ON BENEFIT FRAUD, ABUSE AND THE LAW

Welfare fraud stories often repay critical examination. They can tell you a lot about how the law works and the press report it.  I will have a look at some reported cases from time to time on this blog. 

Consider this case, from the Daily Mirror: a woman, Jayne Young from Hartlepool, who allegedly claimed, fraudulently, up to £150,000, mostly in Income Support and Housing Benefit. 

The article makes much of the fact that, at £40 per month, Ms Young will take 178 years to repay less than half the total (the figures are inaccurate but never mind). And, it notes bitterly at the end, the repayment order only applies if she gets a job - HA!

In fact following conviction, and on release from prison, she will be barred from claiming almost all benefits for three years. When she is allowed to claim, any benefit she gets will be reduced by at least £78 a month, indefinitely. The Court compensation order is on top; her punishment is going to go on for a long time.

But what was the crime? She allegedly claimed benefit as a single parent for 10 years while living with her partner, Jason Swanson. He is the father of her two eldest children. They had three holidays together in 10 years.  According to the defence "Young had a troubled life and difficult partner and there were times when she was living alone. She has severe depression".

That's all we know but it suggests a bit more. Mr Swanson is apparently not the father of some younger child or children. He was 'difficult' in unspecified ways. We can assume he was working or the overpayment would have been much lower. And they did not actually live together all the time.

It seems just remotely possible on these facts that the person who actually gained from all this was Mr Swanson. He was accommodated for free. He did not have to make more than minimal provision for his children. He could go off and leave Ms Young when the fancy took him. He either knew, or deliberately failed to know, that Ms Young was claiming benefit as a single parent and accepted the resulting financial gains. And he faces none of the consequences.

There are clearly darker possibilities of mental or physical abuse as well but, discounting these, something still looks rather wrong here. And it is not an uncommon story at all.

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I worked in welfare rights for thirty years. We would see this type of case quite regularly - a 'cohab' case we would call it, in the cynical shorthand you fall into; short for cohabitation. The actual legal provision is that a man and a woman "living together as husband and wife" will have their income aggregated for the purposes of all means tested benefits. And for some benefits, like Income Support, a couple cannot be entitled if either of them are in full time work.

If you claim Income Support as a single parent you are therefore required to disclose if you start to live with someone as husband and wife. If you either fail to disclose such a fact, or if you positively misrepresent it - by ticking 'No' in answer to the question that is on every claim form: "Do you have a partner" - then you have committed a criminal offence.

Back in the 1970's one of the early campaigns of the then flourishing claimant's movement was against 'sex snoopers' - social security officials investigating with whom a woman claimant was sleeping (it was never the other way round). The campaign worked. Social Security officials stopped asking questions about people's sexual activity. In fact they stopped so completely that it became a problem. People in entirely non-sexual relationships could end up being treated as LTAHAW (living together as husband and wife; yes, it's an acronym) and have to insist on talking about their absence of sexual relations.

However the need for the state to know when a man and woman formed a couple remained. They could rely on informants much of the time, via various fraud hotlines. More recently they have been able to use credit reference agency and other records to pick up any electronic trace of a male presence in a single parent household. When they have a hot enough tip they deploy surveillance - a car parked at a discreet distance with an observer taking notes of comings and goings, or motion sensitive cameras, trained on the 'suspect's' front door, and mounted in a convenient tree. When they're ready they can raid the house looking for physical evidence of a male presence, and tour the neighbours, touting for unfriendly statements. 

Some people really like doing this stuff. It's like The Sweeney - a bit.

But what they actually uncover is, almost always, a long way from the picture of cynical lies and manipulations that is presented in Court. They find unstable relationships with the man coming and going as it suits him. They find men who, when they are in the house, don't feel obliged to contribute financially. They find wideboys and charmers who keep several houses going They find violence and abuse. They find disabled children making life difficult or mothers with major mental health problems. They find women, bringing up their children effectively alone, who absolutely need their own income, and claiming benefit is the only way of getting it.

They find, in short, in a context of low incomes and poverty for both people of both sexes, a world of relative privilege and freedom for working men, and women forced, by childcare responsibilities into the 'crime' of benefit fraud. And this system is created and enforced by the state.

There are always exceptions of course. Plenty of men do take on their responsibilities; the downside of that for the woman being that they lose most of their income. Sometimes the DWP appear vaguely aware that there might be an issue here and respond by trying and failing to bring conspiracy charges against the man involved. But the narrative of benefit fraud goes unchallenged, even on the left, where we tend to argue merely that it is much less prevalent than government and their media make out - not that the category of fraud itself is an agent of oppression.

The real crime here then is that there is no right to an independent income for women taking on childcare responsibilities. Until 1948 there existed, as a relic of the old Poor Law dating from 1601, a family means test. Any member of an extended family could, in principle, be made responsible for the support of any other  so that when the young adult son of a family, say, found work, support for the entire family might stop. Abolition of the household means test in 1948 was rightly celebrated as a great victory for the whole working class movement.

However the 1948 settlement was still rooted in, and structured by, a host of gender based assumptions which have only gradually and partially been reformed away. Still reigning unchallenged is the principle of aggregation of income and joint means testing of couples for benefits and tax credits. In fact this principle is being extended. Low income same sex couple are now caught in exactly the same way as male-female couples - the definition of living together as husband and wife has been extended to people "living together as civil partners". And Universal Credit will draw millions of working couples into the DWP's policing system.

 In 1990, middle and upper class women benefited from the abolition of the same gender assumption in the tax system - separate taxation was introduced. That the same principle could be extended to working class women is a notion met by silence or incredulity. Feminists and socialists need to address this as a central priority. We need to be demanding a basic income scheme and an end to all means testing.

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Meanwhile here are a few practical suggestions:

• if you're claiming as a single parent, don't let anyone else use your address and return any mail you receive for someone else. I know it can be hard for people without an address but the risks here are too unequal for you to be able to help;
• if there is any question of you becoming a couple with someone else, set a date: until then they are only a guest - don't let them use you address, don't let them keep their things in your home. But don't panic about how many nights a week they stay - there is no rule about this. What matters is that they have a home somewhere else, which they still use;
• if you are pulled in for cohabitation, the central question is: are you members of the same household? Not, say, is he your boyfriend or, does he give you any money? You need evidence,  like paying of rent or bills or use of the address, showing that they live somewhere else;
• appeal any and all benefit decisions saying you are a member of a couple. Concentrate on these appeals, rather than the criminal case. You have a much better chance of winning at a benefit tribunal than in a criminal court. And if you win the appeal, the criminal case usually collapses.