| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
7.15 pm
Mr. Clifford Forsythe (South Antrim): Before us are a motion and an amendment, but I am sure that the House generally would support action against fraud to ensure that benefits are targeted on those who require them and are entitled to them. That is especially the position in Northern Ireland, where consumers face higher costs. Electricity is one example.
Figures have been bandied about on the extent of fraud and how much it is costing. We have also heard about how much will be spent to combat it. The Secretary of State has made various other announcements, which I support and welcome.
I would wish to compare Great Britain with Northern Ireland. When I intervened in the Secretary of State's speech, he invited me to try to catch the eye of the occupant of the Chair in letting him know to what I was referring. I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman is now unable to be in the Chamber. I am sure, however, that the information will be conveyed to him.
I tell the House again that there is no fraud strategy in Northern Ireland. Evidence was taken last week in Northern Ireland, and we were told that there was no strategy, even though one has been introduced in Great Britain, which in many areas seems to be working well.
Perhaps some hon. Members are not aware that, in Northern Ireland, local authorities do not have anything to do with social security. Similarly, they have nothing to
do with housing benefit and housing. Those matters are handled by the Social Security Agency and the Housing Executive.
In those circumstances, there is surely an excellent opportunity to introduce one housing organisation or one social security agency. I am speaking of a small area of the United Kingdom in which there are about 1.5 million people. A new strategy could have been brought into place, where it would have worked better than elsewhere.
Unfortunately, my colleagues and I have gained the impression that it appears to be assumed that everything is all right in dealing with fraud in Northern Ireland, even though no measurement is available. The assumption was that, because safeguards were in place, it automatically followed that no fraud was taking place. I will mention some of the frauds that are taking place in Northern Ireland.
In Northern Ireland, we have--I do not know whether they are called this in the rest of the United Kingdom--what are known as Giro drops: houses that people claiming benefit use as an address and where their benefit cheque is sent, even though they do not live there. The Giro drops through the letter box--that is why it is called a Giro drop. No matter how we check on housing benefit or any other sort of fraud, we would have to call at all the houses, discover where the people lived, and visit them.I am pleased that there will be more visitors at least in Great Britain. I am sure that the Minister will pass on my comments, so that such visitors will be introduced in Northern Ireland as well.
While in the building construction industry, I worked on building sites with plumbers and heating engineers. Even in those days, on certain days of the week, people "doing the double" disappeared from the site and returned after an appreciable period. They had signed on and returned to work--known by most people as doing the double. As is well known, that still goes on in parts of Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
We have a border, boundary, frontier--I leave it to hon. Members to decide what to call it--between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, but the social security system in the Republic is different from the one in the UK. It is not unknown for people living in the Republic of Ireland to claim benefit not only in the Republic, but in Northern Ireland, and vice versa.
There is another example of a fraud strategy being required in Northern Ireland. I know--and the Select Committee on Social Security took evidence on this--that there is contact and close co-operation between the Department in Northern Ireland and the Department in Dublin on that fraud, but how do we know what the position is if there is no strategy and we cannot obtain any figures?
There is another serious example involving benefit fraud in Northern Ireland. Some people claiming benefit are undertaking other activities--and I do not mean that they are working. The great problem in dealing with those claimants is simple: they are handled, under their normal duties, by junior staff, who are placed in a difficult position. Other senior officials do not handle those claimants.
It is well known, and has been mentioned in various places in Northern Ireland, that those things are happening. That is another example of fraud. All the things that I have
mentioned have been and are going on, and, as has been admitted, we do not have a fraud strategy in Northern Ireland comparable with that in the rest of the UK.
Another example of fraud applies to the rest of theUK as well: in certain circumstances, employers do not pay national insurance contributions for employees. As a result, if those employees are made redundant or lose their jobs, they cannot claim benefit, because the required national insurance contributions have not been paid.
The local government auditor's 1994 report recommended that the Northern Ireland Housing Executive should have a dedicated fraud team. I was interested to hear that some of today's suggestions head in that direction. I do not wish to place the Minister in the difficult position that he seemed to be placed in by the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), even though I know that, as Chairman of the Select Committee--of which I am honoured to be a member--he did not mean anything personal about it.
The Minister may not have the advisers here that he may require to answer some of my points. I do not wish to let him off the hook, but I will understand if, in his winding-up speech, he cannot answer some of my queries, and I receive replies later.
