Cracking down

I once had my picture on the front page of the local paper next to a big headline 'crackdown on council tax cheats' (interested readers would have had to turn to page nine to find out that I was doing the cracking down - on people with substantial assets who owed the council thousands in council tax - rather than the cheating).

Round where I live at the moment there are lots of posters about the penalties for benefit fraud, and also adverts on the telly about how it is not ok to claim and work etc. One thing I didn't realise is that this has been one of the government's successes, in that levels of fraud in working and claiming fell by 70% between 2000 and 2004. One of the peverse effects of the current high profile campaign is that most people will assume that this is still a massive, and possibly growing, problem, rather than one where good progress has been made. In fact, a much bigger problem at the moment is levels of error in processing benefit applications, where progress has been much slower. I appreciate that this does not lend itself so well to a big publicity campaign (a big target sign round a pile of paperwork doesn't have quite the same visual impact), but it highlights how skewed the debate is.

There are regular stories in the papers about the people who claim thousands in incapacity benefit while running marathons or whatever. Considerably more typical than that are cases like the one of a young woman in Northern Ireland who was caught working while claiming benefit. When her case came to be reviewed, it turned out that she would have been £10/week better off if she had been claiming all the benefits that she was entitled to than what she had been earning while 'doing the double'.

Of course what would really be good is a campaign against tax evasion by rich people. Having posters up everywhere of a man in a posh suit with a target round him with things like 'IF I don't pay tax on my million pound bonus it doesn't make me a tax dodger' and a tag line of 'No Ifs, No Buts, tax avoidance is a crime, break the law and you face a criminal record' would not only raise far more money than any number of benefit fraud crackdowns but also provide something cheering to read on the bus ride into work each morning.