DWP call handler: ‘Claimants treat benefits like a gravy train’
"Benefits claimants are being signed off work despite repeatedly failing tests designed to root out bogus applications, a civil servant responsible for vetting thousands of applications has claimed.
It comes after one million more working-age Britons were parked on jobless benefits that do not require them to look for employment, official figures show.
Britain’s welfare bill has continued to spiral out of control despite Labour’s vow to tackle the country’s worklessness crisis since it came into government last July. The ballooning bill is expected to hit £303bn this year – equivalent to almost a quarter of the Government’s total annual budget.
Speaking anonymously, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) employee told The Telegraph that applicants who failed a tick-box process for incapacity benefit – paid out when someone’s health problems prevent them from working – were able to reapply even after being rejected several times.
The benefit, they said, had become a “pension for life” because claimants on the support do not have to look for work.
“They keep going and going,” the civil servant said. “I see cases where people have failed checks nine or 10 times, but they stick at it and then they’re on the gravy train.”
Getting approved for the benefit typically requires a doctor’s note, interviews with medical professionals and National Insurance records which are together used to produce a score rating an applicant’s capability to work.
After several failed tries, they said determined applicants would eventually succeed in getting approved, despite a track record of rejections that would not count against them.
“People will try and try again to get limited capability to work because they’ve got a bad back. Once they’ve got it, they treat it as a pension for life.”
More people are falling into this category. The increase in the number of people claiming Universal Credit with “no work requirements” is up from 2.67 million in July 2024, following Labour’s landslide victory.
Claimants for incapacity benefit, which falls under the health element of Universal Credit, could receive £2,500 more than the national living wage combined with housing benefits and personal independence payments, according to analysis by the Centre for Social Justice...
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of the means-tested Universal Credit system, said there were “no surprises here” in response to the claims, which come after key checks were temporarily removed from the benefits system during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We are now paying for a stupid policy during Covid that slackened off sanctions and slackened checks. We still don’t have face-to-face interviews much. If people can find some way of getting money for nothing, they’ll do it,” he said...
Even if claims assessors suspect fraud, they must approve benefits unless there is a clear reason why an applicant should not receive the funds, the civil servant said...
One telltale sign a claim could be fraudulent is if it comes from an international dialling code.
Once or twice a month, “people will try to make a new claim from scratch and they are abroad. I say: ‘Hang on, you’re not even in Britain’. They just hang up and try again”.
Last year, a ring of fraudsters were jailed after stealing more than £50m from British taxpayers through the benefits system by submitting thousands of false claims.
The case was only uncovered after a lone policeman in Bulgaria told UK authorities that his city was suddenly awash with cash, with criminals “living like barons”, The Telegraph reported last year.
“When you get a call, every number should begin with four-four,” which is the British international dialling code. “But you will get calls from somewhere else [which is] a fraud. There’s absolutely no way they can take calls without definitely being in that country.”
The civil servant also said they occasionally detected attempts to exploit the benefits system as part of collective efforts to defraud the taxpayer.
“You get the feeling that it’s organised [because] every claim is so similar. You see on the notes from previous agents that this person has tried to use a forged licence, or come into the job centre and not been who they say they are, or has children on the claim who don’t exist.”
One strategy adopted by suspected fraudsters is to bombard government phone lines until they get what they want.
“They call 10 or 20 times in a day and hope someone will be half asleep and just give them the money. Any weakness in the system, they will try and exploit it to the maximum. There’s too many people willing to give the money away.”
This could be made worse because “a lot of people worked from home” and were therefore more difficult for managers to keep an eye on, the civil servant said. They also said some colleagues were able to do their jobs effectively from home.
“The main thing for me is how organised it comes across, [as though] there are people high up behind it. The amount of energy they put into these claims, you’d think they’re paying people a percentage,” they said.
The civil servant added it was possible to raise “red flags” on benefits cases – which are fraud reports – but that claims assessors “never hear the results”. The reports of fraud “might get binned or they might get acted on, we are never told”."
