The housing benefit bill is out of control – at over £20billion it’s more than three times the police budget.

It is important to clear up a number of myths. The first is that the current system is fine. The current maximum LHA rate is £104,000 a year. If you were a working person, that would require an income of well over £250,000 to fund, based on what households spend on average on housing.

Despite all the shouting, the maximum rate under the cap we are now proposing will be £400 a week or nearly £21,000 a year. This would require a gross income of over £80,000 a year if you were not on benefits.

Labour joined forces with Church of England bishops and Lib Dem rebels last night to try to wreck flagship plans for an annual limit on welfare handouts. Ministers reacted with fury as Church leaders suggested that capping benefits at a maximum of £26,000 a year was somehow un-Christian. The bishops helped inflict a dramatic defeat in the House of Lords, with one even invoking the Bible as he argued against the Government’s plans. Nearly 200 families are pocketing a staggering £61,000 A YEAR in benefits, Government figures revealed last night.

The massive pay-outs go to families with ten or more children — and no adults in work.

These households — 20 of which have 12 KIDS each — are eligible for an astounding £1,177 every week. Benefits include Jobseeker's Allowance, Child Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit and Child Benefit.

More than £2billion is being claimed in benefits by foreigners every year, including thousands of illegal immigrants, figures reveal. The Department for Work and Pensions announced a fraud investigation last night after it emerged 5,000 illegals claimed handouts worth £42million to which they are not entitled. Ministers acted after the first-ever study of claimants’ nationality, which found 371,000 foreign nationals are on out-of-work benefits.A fraud investigation has revealed 5,000 illegal immigrants have claimed £42million to which they are not entitled. The study by the DWP found 6 per cent of all benefit claimants were foreign nationals when the data was collected in February last year. Of those claiming benefits, 258,000 were from outside the European Economic Area, which includes the 27 EU countries as well as Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. But a follow-up exercise found 2 per cent of all claims by foreign nationals were made by those without the immigration status to justify the payments.

At the kitchen table, two pretty girls giggle as they draw pictures with crayons. On the wall are posters listing their times-tables, while in the corner, the family’s tropical fish, Bubbles and Tiger, swim in a heated aquarium.

But this happy domestic scene is threatened with upheaval because, in nine days’ time, the Rostant family - two parents, eight children and their pet fish - may be homeless. Until now, the family have been one of four families claiming the highest amount of housing benefit in the country. Their £2,000-a-week rent (more than £103,200 a year, given to the landlord has been paid by taxpayers. But the money is to be stopped as the result of the Government’s crackdown, which began this week, on the long-running scandal of housing benefit abuse (which costs the working public a staggering £20billion a year).

£400 a week rent paid by Housing benefit is astill too much. Immigrants who comne from Africa etc all would live together in one room, why should the UK let them rent expensive homes and live for free on the dole. THE growing burden of the state benefits system was highlighted last night when figures showed that nearly 200 families with 10 or more children each get £60,000 a year in hand-outs.These huge broods in workless households are costing taxpayers nearly £12million a year.

The figures, released by the Department for Work and Pensions, will fuel fears that some welfare scroungers are having large families simply to increase their state-funded incomes.

And last night ministers vowed to continue to crack down on the lavish expenditure by capping benefits for all households at a maximum of £500 a week. It's not fair that benefit claimants can receive higher incomes than families who are in work – in some cases more than double the average household income. "That's why we're introducing a cap on benefits – to restore fairness to our welfare system while ensuring that support goes to those who need it."

You can have children, but if you are going to ask for support that is more than the average wage people earn then we're saying no. The shocking figures date from May 2010. They revealed that a workless family with 10 children under the age of 18 could receive around £1,177-a-week in benefits by claiming Jobseeker's Allowance, Child Tax Credits, Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit and Child Benefit. This adds up to £61,204 a year.

Despite all the Leftwing propaganda about oppressive penury the truth is that welfare can provide a comfortable living. More than 1.2million claimants on social security receive £15,000-a-year, a higher post-tax income than many workers receive, while 300,000 of them are on more than £20,000-a-year. The absurd generosity of the state was highlighted by the recent case of the Somali family given a £2million home in Hampstead, with the £8,000 per month rent met by the taxpayer. Yet those who actually go out to work regularly struggle to find suitable accommodation for their families. Paying people to stay unemployed is the economics of the madhouse and the height of injustice. The coalition came to power promising radical reform of the welfare state but so far that has proved empty rhetoric. Sadly Osborne’s decision to uprate benefits so generously is just part of this pattern of failure.

Around 500 foreigners landed a job in Britain every day over the past year while the number of UK-born workers plunged. Official figures yesterday painted a shockingly bleak picture of a jobs market in crisis as unemployment hit a 17-year high. The Office for National Statistics said the number of British-born workers has crashed by 311,000 in a year, equal to more than 850 a day. But in the same period, the number of foreign-born employees jumped by 181,000 – or 495 a day. Ministers admitted the situation was ‘unacceptable’, although bosses warned that many young British workers were too lazy and too bad at basics such as punctuality to be worth hiring. But experts said the latest figures highlight the urgency of tackling the immigration problem.

CHILD benefit worth £42million is being sent abroad each year – while British families are being squeezed by the cash crisis, we can reveal today. Most of the cash goes to eastern Europe, with Poland top of the list. Every month more than ­£2million is sent to Polish children, who already enjoy a higher quality of life than those living here.
Of the £42million sent abroad, £30million goes to youngsters in eastern Europe.
Payments are usually far more generous than any government benefits in those countries.

British benefits for Polish children are 515 per cent higher than local workers could claim on their own welfare system – which could explain the huge surge in claims here in recent years. While the Warsaw government pays £3.30 per week per child, Polish claimants here get £20.30 for one child, a difference of £17 per week.

The number of foreign-born people working in the UK rose during the recession, new figures have revealed. As the number of UK-born workers dropped by 654,000 between 2008 and 2010, migrant workers leapt up by 139,000. Figures released by the Office for Budgetary Responsibility show of this number, 100,000 were born outside the EU.

Although the Government says there are only 1,000 such bigamous or polygamous unions in the UK, two experienced Lancashire social workers — one of Indian-English heritage and the other with Pakistani origins — told me that, although it’s difficult to be precise, in their estimation the figure is closer to 20,000.

The social workers said the multiple marriages are encouraged by a welfare system which allows a second, third or fourth wife to be treated as a single mother who gets a house and an array of other state payments for herself and her children.

Controversially, it means that a man can take a new spouse (from anywhere in the world), sire any number of children with her, and yet have no responsibility for this family’s upkeep or care.

To avoid breaking Britain’s matrimony laws, the men marry their extra ‘wives’ in an Islamic Nikah ceremony, either in their own homes or a mosque.

For example, a Pakistani man contracts a marriage in his native country, and then brings his wife to England to start a family. Because they have been married only under Islamic law, she isn’t legally registered by British authorities as his wife. Even so, they are able to claim child benefit for any children they have.But the state handouts do not end there, for under Islamic Sharia law, polygamy is permissible. So a man can return to Pakistan, take another bride and then, in a repetition of the process, bring her to England where they also have children together — obtaining yet more money from the state. Because such Islamic multiple-marriages are not recognised in Britain, the women are regarded by the welfare system as single mothers — and are therefore entitled to the full range of lone-parent payments. As a result, several ‘families’, fathered by the same Pakistani man, can all claim benefits as they are provided for by the welfare state, which treats them as if they are not related.

Some Asian families in Britain are having too many children in order to claim extra welfare payments, Britain’s first female Asian peer claimed last night. Baroness Flather accused the Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities of failing to adopt the values of British society and said they should have their benefits slashed. Lady Flather, a former Tory who now sits as a crossbencher, said this abuse of the welfare system has been brushed under the carpet out of political correctness. She spoke out in the House of Lords during the second reading of the Welfare Reform Bill. But she took aim at the Pakistani community, saying uneducated immigrants are still following the traditions of their homeland by having more children because they end up getting a ‘bigger house’. She told peers: ‘The minority communities in this country, particularly the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis, have a very large number of children and the attraction is the large number of benefits that follow the child.

Almost one in three households in some areas of the country have not one person in work, shocking figures revealed today. And in a reflection of the stagnant and fragile state of the economy the three areas with the highest rates of of joblessness are the same cities that topped the table last year. More than 30 per cent of households in Liverpool, Nottingham and Glasgow are classed as workless in 2010, said the Office for National Statistics. For Liverpool and Glasgow the figure fell in the previous year from 32.1 per cent and 31.1 per cent, to 31.9 per cent and 30.7 per cent.

ANGER at the scale of Britain’s benefits culture erupted last night after official figures showed there are nearly four million households where no one works. The statistics also revealed the number of households where no one has ever worked has increased by 18,000 over the past year to 370,000. A total of 3.88million homes with at least one working-age adult do not include anyone with a job. Despite a slight drop of 38,000 over the past year, the shocking figure represents one in five of households with at least one member of working-age. In total 7.25million people, including 1.84million children, are living in workless households. The ­figures yesterday triggered renewed fury at the £180billion annual welfare benefits bill being picked up by taxpayers. Critics seized on the statistics as fresh evidence of the culture of benefits dependency that was allowed to spiral out of control under the previous Labour government. The figures confirmed that the number of households where no one has ever worked doubled under Labour.

She tells her children to do as she says and not as she does.But the words of mother of 14 Joanne Watson – who receives more than £2,000 a month in state handouts – have fallen on deaf ears. Her 15-year-old daughter Mariah is pregnant, the father has ‘left the scene’, and the youngster is about to start living off benefits. Mrs Watson, 40, is raising her giant brood alone after parting from her husband John, 46, three years ago, and breaking up with subsequent partner Craig le Sauvage, 35, last year.

Despite this, she has still managed to squirrel away enough cash for a £1,600 breast enhancement and a sunbed. She claims she has always encouraged her daughters to use contraception – but, inevitably, it seems they would rather follow the family tradition. Mariah’s pregnancy comes after Mrs Watson’s oldest daughter Natasha, 22, got pregnant with her son Branford, now six, when she was 16. Her second eldest daughter Shanice, 19, also got pregnant at 16 with her 22-month-old son Marley.

As many as 100,000 migrants from Eastern Europe will be allowed to claim £250-a-week as Europe forces Britain to abolish its restrictions on benefits.

In a move that could cost the British taxpayer tens of millions of pounds, migrants from the Soviet bloc will be allowed jobseeker's allowance, council tax benefit and housing benefit. The law changes will come into effect within weeks as the European Union scraps restrictions imposed when eight states joined the EU in 2004, and it leaves Britain powerless to counter the move.

LET OFF THE WOMEN WITH £70,000 IN HER BANK WHO CONNED £30,000 IN BENEFITS.

A SWINDLER exposed in April 2005 how British justice has become a soft touch.  Hansa Patel claimed income support, council tax benefit and housing benefit though she had savings of £70,000 ( from sale of her house and money transferred to an Indian bank account).  The fraudster refused to pay back a penny from the proceeds of her crime.  She was spared jail because she claimed she was ill.

Newham Borough Council is believed to have paid out over £100,000 to Patel.

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3 MONTHS IN JAIL FOR FIDDLING £33,000 IN BENEFITS.

A man who fiddled £33,000 in benefits so he could afford to send his children to university has been jailed for only three months.  Abdul Qayum, 48, admitted falsely claiming income support, council tax and housing benefits over a six-year period. Yet he had thousands in savings.  He watched his children graduate - one as a doctor and two as trainee solicitors before being caught for failing to declare his savings.

BENEFIT FRAUDSTER GIVEN 42 YEARS TO PAY BACK MONEY.

A women who fiddled £5,500 in benefits has been ordered to repay it at £2.50 a week - which will take just over 42 years. Susan Hawkes will be 73 by the time the cash is paid back.

Since January this year, court cases have identified more than £1million lost by taxpayers to benefit claimants who claimed they were single. The ‘living together’ fraud cases include Zena Bailey of North-East London who raked in nearly £83,000 while masquerading as a lone mother. She was jailed for a year in February by Snaresbrook Crown Court when police discovered cards addressed to her and her partner at the couple’s home and her partner’s clothes in her wardrobe. In May, Suzie Dwyer of Liverpool claimed nearly £103,000 as a single mother but was jailed for 16 months alongside her supposed landlord Paul Campbell. It emerged that Campbell was in fact her partner and father of her three children.  Karen McCormack of Highgate, North London, was jailed for two years in February after failing to declare she was living with her partner and father of her two children. While claiming benefit, she also neglected to tell the authorities about an £80,000 inheritance she had received.

Sky has a council house next door to her mother in Tonypandy, South Wales, while her big sister has moved away from the area. The teenage mothers, their partners and Mrs Rees all rely on benefits to get by, at an annual cost to the taxpayer of £34,000, not including their free accommodation. Both couples receive £160 a week in child benefit and tax credits, as well as £180 a fortnight in jobseekers' allowance, giving them a tax free income of £13,000 a year. Mrs Rees herself receives jobseekers' allowance and a small amount of child tax credit as Sky is still under 18, giving her an estimated-income of £8,000.

IT IS a monstrous injustice to expect British taxpayers to bankroll the full panoply of welfare benefits for claimants from other European Union member states. This country has enough difficulties financing the benefits claims of its own citizens without being turned into the number one hot spot in Europe for welfare tourism.

But that will be the impact of the High Court decision that found in favour of a Portuguese citizen seeking to force the UK taxpayer to stump up child benefit for his children in Portugal.

Jose Lopes Ruas is already a substantial burden on the British taxpayer, having become reliant upon disability benefits after working here for just four years. It is utterly ridiculous that such a short-lived economic contribution should entitle him to receive additional support for family members living back in Portugal. A nightmare combination of EU integration and a liberal judiciary is leaving British people acutely vulnerable to those from all corners of Europe who recognise a soft touch when they see one. Each time somebody wins a new concession at the expense of the taxpayer, the message goes out to the indolent classes across the EU that Britain is the place to be. This country used to be known as a great place to do business. Not any longer. Now it is a great place to come and sponge off.

Two in three of those applying for incapacity benefit should be in day-to-day employment while tens of thousands more could undertake some form of work.

Fewer than 10 per cent of around 300,000 claimants were found unable to work at all. The findings reveal the culture of dependence created by Labour and suggest that more than two million of the 2.6 million currently claiming incapacity benefit should be at work – and are costing the taxpayer more than £11billion.

The problem is a massive drain on Britain with the total incapacity benefit bill adding up to some £12.5billion a year, despite repeated pledges by Labour to reduce the burden. Last night Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers will be very concerned that so many fit and well people have been receiving incapacity benefit on top of other generous allowances.

“The review is long overdue but essential. Incapacity benefit should be there for people who really need it and those who are able to should be helped back into work.

ALMOST 92,000 Eastern Europeans who came to Britain looking for work are claiming tens of millions of pounds in state handouts.The flood of migrants cashing in on benefits is costing the taxpayer at least £102million a year. And the bill will rise further as figures showed yesterday that 660 Eastern Europeans  more than 4,500 a week  are coming to the UK every day. The daily count includes 116 Romanians and Bulgarians who have flocked here since they joined the European Union in January. And in a devastating attack on Labour's open-door policy, business leaders yesterday warned that the flood of migrants is leaving hundreds of thousands of school leavers out of work. David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, said: The Government must understand that migration is not a long-term solution to the tragic skills shortages that many young people have.More than half a million people aged 18 to 24 are presently out of work, yet no one seems to notice due to the number of jobs that have been filled by so many willing migrant workers. This is unsustainable and we are in danger of creating a two-tier society, with many going straight from school to a life on welfare. Meanwhile, more than a million immigrants have been given British passports since Labour came to power in 1997. Home Office figures reveal that 1,020,510 have been given citizenship. Of those, 245,270 were children and about 278,680 were through marriage. Mgrationwatch UK chairman Sir Andrew Green said: “It is astonishing that we should now find that we have a million new citizens under Labour when they never indicated that they had any policy of this kind. In fact, the opposite.” He said the impact on society was huge and it was “high time” the consequences were openly addressed. Since eight former Eastern Bloc nations, including Poland and Lithuanian , joined the EU in 2004, a total of 91,994 claims for benefits have been approved or are still being considered.

BRITAIN PAYS £2.5BN BENEFITS TO FOREIGNERS.

Taxpayers in Britain have been saddled with a £2.5Billion bill to pay welfare benefits to Romanians and Bulgarians who don't migrate to the UK.

The massive tax burden was revealed as Britain braces itself for a wave of up to 600,000 migrants from the two East European countries.  Now Britons will also be expected to help boost living standards of those who stay at home.  In Romania families will see their benefits almost treble as the billions start to pour in.  The £2.5billion forms Britain's contribution towards a six year £20 billion EU funding programme that equated to £105 a year for every UK household.

A FAMILY of former asylum seekers is living in a £1.8m central London home at a cost to the taxpayer of £1,600 a week, despite a pledge by ministers to crack down on housing benefit payments. Somali-born Nasra Warsame, seven of her children and her mother moved into the six-bedroom property last month after Westminster council agreed to pay the rent. Her husband and an eighth child are living in a separate “overspill” property also paid for by housing benefit. Warsame’s five-storey home boasts three sitting rooms and four bathrooms. It is within walking distance of the West End. This weekend critics said the £1,600 payment — £83,000 a year — was “excessive” and accused the government of failing to get to grips with Britain’s annual £17 billion housing benefit bill. Last year James Purnell, then work and pensions secretary, promised to make housing benefit “fair to taxpayers” as well as to people on low incomes. Today’s revelations, however, appear to contradict that claim. The Warsame family home is part of a smart 1960s development just yards from Edgware Road Underground station. It is understood that the house was previously rented out at £800 per week — considered by estate agents in the area as the going rate for similar properties. It is unclear why the taxpayer is having to pay twice that rate.

SIX moaning asylum seekers have landed bigger council houses after winning a legal battle with taxpayers’ cash. The Somalians were given free homes shortly after they arrived in Britain. But they soon complained the accommodation was too small after their families arrived from abroad. One refugee was in a two-bed flat, but a year later was joined here by his wife and six children. Another was also joined by his wife and six children before she gave birth to another child. They took their demands to court – using legal aid cash – after Birmingham council said it had no accommodation left. But yesterday it was revealed they been moved into bigger houses after winning the action. One got a five-bedroom mansion, four got four-bedroom homes and another received a three-bedroom house. None of the asylum seekers is believed to be working and all were said to be living off welfare benefits.

Most families who are due to lose their child benefit are worrying about how they'll make ends meet without it. But for Kelly Marshall, who has five children by four different fathers, the handout has never been about paying for nappies, food and other everyday expenses. She saved her benefit money to help pay for breast enhancement. And as many parents envisage tightening their belts after the Tories announced plans to cut the benefit for higher-rate taxpayers, she plans to save more of hers for liposuction and a tummy tuck. Miss Marshall, who has never worked, rakes in almost £29,000 a year from benefits - and last year spent £4,500 to go from a 34A to a 34DD. She explained: 'I have wanted a boob job since I was a teen. But it wasn't until I had five children that I could afford it - with all the extra benefits I get. Now I hope to have liposuction, a tummy tuck and regular Botox.

LABOUR stands accused of a catastrophic mishandling of the benefits system after a huge rise in fraud in recent years. Ministers have paved the way for what amounts to a charter for shirkers and cheats to exploit the system to the tune of billions of pounds a year by failing to scrutinise claims properly, warn critics. Government figures reveal benefit fraud costs the taxpayer £1.1billion annually – a six-year high – but the real figure is likely to be much more as thousands of cheats continue to evade detection.

Incapacity Benefit fraud alone has multiplied sevenfold in three years while there have been huge increases in the cost of bogus claims for Housing Benefit, Income Support and Jobseeker’s Allowance. Government action to stem the haemorrhaging of Incapacity Benefit payments has revealed the true extent of the problem, say analysts. Initial testing of a new, tougher assessment to be rolled out over the next three years indicates that up to two-thirds of the 2.6 million Incapacity Benefit claimants, who receive a total of £12.5billion a year, would not qualify for handouts or would receive a smaller payment. The bill for Incapacity Benefit fraud may run into several billions, dwarfing the £70million claimed in a Department for Work and Pensions report. Thirty years ago about 700,000 were paid the benefit if deemed unable to work through ill health or disability. Today recipients outnumber unemployment benefit claimants by more than three-to-one. Official figures show that while Housing Benefit fraud cost the taxpayer £140million in 2005-6, that shot up to £260million last year, a rise of 85 per cent.

A campaigner for Roma gipsies' rights has been charged with helping scores of Romanians illegally claim millions in benefits. Lavinia Olmazu, 30, and her boyfriend Alin Enachi, 29, are said to have masterminded a scam by which 172 Romanians claimed £2.6million. Olmazu, who was arrested last week, was working as an 'inclusivity outreach worker' to Roma gipsies for both Haringey and Waltham Forest councils in North London. Fake documents: Lavinia Olmazu allegedly helped Romanian migrants to claim millions in benefits. The academic, who has campaigned for greater understanding of gipsy culture, is accused with Enachi of using a supposedly charitable organisation called Roma Concern to help coordinate the fraud. The couple appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Friday alongside six gipsies, each of whom is alleged to have pocketed thousands of pounds from the scam. Under rules introduced when Romania joined the EU in 2006, Romanian migrants cannot get a National Insurance number - which is the key to getting benefits - unless they can prove they have paid employment lined up. Olmazu and her boyfriend are accused of giving unemployed Romanians false documentation which purported to offer them work. They are also said to have provided false invoices and references purportedly showing they were working. Scores then used fraudulently obtained NI numbers to claim child benefit, working tax credit and child tax credit, the court heard. The fraud was allegedly facilitated by Enachi, who attended Benefits Agency interviews with Romanians as a translator.Alin Enachi is also accused of masterminding the £2.6billion benefits scam. Prosecutor Matthew McCabe revealed that over a 17-month period to last July, Enachi attended 356 interviews, mainly at the Jobcentre Plus office in Tooting, South London. And 172 of these individuals went on to claim benefit.

Mr McCabe said Olmazu 'saw Roma gipsies to advise them in how to apply for a National Insurance number and benefit'.

A grandmother who claimed she was so ill she could not sit down for more than 10 minutes pocketed £66,000 in welfare handouts while holding down six different jobs. Susan Skinner, 60, lied about her health to the Department for Work and Pensions for 13 years, a court heard. She was given incapacity benefit after claiming she was suffering from medical conditions that prevented her from sitting for longer than 10 minutes or walking more than 200 metres without severe pain. But she was working at various jobs throughout the period she was claiming the cash, earning up to £1,400 a month. At the time of her arrest, she was an administrative assistant for the Pennine Acute Hospitals Trust, but did not tell her bosses about the fraud or her court appearance. Burnley Crown Court was told that she had started repaying the money at £50 a month, which meant she would have to live until she was 170 to repay it. Skinner, of Shawforth, near Rochdale, admitted obtaining property by deception and was jailed for eight months.

A Nigerian immigrant stole the identities of 350 people to claim £1.3million in bogus tax credits in the largest benefit scam of its kind. Olaide Taiwo, 35, hijacked the identities while working as a security guard for a number of large national companies.

He then used the names to claim tens of thousands in working tax credits. This week he was jailed for eight and a half years – the highest ever sentence for tax credit fraud. Taiwo is understood to have arrived illegally in Britain in 2003 with his wife. Although three applications to stay in the UK failed, in 2005 he was granted discretionary leave to remain. It was during this period that his scam began. The father-of-two submitted more than 300 fraudulent tax credit claims between June 2004 and July 2008 worth over £1million. When he was arrested, investigators found an ‘identity thieves’ paradise’, with stacks of fake passports and driving licences and £70,000 in cash lying around his council flat in Camberwell, South-East London.

The European Commission has begun legal proceedings against Britain to get restrictions on welfare claims by incomers scrapped.

If successful, the Government would be required to remove its deterrents to benefit tourism, including the right-to-reside test and an additional qualification for those claiming jobseeker’s allowance, that they must have worked for 12 months or more.

Officials warn the bill could be between £1.3billion and £2.5billion a year – hampering plans to rein in welfare spending.

Tracey Crompton has never had a job, and her husband Harry has been out of work for 15 years. Yet the couple live for free in a seven bedroom house with their ten children and receive £32,656 in benefits a year. They even have their own vineyard in their 270ft long garden. In fact, they receive so much in handouts that they have already bought and wrapped £3,000 worth of Christmas presents, and plan to buy more.

The couple say they are enjoying the credit crunch because it has forced down the price of luxury goods like TVs and computer games, but do have two gripes.

A single mother with three children has been placed by her local council in a £1.5million mews house. The luxurious three-storey property, in the heart of London's exclusive Kensington, costs an astonishing £1,125 a week to rent - a cost being met by housing benefit, at taxpayers' expense. Appalled neighbours say the house concerned is the biggest on the central yet quiet street. Boston Ivy climbs its walls, and it features a juliet balcony and a large garage.

A RECORD number of bogus claims means fraudsters are cheating taxpayers out of millions of pounds every year, a report reveals today. The Audit Commission has exposed £215million of fraud in 2008/09 – and that is likely to be only a fraction of the real level. The new figure is up more than 50 per cent from the £140million identified in 2006/07. Fake claims included £62million cheated by people falsely claiming the single person discount on council tax and 16,535 cases of disabled parking badges being used by those who were not entitled to them.Other scams saw £32million overpaid in housing benefit while £84million was tracked down in pension fraud. The details were uncovered after a huge nationwide operation to match benefit, tax, housing and employment data. The National Fraud Initiative compared information from 1,300 organisations, including councils, police, the NHS and nearly 100 private companies, to uncover thousands of cases of wrongly-obtained benefits, pensions and jobs. The initiative brings together data on a secure website, allowing the authorities to carry out their own matches to find possible fraud overpayments. Since its launch in 1996, it has helped detect wrongful payments totalling £664million.

More than a million pounds a month in child benefit is going to youngsters who live in Eastern Europe, ministers admitted yesterday. The money is being paid out to 14,000 Eastern European nationals who claim for offspring living in their home countries.

It is the first time the Government has acknowledged that the payments - funded by British taxpayers - are going abroad. Even larger sums in tax credits for children are thought to be paid to recent migrants from Eastern Europe but ministers insist that total figures are 'not available'.

THE number of jobless claiming handouts for being "too stressed" to work has soared by 800 per cent under Labour. A record 51,790 claimants pick up stress-related incapacity benefit and cost hard-hit taxpayers £122million every year in Britain's sicknote culture. The payments - which have soared from just 5,700 before Labour came to power in 1997 - reflect a growing awareness of illnesses linked to stress at work, insist officials. But critics suspect many claimants are workshy scroungers malingering at the taxpayer's expense. The figures - revealed only after a Freedom of Information request - will fuel growing concern over the £12billion annual cost of sickness benefits handed out to around 2.7million people.

Tory ministers are to backtrack on their pledge to cap state welfare hand-outs at £26,000 a year.

The retreat, which is a sop to Lib Dems, will overturn a promise that no household on benefits should be given more than the average family earns.

The policy was a vote-winning response to damaging headlines about large, workless families claiming more than £100,000 a year from the taxpayer.

Lord Freud, the Tory welfare reform minister, yesterday told the BBC’s Politics Show he was anxious to prevent bigger families being unfairly penalised. ‘We’re looking at exceptional circumstances which some people may find themselves in and we are going to be putting out arrangements for that later in the year,’ he said. 

He confirmed exemptions would occur and that ministers we’re ‘looking very carefully at how to draw up those protections’.

NEARLY two million people in Britain have never had a job and a further three million have not worked since Labour came to power, shock figures revealed last night.

In the worst unemployment black spots, as many as a quarter of all adults have not held down a job since 1996. The disturbing figures, released by the Tories yesterday, were obtained from analysis of a recent population survey. They show that a total of about five million have been out of work for over a decade. The Conservatives warned that the statistics confirmed Britain was burdened by hidden pockets of severe long-term unemployment years before the current recession.

Doctors are being pressured into signing off more than 70,000 workers a year who are well enough to work, a tribunal heard. The practice, which is an indirect result of Government targets, costs the taxpayer £300million a year, it was said. The claims emerged in a tribunal case brought by two doctors in Birmingham. They say targets had created a bias in the medical assessment system, which made it easier for false claimants. Up to one in five of those applying for benefits was wrongly assessed as incapable of work, the panel heard. Dr Jakes Branton and Dr Gail Young were employed by Atos Origin, which has a seven-year, £500million contract with the Department for Work and Pensions to carry out checks on incapacity benefit applicants. If a worker is ill, they receive statutory sick pay for about 28 weeks. After this, they can apply for incapacity benefit. But to receive it, they must be independently assessed by Atos Origin. Its doctors examine about 30,000 a month to see whether they are eligible for the Government handouts, of up to £84.50 a week. But Dr Branton and Dr Young say the firm was under "significant pressure" from the DWP to meet targets for levels of complaints from applicants.

A BENEFIT fraudster claimed he could only walk 20 yards – but was caught running a 10k charity race. Brian Rawsthorne, 50, took part in the BUPA Great Manchester run in May 2007, finishing in two hours and eight minutes. A court heard he had received more than £12,000 in Disability Living Allowance (DLA) but carried on claiming – even after the race. Rawsthorne, of Newton Heath, Manchester, even appeared in his local newspaper boasting of how he had lost two-and-a-half stone in pre-race training.

AN ex-factory worker was yesterday ordered to repay £11,000 he fiddled by claiming he could barely walk – while he taught martial arts. Adrian Blayney, 49, got disability living pay after hurting his back in a fall at work in 2001. He claimed he also had a heart attack in 2002. But the court heard he ran two martial arts classes at a sports centre. A Department of Work and Pensions official saw Blayney show fighting moves in Aberdare, South Wales, after a tip-off.

A family of benefits fraudsters falsely claimed more than £130,000 by saying they were too sick to work – while moonlighting as cleaners. Allan Peters, 56, said he was so disabled he could barely walk, could not leave home without an oxygen cylinder and was so weak he could not pull the bed covers over him at night. His wife, Lorraine, 53, said she needed a stick to walk, could not go out on her own and became ‘breathless at the slightest exertion’. She also claimed she was too weak to pull a duvet over her.

Their son Garry, 31, said he was unable to work because he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Another son Martin, 28, told benefits officials he was an alcoholic and that he had to look after his poorly father. Even their uncle, Compton McKenzie, 51, was in on the act, claiming he was unable to work because he had severe agoraphobia.

Can you guess what they do for a living, the protestors who gathered outside the Old Bailey to support Roshonara Choudhry, sentenced to life earlier this week for trying to murder a Labour MP? That’s right: they’re on benefits, one claiming to suffer from chronic fatigue disorder. (Although he was evidently not too fatigued to spend the day bellowing “British troops must die!”) Unconditional subventions can create an ideal terrorist habitat. The same phenomenon can be observed in Britain. The second set of Tube bombers were largely living on social security. Several inflammatory imams have no difficulty claiming cash from the state whose overthrow they preach: as Anjem Choudary, the benefits claimant who tried to organise an anti-troops demonstration in Wootton Basset put it, “the money belongs to Allah“. It was a similar story in Northern Ireland during the Troubles: a disproportionate number of loyalist and republican gunmen were on the dole.

A JUDGE sparked uproar yesterday after a Mercedes-driving benefits cheat was spared jail despite being caught with thousands of pounds stashed in the bank.

Single mother Keeley Wreden earned £43,000 a year as a computer consultant yet still pocketed more than £18,000 in benefits, Basildon Crown Court was told. When the Department of Work and Pensions found she had also hidden cash in bank accounts for her children, the mother of two claimed the money came from her work as a prostitute 10 years ago. Investigators discovered Keeley had stashed more than £23,000 in her bank accounts and had bought a £24,000 Mercedes.

Half the 3.2million people on disability benefit have never been asked for evidence to back their claims, it emerged last night. In addition, nearly a million people have been on disability living allowance for at least 14 years, a Government analysis of claims for the benefit revealed. DLA costs the taxpayer £12billion a year, the same as the Department for Transport’s entire annual budget.

More than £1million a week is going abroad to pay for ex-pats on Incapacity Benefit. Despite a crackdown on sickness handouts at home, the Government sent up to £54.6million abroad to over 12,000 claimants last year. In the decade since Labour came to power, £496million is estimated to have been paid to those who have left the UK. Some of the money is ending up in the pockets of foreigners who fell ill while working in Britain before returning home. Claimants who live abroad do not even take regular medical checks to find out if they are still entitled to the cash. They are required only to send Department for Work and Pensions officials confirmation from a GP that they are still too sick to take a job.

More than 710,000 foreigners were given the right to live and work in Britain last year - including 321,0000 Eastern Europeans.

It takes the total number of National Insurance numbers handed out to immigrants to more than two million in the past four years alone. Yesterday's figures reveal that - despite Labour's promise to switch to a policy of "controlled" immigration - the number of people being handed the right to work here is still increasing. Last year's total of 713,0000 foreigners allocated NI numbers is an increase of 51,000, or 8 per cent, on 2005/6. The 321,000 Eastern Europeans arriving was a rise of 16 per cent, or 44,000. The figures also showed that 145,000 NI numbers were given to arrivals from Asia and the Middle-East, 103,000 from old EU countries, 61,000 from Africa, 33,000 from Australia and Oceania, 32,000 from the Americas and 16,000 from non-EU countriesin Europe. The report also revealed that, of the total number allocated NI numbers last year, 16,000 were claiming outofwork benefits within six months of registering. The Tories estimated the bill to the taxpayer for the handouts could be as much as £80million.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "These extraordinary figures show that over two million new foreign workers have come to Britain in the last four years - and this is simply the number for those who are working legally

Funding hate on the State

Is anyone shocked that the wife of the senior Al Qaeda operative who planned to kill a British Muslim soldier and film him being beheaded "like a pig" is continuing to receive £20,352 of state benefits a year?

But why have the authorities allowed her to keep her children, considering that she let her husband groom them for terrorism, teaching their five-year-old how to stab a man to death and making them sleep and eat on the floor?

Surely she isn't a fit mother to raise these vulnerable and brutalised young children.

THE shameless mum of Shannon Matthews has been raking in nearly £400 a week by cheating on benefits. Karen Matthews, 32 - accused over the abduction of her nine-year-old daughter - told officials she was looking after four of her seven children on her own. But at the time that Shannon vanished for 24 days in February, she had been living for four years with her supermarket fishmonger boyfriend Craig Meehan, 22. He has been earning around £16,000 a year. Meehan had bragged at the time of Shannon's disappearance: "I earn the money. I put the food on the table." He was dumped by Karen following his arrest on child porn charges.

THE billion-pounds-a-year scandal of benefit cheats bleeding the taxpayer dry was laid bare yesterday by a Romanian living like a gypsy king on handouts.

“Shameless” Illie Schian’s extravagant lifestyle funded by stolen benefits outraged public spending campaigners. The 47-year-old immigrant even built a mansion with floor-to-ceiling marble in Romania on land bought with British taxpayers’ cash.

His fortune from fake claims for Jobseeker’s Allowance, child tax credits and housing benefit also paid for sports cars, motorcycles and quad bikes. Emma Boon of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said the case highlighted the need for the Government to declare an all-out war on fraudsters to curb Britain's soaring £192billion-a-year benefits bill.

“Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is continuing to fall into the wrong hands and this case shows how badly our welfare system needs to be reformed,” she said. “The ease with which Schian managed to cheat the benefits system is absolutely astonishing.” Responding to the calls, Minister for Welfare Reform Lord Freud said: “Benefit thieves are costing the taxpayer almost £1billion a year.” Schian is also suspected of involvement in a sophisticated people-smuggling ring that sent around 180 children to Britain to beg and steal.

AN asylum seeker conned £25,000 in benefits and blew it on designer shoes and frocks at Harrods. Janet Lahai let out one FLAT, bought another on the cheap, had £41,000 SAVINGS and was PAID £40,000 a year by two councils as a carer.
But African Lahai, 34 - who was granted asylum by Britain - still claimed benefits.
And yesterday she was behind bars for 12 months after admitting the huge swindle. A court heard how Lahai drew income support and housing benefit after claiming to be unemployed in Ardwick, Manchester. But she also had her own company, working as a carer for disabled people and earning £800 a week from Islington and Hackney councils in London.

ONE MILLION FACTORY JOBS LOST SINCE LABOUR CAME TO POWER.

A million manufacturing jobs have been lost since Labour came to power it was confirmed in March 2005.  The number working in the sector has fallen from 4.5 m to 3.5 m since 1997, the Office for National Statistics said.  As of December 2004, almost 1 million industry workers have lost their jobs under Labour. In 2004 alone 93,000 manufacturing jobs were axed.

Dole cheat Sadete Myrtozai has been warned she could jailed after admitting claiming tens of thousands of pounds in benefit while working. Speaking through an Albanian interpreter the 48-year-old admitted plundering the cash from the state over a five year period.  Now the mum, who lives in Walcot, has been told by a judge at Swindon crown court she could end up behind bars as a result of her deception.  Myrtozai, of Lennox Drive, pleaded guilty to three counts of dishonestly failing to notify a change of circumstances and one of making a false representation to obtain benefits.  She also asked for a further 38 similar offences to be taken into consideration when she is sentenced.  Myrtozai continued to claim income support between December 2001 and July 2004, and September 13, 2004 and October 21, 2004, despite working.  She also had a job and claimed the cash from the end of November 2004 until the end of June 2005.  The final charge relates to her claiming housing and council tax benefit on or about July 16, 2003, and not revealing she was in work. John Dyer, prosecuting for the Department of Work and Pensions, told the court that the offending took place over a five year period.  He said that with the matters taken into consideration the total amount defrauded from the state was more than £20,000.

A gang of African immigrants stole £250,000 in benefit cheques and then splashed out on luxury designer clothes.  The Conglese gang, whose conspiracy was so sophisticated and well-planned that it escaped detection for four years, now face deportation.  Birmingham Crown Court Recorder Justin Wigoder said the theft of more than 800 giro cheques from the post had left hundreds of needy people without funds.  Postal worker Massamba Lubamba, who stole more than 500 of the cheques, was jailed for four years.  Forger Basimo Ngolo - doctored the cheques using a typewriter, scalpels, crayons, glue, correction fluid and typewriter ribbons - was jailed for three and a half years.  'Middlemen' Willy Mazele and Cyprien Noumeme-Simetcho, were each jailed for 21 months.  A fifth defendant, a Cameroonian woman, was not recommended for deportation.

A benefits cheat netted more than £20,000 after claiming she had 18 children to clothe and feed. Over a four-month period, Caockmari Omoike, 36, who has no children of her own, made up two imaginary families using both her own name and a false one.

As she was sentenced to a year's jail yesterday, a judge condemned the tax system, saying officials should have spotted the scam earlier. Judge Anthony Ensor said: "It is disturbing that alarm bells did not ring when the seventh and eighth child were claimed for within weeks of the previous child appearing on the scene. "I express my concern about the simplicity in which substantial sums were obtained over a period of time. I would hope that steps have been taken to ensure the authorities are more vigilant." Manchester Crown Court heard that Omoike, who was born in the Gambia but is a Swedish citizen, rented two flats in Crumpsall.

One person who will not be losing any sleep over the impact of the financial crisis is Toorpakai Saiedi, an Afghan mother of seven living in West London and receiving £170,000 a year in benefits. While millions worry about the prospect of losing their jobs, their homes, their savings and their pensions, she is luxuriating in a £1.2 million double-fronted, seven-bedroom Edwardian villa - her staggering rent of more than £12,000 a month picked up by the British taxpayer. Ealing Council has a statutory duty to find accommodation for the family. But because it didn't have anything big enough on its books, it approached a private letting agent - and then agreed a rent five times the going rate.

FAMILY OF FIVE IN £200,000 FRAUD.

A gang of benefit fraudsters swindled taxpayers out of £200,000 while working for a cleaning company.  Led by five members of the Swift family, 25 out of 79 employees were involved in the fraud while another 36 can't be tracked down as they gave false names.£13,500 was found at the Swifts home plus accounts showing that the couple had savings running into the "tens of thousands".   Alan Swift had been overpaid £109,000 over 8 years whilst actually working.  Alan Swift was jailed for just 15 months.

He claimed to be penniless and fleeing persecution in his native Iran.

But, in reality, failed asylum-seeker Massoud Montazery had £550,000 in the bank, wore designer clothes and drove top-of-the-range cars. The 29-year-old conned benefits staff into paying him nearly £25,000 before his lies began to unravel.

An immigration officer spotted him at the wheel of a Mercedes wearing expensive clothes with his wife in the passenger seat dressed in a fur coat. He remains at liberty, however, to spend the fortune which is believed to have come from relatives.

A judge at Liverpool Crown Court decided not to jail him, despite labelling him 'dishonest', or order his deportation. Instead, Judge John Phipps imposed a suspended jail sentence of nine months and ordered him to do 100 hours of unpaid work to be followed by a two-year supervision order. Montazery was also found to be working illegally as a salesman for a babywear company.

THE estranged son of a mum-of-11 who lied that nine of her children were disabled to illegally claim £52,000 benefits has blasted a decision not to jail her. Marrie Louise Freeman, 42, was told by a judge she had only missed being sent to immediate custody because of the additional burden it would impose on tax payers who would have to foot the bill for the care of her seven dependant children. Freeman, of Meadow Park, Cabus, Garstang, pleaded guilty to 10 counts of tax benefit fraud in June, after her ruse was uncovered by customs officials in 2007. Recorder Rachel Smith, who sentenced her to nine months suspended for two years said: "It is not in the public interest to cast this further financial burden on the tax payer for the period of a custodial sentence which would be short in any event." But the sentence was criticised by her eldest son Callum, father of her only grandchild, whom she has disowned. The 24-year-old postman, who lives in east Lancashire, said: "It's ridiculous - she has effectively got away scot free.

A Nigerian mother-of-five is living in a five bedroom, detached house with an annual rent of £25,000 paid for by taxpayers. The house, worth as much as £1 million at the height of the property boom, is situated in a smart cul-de-sac close to shops in Edgware village, north London. The tenant, Omowunmi Odia, said today she was pleased to be living there - the family's previous home was a cramped flat. Mother-of-five Omowunmi Odia is pleased with her new detached house which was worth as much as £1m at the height of the property boom. 'I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with my five children and only moved in here two weeks ago,' said Mrs Odia, who is in her thirties. 'They didn't have any council houses big enough for me so I found this one. I like it; the children like it,' she added. Mrs Odia, who drives a six-year-old family car, was forced out of her previous home after a court order was obtained against her. Threatened with homelessness, she was rehoused by Barnet council in her new house, bought by its owners in 2005 for £650,000. This five-bedroom London home has an annual rent of £25,000 paid for by taxpayers. Government rules entitle Mrs Odia, who has been in the UK for 10 years, to live in a five-bedroom house. She lives off benefits and has not been in contact with her husband, who remains in Nigeria, for at least three years. Mrs Odia's new home also has two large sitting rooms, a conservatory which backs on to a garden, and a double garage. It is, however, unfurnished and most of the rooms are empty bar a leather sofa and armchairs in one of the sitting rooms. Mrs Odia said the council had tried to rehouse her in Enfield, north London, but she had held out for Edgware, close to her children's schools. One of the bedrooms, she said, was "no bigger than a shoebox". More than £4 billion of taxpayers' money is being spent on housing benefit across London - an increase of more than 40 per cent in five years. The new figures will fuel growing concern that private landlords are profiting from a system threatening to spiral out of control. In the 12 months to April this year, £4.15 billion was spent by the Government on housing benefit in London, compared with £2.94 billion in 2003.

Thousands of failed asylum seekers are entitled to free NHS care despite their cases being bogus, the High Court ruled yesterday. A Palestinian who was denied treatment for a liver condition after his asylum claim was rejected used human rights laws to overturn standard NHS policy. The landmark ruling means 11,000 other failed asylum seekers who cannot be deported could now claim free health care - at a cost of millions of pounds to the taxpayer. After a two- day judicial review hearing, Mr Justice Mitting declared that all failed applicants who are unable to return to their homelands - either because it is too dangerous or because they lack the right documents - must have free treatment Denying free treatment is a breach of human rights, he said. The ruling comes amid growing concern over the impact of largescale immigration - and in particular so- called "health tourism" - on health care in Britain. The NHS spends around £250million a year treating foreign patients, according to a recent Government report, of which an estimated £60million goes on those who have no right to free care.

An alarming one in five young people are now out of work - costing the state £3.5 million a day in Jobseekers allowance alone.

Many of our young people are growing up in a house where there are three generations who have never worked. They have no working role models or boundaries. They have little aspiration and still less hope. The challenges of alcohol and drug dependency, domestic abuse and crime increase dramatically in areas of high, long-term unemployment. This often means there is no one to get kids to school, and no one to encourage them to work later in life. For young people with such role models the climb up and out to a brighter future is unimaginably tough.

Labour's flagship welfare-to-work programme has become an expensive revolving door, with hundreds of thousands going straight back on to benefits after leaving the scheme.  Official figures show more than half a million unemployed - a quarter of the total - have been through the controversial New Deal programme more than once.

They reveal 543,750 benefit claimants have taken part in the scheme twice, 171,290 three times, 11,900 five times and ten people an extraordinary ten times.  More than 1.2million youngsters aged 16 to 24 are not in work or full-time education - more than in 1997. The New Deal has also failed to eradicate long-term youth unemployment, with 178,000 18-24 year olds remaining unemployed for more than six months.

And with the taxpayer shelling out around £1,289 per participant, the scheme is estimated to have cost almost £3billion since its conception in 1997.  Experts claim the growth of the economy has created four-fifths of New Deal jobs, regardless of the subsidies.  Liberal Democrat welfare spokesman Danny Alexander said: "For too many people the New Deal is no deal at all.

A family of travellers is living in a £1million house at taxpayers' expense.

John and Serena Connors and their seven children have their rent paid by housing benefit. Their landlady is trying to evict them because she claims they have caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage. Luxury: The house lived in by the travellers has five bedrooms and three bedrooms. Her case is lent weight by a leaflet issued by the Metropolitan Police allegedly about the family, which claims they are suspects in a series of 'distraction' burglaries. But the parents, who have five girls and two boys aged four to 19, are determined to stay put and are threatening legal action over 'racism against travellers'. The Connors moved into the home in February with the help of Barnet Council in North London. They are benefiting from the Local Housing Allowance, which was introduced last year to encourage private landlords to take in the homeless because of a shortage of council housing. Parents: John and Serena Connors. The council is under obligation to find them a large enough house, hence the family being placed in one of the most expensive areas. The property in Totteridge, which has been valued at nearly £1million, has five bedrooms and three bathrooms and lies on a usually peaceful street. Businesswoman Sapna Bukhari and her IT project manager husband Zulfi, both 38, used to rent it to professionals for £4,000 a month. But with the market deteriorating they agreed to let it out to the Connors for £2,400 a month through housing benefit, after being assured that they were 'good tenants'.

DEPORTED ILLEGAL MIGRANTS KEEP ON RETURNING.

Albanian Bucpapa, 22, has twice been deported and escaped from two Home Office detention centres.  He scrounged a comfy life on the DSS handouts and housing benefits for three years before his asylum claim was found to be bogus.  He said " Every one of my friends takes the piss with bogus asylum claims".  He first conned his way into Britain in 1999 using a fake Italian passport and claimed asylum in Portsmouth. He got a free house and welfare benefits straight away.  He claimed to be a Kosovan escaping a war zone.  It was a good life he bragged " I got £150 a week for three years".  He was deported in 2002 for shoplifting - slipped back into Albania and returned with another false passport.  He escaped from a detention centre in Calais and was back in London only to be back behind bars six weeks later after a jilted girlfriend tipped off police.  Again he was deported but used a stolen Greek passport to return to London.

Thousands of families are raking in housing benefit worth more than £26,000 per year, according to an analysis of the welfare system. A total of 3,400 people are receiving the bumper handouts - the equivalent to having an interest-only mortgage worth around £650,000. The study, based on Treasury figures, shows that families are allowed to claim up to a maximum of £94,000 a year - or £1,800 a week - to live in a five-bedroom property in Central London. Bashir Aden, husband of Nasra Warsame, is shown sitting in his wife's rented home, where she lives with seven of their children.

Bashir Aden, husband of Nasra Warsame, is shown sitting in his wife's rented home, where she lives with seven of their children. It paints a depressing picture of Britain's dependency culture and will enrage millions of hardworking taxpayers who are struggling to make ends meet. Britain's bill for housing benefit is this year expected to hit nearly £20billion - up £3billion on last year - despite repeated pledges by ministers to crack down on excessive claims. It is the steepest rise for 15 years and comes as more families are forced on to benefits by the recession. In November, it was revealed that Somali-born Nasra Warsame and seven of her children were living in a £1.8million house in Westminster at a cost to taxpayers of £1,600 a week. Her husband, Bashir Aden, and her eighth child were living in an 'overspill' property, also on housing benefit. The study also shows that more than 750,000 families receive benefits and tax credits worth in excess of £20,000 a year. In total, the Government will this year spend £200billion on social security and tax credits - the largest area of public spending. This equates to more than 13 per cent of gross domestic product and is nearly double the amount spent a decade earlier. The analysis also found that nearly 13 per cent of Britain's working age population are on out-of-work benefits and nearly two million children live in workless households - the highest of all industrialised nations.

The UK also spends £11.5billion on disability allowance - more than the budget for the Home Office. Around two million - or 70 per cent of Disability Living Allowance claimants - will never have their benefits reviewed as they have been given an indefinite award. People can claim more than 30 benefits, which leads to in excess of 1,000 possible combinations of handouts. The new Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has warned that hundreds of thousands now have little hope of ever getting off benefits. Speaking last week, he said: 'We literally cannot afford to go on like this. A system that was originally designed to support the poorest in society is now trapping them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate.' Whitehall sources said they were shocked to discover the scale of welfare dependency that built up under Labour.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants are a drain on Britain and its economy, not a benefit, says a Left-leaning think tank. Migrants from many developing nations fail to pay their way, while those from wealthy countries, such as the United States and Australia, provide a boost for the economy.  The report, published today by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), sets out to reveal which nationalities are "a debit on Britain's balance sheet".  It found that fewer than half of Britain's 650,000 Somalis, Bangladeshis, Turks and Pakistanis, have jobs and the four communities have the highest levels of benefit dependency.  Britain's fastest-growing migrant group, the Poles, score above-average for employment, but have the lowest hourly pay and make a below-average tax contribution.  Channel 4 commissioned the report for a Dispatches documentary, Immigrants: the Inconvenient Truth, to be shown tomorrow night.  The IPPR, which has close links to Labour, insisted that its report "is not an attempt to cast immigrant communities in a bad or good light".  However, its findings will be seized on by those campaigning for tighter immigration controls.  New government statistics predict a two million rise in population over the next decade due to immigration, more than previous projections.  Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said last week that the forecast "underlines the need for swift and sweeping changes to the immigration system".  This newspaper revealed last week that one in five crimes in London is now committed by foreign nationals, with Poles, Jamaicans, Irish and Somalis at the top of the list.

BRITAIN is at the centre of a massive international trade in babies. Thousands of children are being bought and smuggled into this country to help benefits cheats claim council housing and other handouts illegally. The racket was uncovered when a woman arrived from Nigeria and went straight to council offices to demand a home, cradling a baby boy, whom she had bought for £150. An official became suspicious and the woman is now facing jail after being convicted of child trafficking. But police fear the case is just the tip of the iceberg and that thousands of children are being smuggled in to defraud councils. They also believe that many of the displaced children end up leading lives of despair, forced to work as servants or worse. Campaigners last night called for stiff new penalties to crack down on the scourge of the modern-day slave traders. Last week a court heard how Nigerian-born Peace Sandberg, 40, paid £150 for a three-month-old boy in her native country. She then obtained a forged birth certificate, which she used to have a visa issued for the child by the British High Commission in Nigeria, and demanded a flat from Ealing Council in West London hours after arriving at Heathrow. Sandberg, who had been living here in a hostel, claimed she had returned to Nigeria in December 2006 to give birth and needed her own flat

A family of 13 is demanding that town hall chiefs rehouse them, claiming life in their four-bedroom house has become impossible. Michelle and Robert Neasham have 11 children between them, aged from two to 17, and say they are struggling to cope with four bedrooms and one bathroom between them. The Neashams' two-year-old daughter Yasmine still sleeps in a cot in her parents' room, while 14-year-old Carol-Anne McFadgen - Mrs Neasham's daughter from a previous marriage - has to share a double bed with stepbrothers Conner, five, and Brandon, eight. Crowded house: Michelle and Robert Neasham with their 11 children, who are forced to share beds in a four-bedroom house . Despite receiving £2,269 a month in child benefit and child tax credits - £27,228 a year - Mrs Neasham says the money does not go far enough and life is becoming impossible in the house in Felling, Gateshead. She said: 'We have had enough. It's a total nightmare living here. None of us have any privacy. 'We are not coping, and when we ask for help we get fobbed off. We all get on and help each other out but it's not very easy. She and her husband married 13 years ago, bringing together her three children from her former marriage and his four children from his last relationship. The couple have since had four of their own children. The family is now made up of Santana, 17, Tina, 17, Natalie, 16, Carol-Anne, 14, Danielle, 15, Robert, 12, Hope, nine, Brandon, eight, Amiee, six, Conner, five and Yasmine, two.

Benefit claims by Eastern Europeans have almost trebled in the past year, official figures show. The cost of the payouts - to almost 112,000 migrants - is put at £125million a year. Home Office figures mean that one in six of an estimated 683,000 Eastern European incomers is living off the state to some extent. A year ago, only 42,620 were claiming benefits.Critics say that the welfare bill will rise further because 700 more migrants arrive every day from former Soviet Bloc states.

Almost 129,000 newcomers are receiving payments such as tax credits - up from 55,000 12 months ago. The payments by the taxpayer are worth an estimated £145 million a year. BRITISH WORKERS DO LOSE OUT TO MIGRANTS.

The number of Britons in work has dropped by nearly half a million since the onset of mass immigration from Eastern Europe. British workers are being pushed out of the labour market by the arrival of hundreds of Poles and other Eastern European workers.
The numbers show that those born here in jobs fell from 24.4 million in 2004 to 23.9 million in 2007.

INCAPACITY BENEFIT.

Record numbers of Britons are claiming they are too stressed to work.  Almost a million are claiming incapacity benefit for mental and behavioral disorders, official figures reveal.  The wave of new claimants almost 1,000 for every working day last year shows the increase in the work shy culture.  In some parts of the U.K one in four men of working age are claiming incapacity benefit.  The benefit has a clear advantage over income support - the money is a lot more plus they can avoid being forced to seek work.  The longer they remain on incapacity benefit the more money they get from the system.  2.4 million people now claim incapacity benefit with under 35's entitled to more money.  166 million sick days are taken each year or an average of  7 days per each employee.

An ex-miner who received £115,000 incapacity benefit after claiming he was a wheelchair house bound prisoner was pictured jet-skiiing on a holiday in Australia.  Cheat Michael Miszczak had already claimed £400,000 compensation from the National Coal Board.

Benefit fraud

Over 3 years more than 300 workers employed by an office cleaning company fiddled benefit payments of over 1 million pounds.

Several of the Floorbrite employees in Sale, Manchester had used up to 8 aliases to claim benefits. Some of the workers even claimed to be disabled and received money for specially adapted vehicles.  One family alone pocketed over 36,000 pounds in benefits payments.

As many as 45 hospitals could be built with the money Britain loses each year to Benefit fraud and mistakes.  Up to £2 billion a year is lost on Social Security fraud, according to the National Audit Office.  And the Government estimates that another £1 billion is wasted due to errors by claimants and officials.  The Health Service could be transformed within 1 year if this fraud was stopped and money re-directed to Hospitals.  Our country also gives away billions of pounds in Foreign Aid to countries like India and Pakistan - It is abut time all this foreign Aid was stopped - we no longer have an empire to support everybody else!

Jet Set lifestyle of benefit fraudsters.

A couple who financed a jet-set lifestyle by milking the benefits system for a decade were yesterday jailed for a total of eight years.  Keith Shelling and Sarah Bowden fraudulently claimed over £100,000 in benefits.  They pretended they had separated and thus claimed benefits for two households, including income support, housing benefit and reduced council tax.

This is just the tip of the iceberg - there are thousands of people in the U.K who have not worked officially in the last ten years but in reality they run businesses from home like window cleaning, hairdressing, dog-breeding etc.  So in effect they get the best of both worlds - no council tax , income support, plus their tax free earnings.

COUNCIL HOUSE CULTURE.

When her son was two weeks old Courtney Cassidy went clubbing again and met the third man in her life.  Again she had unprotected sex with this new man in her life.  She is now a mother of three at the age of 17  with three children to 3 different fathers.   The latest father has stuck around but has no job.  She has been rewarded with a free council house after only two months on the waiting list plus receives over £620 a month in benefits.

ANTI-BENEFITS ADVISER FINDS SHE IS £3,000 BETTER OFF ON THE DOLE.

As a Job-Centre adviser, Claire Collier spent her time persuading clients they were better off working.  But after taking a career break she discovered the truth.  In work, as a Civil Service administrative officer,  Mrs. Collier earned less than £12,000 a year, with benefits taking her total to £32,000.

Her benefits now as a single mother add up to £672 a week - or nearly £35,000 a year.  By giving up her job she qualified for income support, carer's allowance, council tax benefit and local housing benefit taking her total income to £35,000 a year.  She is £3,000 a year better off by not working plus her 5 children get free school meals and a grant towards their uniforms.  She also gets free dental treatment and doctors prescriptions etc.

Foreigners outnumber Britons at UK prison

Foreign inmates outnumber UK nationals in a British prison for the first time, it has been revealed.

The rise of prisoners without UK passports at Morton Hall women's prison in Lincolnshire, has been put down to an increase in the numbers of those jailed for smuggling drugs.

The prison in Swinderby has 350 inmates - 65% are foreign nationals.

The Prison Service is facing record levels of overcrowding, with one in seven of the record 74,000 jail population now a foreign citizen. Wandsworth jail in south London has 400 Jamaican inmates - the largest concentration in the country. The disclosure was made in a report last month in which prison inspectors commented that it was the first time that they had visited a prison with more foreign nationals than UK born prisoners. The prison is now planning a pilot project to give mothers the chance to see and communicate with their children in Jamaica over the Internet. Jails in England and Wales house people from more than 160 countries, following an increase in foreigners convicted since the late 1990s. The percentage of foreign nationals - anyone without a UK passport - has risen from 8% in 1999 to 13.1% in 2003 according to latest figures.

A prison service spokeswoman confirmed that Morton Hall was the only prison where foreign nationals outnumber UK-born prisoners.

PAYING WELFARE TO KNOWN TERRORISTS:-

Mohammed al-Gerbouzi
North London cleric - Wanted in Morocco for terrorist attacks
Benefit Status: > £1000/mo

"Accused of being a key leader of the Muslim terror group behind the
Madrid atrocity which killed at least 191 people and wounded 1,500, as
well as a dozen suicide bombings in Casablanca last May which left 33
dead."

Omar Bakri
Leader, UK al-Muhajiroun
Benefit Status: at least £1200/mo

"most of the leadership of the Islamic movement is on [state] benefit."

"Prime Minister Tony Blair has become a legitimate target. If any
Muslim wants to kill him or get rid of him, I would not shed a tear for
him. In the Islamic view, such a man would not be punished for his
deeds, but would be praised."

Abu Hamza
North London Imam
Benefit Status: >£4,000/mo in rent and payments

"You don't have to travel thousands and thousands of miles to become a
shaheed [martyr] - you can be a shaheed right on your own doorstep.
This is the best jihad"

Ramee Abdul Rahman Muhammad
Manchester Imam
Benefit Status: £1400/mo + rent

Lectured to shoe bomber Richard Reid, as well as British suicide
bombers Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif. According to the Daily Mail, "he is
still urging British Muslims to take up arms and wants Britain to
become an Islamic state." Now in the UK, he is seeking asylum from the
US - but may be deported soon.

Sayful Islam
Leader of Luton al-Muhajiroun
Benefit Status: £1,000/mo.

"When I watched those planes go into the Twin Towers I felt elated.
That magnificent action split the world into two camps - you were
either with Islam and al-Qaeda or with the enemy."

"I have no bad feelings about believing in what I do and living off the
British state."

Wali Khan Ahmadzai
Taliban fighter granted asylum in the UK
Benefit Status: Amount unknown - eligible for benefits as a successful
asylum seeker.

"I live here but I still think America and Britain are enemies of the
Afghanistan people and Muslim people."

It is unthinkable that such individuals would have been tolerated -
much less supported by the state - if they'd been making similar
pro-Nazi statements during World War II (see the case of Lord Haw Haw,
for example).

Surely we can at least stop paying them.

MOTHER FACES JUST A YEAR IN JAIL FOR 28,000 POUNDS BENEFIT SCAM.

A single mother-of-one was yesterday told she faces up to a year behind bars after admitting a 28,000 pound benefit fraud.  Judy Lutley falsely claimed the housing and council tax benefits over a five year period despite being a joint owner on the home.  She collected 110 pounds in rent each week and later made another 50,000 pounds profit when the house was sold.  She received over 28,460 in benefits whilst in the property and so far has paid back just 10 installments of 11 pounds.

OUT OF WORK REFUGEES COST TAXPAYERS 5 MILLION POUNDS PER WEEK.

The Government hopes to reduce the millions of pounds in benefits being paid out to an estimated 85,000 successful asylum seekers who don't have a job.  The unemployment rate for refugees is running at 36 percent.  Only half of these refugees are attending Jobcentre Plus offices designed to get people into work.  Many refugees are claiming Jobseekers allowance, worth £55 a week, plus housing and council tax benefits.  Jobseekers allowance alone costs the taxpayer 5 million pounds per week.  The annual bill for asylum is running at over 1 billion pounds per year - yet these costs don't take into account the cost once they have been allowed to stay. There is extra cost in extra housing, hospitals, schools and policing to take into account plus the legal aid costs and health costs etc.  Our quality of life is being destroyed by the overcrowding in the U.K. especially as most refugees live in the overcrowded London areas.  The only people benefiting from mass migration are the rich landlords and factory owners who get a cheap supply of workers the rest of us have more in taxes to pay for this social engineering. Refugees only contribute 0.1 percent to our Nation GDP when all factors are considered.  The rich who make the laws though are big winners so it is no wonder that illegal migrants are not being deported and those that employ them are not being prosecuted.

22 PERCENT OF ADULTS NOT WORKING IN UK.

 The Office of National Statistics  have recognised the importance of economic inactivity, and have investigated this thoroughly producing a series of articles. The first of the series appeared in the February 2002 issue of Labour Market Trends and looks at trends over time in the groups of people classified as economically inactive. Research revealed a number of interesting changes over the past decade in the economically inactive groups. Despite unemployment rates fluctuating at around 9% in the late 1980s and then dropping to a low 6% in 1990, the economic inactivity rate has remained fairly stable at around 22% since 1993. However, if this is broken down by groups the following key trends have been identified: Men in all age groups and women aged 16-24 have experienced increases in inactivity since the early 1990s. The rate for women aged 50-59 declined by 7.5% between 1984 and 2001. In 2001, 75% of inactive males aged 50-64 said they did not want a job an increase of 8% since 1993. 55% of older men in 2001 gave the reason for inactivity as being long term sick and 29% said they were retired. Changes have occurred over the past 15 years among men of working age. Students were the largest group within the inactive making up over a third of all those in the group in 1984. However, since 1987 those classified as long term sick or disabled have overtaken this group and made up 41% of those inactive in 2001. Changes have also taken place among women of working age. A sharp decline in the proportions looking after the family and home has been accompanied by increases in the long term sick group.

NEET's - Not in Education , Employment or Training.

According to official figures more than 1.1 million 16 to 24 years olds in England can be classified as NEET.  Each NEET dropping out of education at 16 will cost taxpayers over £97,000 during the NEET's lifetime.

The 157,000 NEET's between 16 to 18 years old will cost taxpayers over £15 billion by the time they die in 2060.

They are 22 percent more likely to be single mothers.

50 percent more likely to have poor health.

60 percent more likely to use drugs.

20 times more likely to become criminals.

85,000 new NEET's leave school each year.

22 percent of NEET's have no qualifications.

An average NEET costs the taxpayer £100,000 but the worse can cost over £300,000 each over a lifetime.

Thank you for your heartfelt email, and of course you’re absolutely right. Why should people who work hard be penalised, and those who do nothing get everything? Speaking personally, I used to have some bone-idle neighbours (father off work permanently with a supposed ‘bad back’) who had their rent and council-tax paid, plus they claimed disability benefit, and the mother worked part-time in a shop but didn’t declare her wages. They were well-off in comparison to those of us who worked. Eventually, they decided they wanted a bigger house so the mother deliberately got pregnant again to get one – and she told me this herself! Recently, I spoke to a gentleman who had been homeless for 12 years after his wife divorced him. He got in touch with us because he knew of a Romanian ‘Big Issue’ seller who came to England and got a council house within a week. The housing and benefits system in our country was originally set up to help the very poorest people in our country but has become utterly corrupt and misused for political ends. The British National Party intend to have a full shake-up of the welfare system. Once we have closed the door on immigration, we will look at every long-term unemployed case and put them to work. There are plenty of jobs available to people with a ‘bad back’. Many fraudulently claim disability benefit and we will look at all of these cases as well. Pregnant teenagers will no longer automatically get a council house, and will have to live with their parents. For youngsters who refuse to get a job, there will be places in the Army. The situation is so dire and is costing our country a fortune that only strong policies can sort it out, and that is our intention. We will also look at imposing a ