO-CURE and read the article in question:
The stereotype of the welfare sponge has haunted the public psyche for decades. It used to be aimed more at abled people who remained unemployed, but in recent years more attention has moved to those with actual disabilities. Here Delingpole defends Rod Liddle's article "'Pretend disabled really ARE sick" (The Sun, 26 January 2012 - http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/smartphonecolumnists/article4087911.ece) which has since been removed. Delingpole writes "There really are far, far too many people sponging off the taxpayer right now with their fake or exaggerated disabilities and they're one of the reasons we're in the financial mess we're in."
This old chestnut gets regurgitated every now and then in the news, but what hard evidence do we have that there are hordes of welfare cheats crippling the economy? I did a quick search and found these UK estimates (with confidence intervals given) on p9-10 of http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/dlafraudjuly05.pdf. Fraud: 0.4% or 70m. There is some official error too (1.3%) and a much higher proportion of overpayments are due to changing circumstances ie 12.8% or 730m (with about half as much "underpayments" due to changing circumstances too). Welfare fraud is obviously an unwanted burden on any economy, and I don't know how much of the overpayments are "semi-fraud", but 70m doesn't exactly sound like it is "crippling" the UK economy.
A while ago I read that Australia rolled out a "welfare to work" program several years ago which "failed to put a brake on the high numbers joining disability pension rolls [and] made little progress in moving people with disabilities off benefits and into work" (http://www.smh.com.au/national/welfare-crackdown-misses-targets-20100310-pzea.html). This makes me wonder if the reason such programs have failed is because they were misguided from the outset, there are no "hordes" of welfare cheats to begin with. Another attempt was made recently, with some business leader encouraging it and drawing inspiration from what the UK are doing (http://www.news.com.au/breaking-new...udget-in-surplus/story-fn7ik2te-1226005498241).
As someone who wants to be more active, I find it hard to believe that people who are "healthy" would actively choose lazy dead-end poverty over a normal life unless something is seriously wrong. The few people I met many years ago who were on disability for reasons other than physical disease, the ones that sometimes liked to "party" as in the stereotype of the work-shy no-hopers, they lived in messy poverty and had serious mental illnesses which made them unsuited to work anyway and which did not improve regardless of all the retraining programs and CBT thrown at them.
A laughable component to the stereotype is that people on disability are all living lives of luxury while all the hard workers have to make do with their average salaries (which is several times higher than disability). Another problem noticed by someone I know who works in hostels, there has been a push to get mental patients more "integrated" into society (the ones that in the old days would be institutionalized), some of these people just end up homeless or on disability benefits wondering the streets in states of confusion without the adequate care they need.
I saw Dr John H Greensmith's post on CO-CURE and read the article in question:
The stereotype of the welfare sponge has haunted the public psyche for decades. It used to be aimed more at abled people who remained unemployed, but in recent years more attention has moved to those with actual disabilities. Here Delingpole defends Rod Liddle's article "'Pretend disabled really ARE sick" (The Sun, 26 January 2012 - http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/smartphonecolumnists/article4087911.ece) which has since been removed. Delingpole writes "There really are far, far too many people sponging off the taxpayer right now with their fake or exaggerated disabilities and they're one of the reasons we're in the financial mess we're in."
This old chestnut gets regurgitated every now and then in the news, but what hard evidence do we have that there are hordes of welfare cheats crippling the economy? I did a quick search and found these UK estimates (with confidence intervals given) on p9-10 of http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/dlafraudjuly05.pdf. Fraud: 0.4% or 70m. There is some official error too (1.3%) and a much higher proportion of overpayments are due to changing circumstances ie 12.8% or 730m (with about half as much "underpayments" due to changing circumstances too). Welfare fraud is obviously an unwanted burden on any economy, and I don't know how much of the overpayments are "semi-fraud", but 70m doesn't exactly sound like it is "crippling" the UK economy.
A while ago I read that Australia rolled out a "welfare to work" program several years ago which "failed to put a brake on the high numbers joining disability pension rolls [and] made little progress in moving people with disabilities off benefits and into work" (http://www.smh.com.au/national/welfare-crackdown-misses-targets-20100310-pzea.html). This makes me wonder if the reason such programs have failed is because they were misguided from the outset, there are no "hordes" of welfare cheats to begin with. Another attempt was made recently, with some business leader encouraging it and drawing inspiration from what the UK are doing (http://www.news.com.au/breaking-new...udget-in-surplus/story-fn7ik2te-1226005498241).
As someone who wants to be more active, I find it hard to believe that people who are "healthy" would actively choose lazy dead-end poverty over a normal life unless something is seriously wrong. The few people I met many years ago who were on disability for reasons other than physical disease, the ones that sometimes liked to "party" as in the stereotype of the work-shy no-hopers, they lived in messy poverty and had serious mental illnesses which made them unsuited to work anyway and which did not improve regardless of all the retraining programs and CBT thrown at them.
A laughable component to the stereotype is that people on disability are all living lives of luxury while all the hard workers have to make do with their average salaries (which is several times higher than disability). Another problem noticed by someone I know who works in hostels, there has been a push to get mental patients more "integrated" into society (the ones that in the old days would be institutionalized), some of these people just end up homeless or on disability benefits wondering the streets in states of confusion without the adequate care they need.