However, much of the Select Committee's evidence shows that, in bringing people who have committed fraud before the courts, the Theft Act 1968 is used rather than social security legislation. The local government auditor's report commented that, under social security legislation, someone claiming benefit fraudulently could be sentenced to three months in prison. It seems strange that that Act, which involves a cumbersome operation, is often used. Surely social security legislation should be considered and implemented in appropriate cases.
In Northern Ireland, we have no measurement of fraud, so we cannot ask how much fraud there is, how it can be or has been measured, or how it will be stopped, even though the Minister and Secretary of State may say, "These are the measures that should be used to stop benefit fraud." I hope that the people in charge of these matters in Northern Ireland will note what has been said, and that something will be done.
On national insurance numbers, along with other colleagues, I was delighted to be in Newcastle. We had an excellent, well-prepared presentation--I congratulate the Minister on that. Sufficient officials were there to answer all our many questions. The majority of their answers were good and we accepted them, as we always do, but I was concerned about a couple.
I do not think that I received the answer--I may have misunderstood what was said--on piggy-backing, where someone uses another person's national insurance number. A person could be employed and paying national insurance contributions, although, at the same time, someone using his or her national insurance number is drawing benefit. That concerned the whole Committee.I should add that it is a very happy Committee: we work very well together. I hope that I am doing no one any harm by speaking in this way. Incidentally, the Committee also has an excellent Chairman.
I understood the Minister's observation that, when someone dies, the person left behind may need to use the national insurance number for some reason, and that it should therefore remain in existence. What I cannot understand is why the national insurance number of a
single person with no relatives should remain on the record. I am not nit-picking, but I feel that such numbers could be removed from the system. The word "clutter" should not be used in this context, but the Minister will know what I am saying. Perhaps at least some of the numbers could be removed.
Mr. Patrick Nicholls (Teignbridge):
In his opening speech, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State referred to the sums involved. Perhaps because debates such as this take on a timeless quality over the years,I sometimes feel that the sums that we discuss are so vast that the public--who have hurried off to HMSO in the morning to buy their copies of Hansard--probably decide that they are meaningless.
The figures involved in social security debates are, in fact, so large that even those who feel that they are being beaten into the ground with percentages may begin to realise just how large they are. It is not simply a case of the social security budget being larger than the education or defence budgets: it is well over twice the size of the two combined.
There are various ways of expressing the £90 billion that is spent on social security. One way is this: it is equivalent to £15 in respect of every person for every working day. Obviously, when disbursing such a huge amount on behalf of the taxpayer, the state should pay attention to where it goes.
The hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith)--and, I think, the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field)--implied that the Government had discovered the situation suddenly, rather late in the day. Apparently they have a right-wing agenda, according to some anonymous person--perhaps not the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury, but some other Labour Member. This, it seems, is part of some dark right-wing agenda that the Government have dreamed up in the last few hours, or at best, the last few months.
I do not consider that entirely fair. I have been in the House since 1983, and I do not think that a month, or even a week, has gone by without some reference--perhaps in a parliamentary question, in an exchange at Prime Minister's Question Time or in a well-attended debate such as this--to the fact that the wicked old Tory Government are out there grinding the faces of the poor. [Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] I am grateful for the confirmation; I knew that I had heard it before.
The Government have been out there trying to tighten up on fraud, crack down, and make the criminal law more effective. The idea that what is currently happening is spanking new is without foundation. There may, however, be a reason for its superficial credibility. The suppression
of fraud is not an end in itself; it is part and parcel of the attempt to ensure that benefits go to the people for whom they are intended. We can argue, as did the hon. Member for Birkenhead, whether benefits should be means-tested more or less, but I think that hon. Members on both sides of the House would agree that the money should go to those to whom Parliament wants it to go.
When the Government came to power in 1979, the benefits system was, in a sense, wide open. In those days, the test governing whether a person received what is now known as income support was whether that person was available for work. The concept of availability for work seemed all right to begin with, but ultimately came to be seen as a complete sham. It was simply a case of "I am at home; if the telephone rings and someone wants to offer me a job, I might entertain the idea." Many people who were making no real effort were freeloading on the system. In a sense, that was a fraud on the taxpayer: money was going to people to whom it was clearly not intended to go.
