New Labour Waste

Benefits worth £500 million were paid out in error last year, according to official figures.

In a decade, £5 billion has been lost through fraud and error. Prisoners, students and those with jobs and money in the bank have all enjoyed payouts to which they were not entitled.

Since 1997, more than £17 million has been wrongly paid to prisoners, who are not eligible for many benefits during their incarceration.

Students have received £33 million while those who are in hospital for the long term - and are not entitled to Jobseeker's Allowance or Income Support - were handed £10 million.

More than £1 billion has gone in benefits to those who have jobs and are not entitled....

**Well done to the government. Over a billion in fraud and/or mistakes on the part of officials. Yet no one, not a single government official is going to be sacked, not a single clerk or accountant has been laid off due to being crap at their job.

In a recent report, the Commons Public Accounts Committee said the total bill for 2004 was £3 billion. Half the money was lost because of mistakes by officials.
MPs concluded that the Government had little idea of how much was owed by claimants who had been overpaid.

Brilliant, it just gets better 3 sodding billion. Even if we allow half of that for "mistakes" that still 1.5 billion quid pissed up against the wall by public officials. It makes you wonder quite how much has to be lost before someone takes some responsibility for the public purse strings and starts sacking some of the legions of over paid bean counters who allow this to happen.
And they even have no idea of how much has been overpaid and so as a result no legal way to reclaim the funds back.

What stands out here is that the various bodies of government don't talk to each other, if someone is in jail then logicly you would assume that the DSS would be informed of that, but it appears not.

If a business was run this way the bailiffs would soon be at the companies door and yet in the public sector its a case of who cares? After all its only money... Just a mere 5 billion in a decade.
Tags: New Labour, Waste, Cool Britannia, public service

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