Underclass milks our benefits

Every year in Britain a staggering £3,000 million in state benefits is lost because of fraud and error. This is a colossal sum. How can it possibly be explained? The case of David Graham provides some shocking answers.

As we report today, Graham was a schoolteacher from Jamaica who came to England on a work visa to teach English.

This in itself raises questions. Why are we importing English teachers from the Caribbean? Is Britain not capable of training enough home-grown teachers?

Once here, Graham discovered what thousands of foreign and native cheats already know. The UK state-benefits system is as easy to rob as a china piggy bank.

Over a three-year period Graham made 200 phone calls to the Inland Revenue to make false tax-credit claims.

He did it simply by inventing an imaginary family of eight children.

And as the state pays extra for disabled children, Graham gave five of his make-believe children an assortment of make-believe disabilities.

Not once, it seems, was he forced to produce any evidence. It was only the sheer number of his phone calls that eventually raised the Revenue’s suspicion.

By then, Graham had swindled the system of nearly £45,000.

He has been jailed for a year, which means he will be free in a few months. He will then be deported to Jamaica which, as countless cases have proved, is no bar to entering and re-entering Britain through our leaky immigration system.

This case was detected. Thousands more are not.

How many other cheats are claiming benefits for non-existent families or ailments?

How many are raking in more than David Graham’s £45,000 by playing the system more cleverly?

Our benefits system is a disgrace. While pensioners live on the breadline and honest folk thrown out of work have to account for every penny, a criminal underclass milks the system of billions.

A few months in a comfortable prison and a one-way ticket to the Caribbean hardly seems much of a deterrent.

Answer to prayer only for lawyers

Lawyers must be rubbing their hands with glee at the announcement that new Church of England schools will reserve a quarter of places for non-Christian pupils.

Church schools are among the best in England. Many are massively over-subscribed.

So how can a CofE school reserve 25 per cent of places for pupils of other religions, or of no religion at all, without turning away devout CofE families, some of whom will go to law?

If the Church presses ahead with this plan, worshippers may be dismayed but the legal profession will surely rejoice.

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