To counter that, the Government introduced the concept of "actively seeking work". As soon as the two tests were applied together, the opportunity for fraud on the taxpayer in the literal sense was removed: benefits were going to those to whom they should be going. Those were the days of peace convoys cruising around the country, and social security officers taking their mobile paying-out clinicsto peace convoy meetings. All that nonsense--which went on in my constituency--was dealt with by the introduction of more stringent tests.
The agenda of the 1980s was to ensure that the law was properly defined, so that only those who went out of the benefit should receive them. That was integral to the debate about fraud: until that side had been got right, there was not much point in trying to come up with "technical" mechanisms to deal with the problem. The claim that we have been doing nothing about it since 1979 is without basis: the facts do not bear it out for a moment.
It was particularly interesting for anyone with a penchant for blood sports to observe the state that the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury got into when taking Conservative interventions. I must tell the hon. Gentleman--hoping, perhaps, to add to his discomfort--that I am a great admirer of his: he is a man of considerable intellectual rigour and considerable personal courage. In some ways, I pitied him for having the brief that he had been given. Faced with such a wicket, some of his hon. Friends would have resorted to a venomous opacity, kept their heads down, read out the speech without understanding it, and reached the end of it in that way. But the hon. Gentleman is not like that: when asked some pertinent questions to which he knew that there were no answers, being the honest man he is, he did not answer them.
Two questions did need answering, however. First, what has the hon. Gentleman's party done since 1979 to support the Government's attempts to crack down on benefit fraud? There is no answer to that--or, rather there is: Labour has done absolutely nothing. The beefing up of the "availability for work" test with an "actively seeking work" test was opposed by the party at the time.
Labour also opposed the attempts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir N. Fowler)--attempts that were largely, if not entirely, successful--to ensure that the availability of benefits was based on net rather than gross income, the idea being that people should always be better off in work than out of work. Such steps were part and parcel of fraud prevention.
Let me help the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury, and repeat the answer to the question that he did not wish to answer: the Labour party has done absolutely nothing.
The hon. Gentleman next blamed means testing. That really is pushing it. When he was asked what benefits would be means-tested under a Labour Government, answer came there none. I have genuinely never understood why on earth the Opposition are against the concept of means testing properly carried out.
No one is saying that one should go back to the situation that obtained in the 1920s and 1930s, when an audit of the most brutal and undignified kind was done on a person claiming state benefit. We are saying that, if we are going to take money from people, we should at least make sure that it goes to those for whom it is intended.
Of course, some people say that means testing is undignified, and if we jack up the taxes on the rich, we shall not have to go through that unhappy process. That might sound like a good idea, but I understand that it has been repressed on the Opposition Benches today. I am only sorry that the hon. Member for Islington, North(Mr. Corbyn) is no longer here, because I had hoped that he would add that suggestion to the debate.
The fact is that we can think of income tax as a means-tested benefit. As I said in an exchange with the hon. Member for Birkenhead, the overwhelming proportion of taxes is provided not by the rich--there are not enough of them to soak--but by basic rate taxpayers. About 87 or 88 per cent. of the total tax take in this country is provided by ordinary working people, those who pay basic rate tax and never reach the higher rate.If they are means-tested and being asked how much they earn so that we can tax their income and spend it elsewhere, I can see nothing wrong in means-testing the recipients of that money, providing that process is carried out decently and carefully, and in a dignified manner.
I put that matter to the hon. Member for Birkenhead, whom I admire enormously. Like the hon. Member for South Antrim (Mr. Forsythe), I have served on the Select Committee on Social Security. This phrase is often used too casually, but it was a privilege to serve under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Birkenhead, who has an extraordinary grip of the subject.
Frankly, a well-prepared and highly competent Secretary of State should have nothing to fear from an Opposition Back Bencher--it is an unequal contest, whichever party is in government. It says a great deal for the hon. Member for Birkenhead that, over the years,I have seen him press highly skilled and highly competent Secretaries of State, like my right hon. Friend the current Secretary of State for Social Security.
The hon. Member for Birkenhead is really a remarkable performer. However, when I pressed him on what he had against means testing, he entered very dangerous territory. It says much for him that he was prepared to enter that territory. Some pretty hard choices follow if one says that fraud is going to occur because the level of benefit is such that, if one wage earner in a household loses that wage, the family will be better off on benefit.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |