Bob Lyddon - Lyddon Consulting Services - Thames Ditton 04 April, 2012, 17:01 0 likes

Would this not mainly be benefits fraud? i.e. holding several NI numbers and claiming the same raft of benefits on each one. This number does not seem to have fallen since the Benefits Payment Automation Project from 1999, which eliminated the usage of girocheques and books of foils, on which there was no reconciliation by the Post Office and where the beneficiary name could be easily scrubbed out and typed over - leading to a big secondary market around the pubs and clubs.

Within the BPAP it was openly discussed that the real losses were 6 or 7 times as much as the published figures for benefits fraud at the time (£2 billion p.a. in 1999). For some reason this communications policy seemed to be accepted as normal.

The government diktat, signed I think by Harriet Harman, was that benefits payments should, by 2001, be moved onto a "modern, fast and efficient payment system: BACS", and be made into a bank account.

Since BACS wasn't capacious enough to handle the extra volumes (as well as arguably not being modern, fast or efficient), the project recommendations, from EDS and PwC, gave rise to the creation of Voca and a major investment in NewBacs, overseen by the original IT manager from the DWP Long Benton site in Newcastle.

This solution was deemed preferable politically to Peter Lilley's Single Benefits Card, or a National ID Card, or the replacement of the back-end computers. There was in essence one computer for each benefit, each with its own claimant database, and no reconciliation of the claimant to a central identification database - which would have uncovered the same person claiming multiple times. A complete replacement of the back-end systems was deemed too costly so it was instead decided to try and stem the outflow at the payment system level - and I guess that, if losses were really £14 billion in 1999, then £20 billion now, with inflation, represents a capping - result!