From an article in the Daily Mail about immigration and the welfare system:
Men also cheat the system by bringing brides from abroad as nannies for their children, or as carers for a sick relative. The bride gets a year’s visitors’ visa, disappears into a tight-knit local community, and is entitled to receive welfare hand-outs.
If you're claiming welfare, then you've not 'disappeared', surely? Does the government not think to cross reference welfare applications and lapsed visas or something?
I vaguely remember that under the Labour government they stopped 'counting them out again', so they didn't know who was still here (and whether the Lib-Cons have reintroduced this, I do not know) but wouldn't applying for welfare not be an opportune moment to identify a few (or at least deter them from trying to claim welfare)?
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6 comments:
NO. Government employees are not paid to use initiative, common sense or do anything that benefits anyone other than themselves. There is no incentive for them doing anything other than to do as little as possible for as much as possible and and hang in there until such time that they can retire on an over generous pension. There is not and cannot be much accountability in the public sector as there is in the private sector. Hence the public sector should only do what the private sector cannot which in reality is very little. Since wealth and profit have become dirty words prosperity and improving standards of living have become something that occurred only in the bad old days. Now according to the left and greens we can live our lives in a land of milk and honey where humming windmills adorn the landscape in bountiful profusion under which boundless acres of organically grown vegetables grow and money is grown on printing presses or borrowed from our neighbours.
One would think it simple enough to require production of a passport, birth certificate or naturalisation certificate as a requirement of being able to claim any benefits. Oh no, hang on, it's probably a breach of human rights.
UKBA has consultation out on proposed changes to the family migration rules. They claim a lot of UK citizens complain that their overseas spouse has disappeared and left them as soon as they get indefinite leave to remain (after 2 years). they propose to increase the probation period to 5 years.
Apparently you can't claim benefits until you have been here five years if your spouse has filled in a sponsor form as part of the application but don't think anybody checks after the application for indefinite leave to remain at 2 years.
Paul
Anti, you're drifting a bit off topic there.
TFB, it would be easy and it probably is, respectively.
Paul, five years seems like a reasonably minimum period to me, others say ten. But as TFB and I suspect, they just don't bloody check anyway.
The ConDems want to restart Exit Checks by 2015. I don't really understand why Labour got rid of them, call it a conspiracy if you want. I think there are only 3 (big) countries in the world which don't do exit checks (not counting places like Andorra etc.) - UK (+/-Ireland as there aren't meant to be checks), US and Canada. In the US there are no exit checks because 90% of departing flights are domestic, but it's much lower in the UK. The main argument seems to be that you need more immigration officers, which is valid but surely justified if it catches overstayers.
Because we don't have a national ID card, different government departments can't easily cross-reference. The nearest thing is the NI number, but not everyone has one. You do need one to claim benefits, but I believe it isn't that hard to get fake documents.
Anon, the cost thing is just not an argument, neither is not having national iD cards. If and when somebody applies for benefits, surely they would ask for an NI number, or a passport or birth certificate?
There's nothing that can't be forged, but benefits agency people can be trained to spot forgeries, and they can still be cross referenced against actual births (and deaths) and so on.
This will never rule out fraud and error in welfare, but it's a question of hacking them down to an 'acceptable' level, i.e. the point where the measures needed to further reduce fraud would cost more than the frauds they would prevent.
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