iDave parrots Labour

From the BBC:

David Cameron has defended plans to use credit rating firms to "go after" people fraudulently claiming benefits (1)...

"If you are entitled to welfare and can claim it then you should claim it but if you are not entitled to it you should not get and should not claim it." (2)

He said the £1.5bn a year fraud was enough to pay for 40,000 NHS nurses (3), and cutting fraud, error and waste in the benefits system was the "first thing" the government ought to do as it cuts spending...

1) To heck with that, it's just an excuse for more government contracts to fakeprivatecompanies. The problem is the Yuman Rights Act and Data Protection nonsense that prevents the police or DWP from making the most basic checks. A few years ago I contacted Scotland Yard vis à vis some terrorists who had been renting a one-bedroom flat from me (long story), and one of the many multiple identities they had registered was a woman who had had a baby in the hospital round the corner. I asked the officers why they didn't just pop round there and do a bit of digging but they told me that the maternity unit would refuse to tell them anything.

Neither could they check up on the National Insurance contributions records (there were letters with NI numbers on them) or ask the DSS/HMRC which passports had been presented to support the applications for NI numbers. Even the bank statements looked weird - instead of add amounts going in regularly (benefits or wages) and small, regular withdrawal of £10 or £20; small, round amounts were being paid in and a round £100 was withdrawn once or twice a week. But they couldn't check those either, nor demand CCTV footage of the people doing the withdrawing from the cash machine. And so on.

2) Agreed. Which is yet another advantage to a radically simplified welfare system, i.e. Citizen's Income, or what the DWP are now referring to as Universal Credits. And instead of trying to hound people into job training, civil servants could spend a bit more time on tracking down fake identities etc. Let's abandon 'conditionality' as regards family status, number of job interviews attended and have a bit more conditionality as to people proving that they are who they say they are and that they live where they say they live. Make people re-apply each year or two, whatever.

3) This is the bit that sticks in the craw - every time the Tories ever suggested modest tax cuts, Labour would immediately express that in terms of how many teachers' or nurses' jobs would be lost. But let's assume that 40,000 nurses cost £1.5 billion per annum (just under £40,000 each, seems about right); there are 400,000 nurses in the NHS, so they'd cost £15 billion per annum in total.

Ho hum. The total annual cost of the NHS is well over £100 billion, so where does the rest of the money go? The Tories, kept missing this open goal while in opposition and don't appear to be aware that it's still there now.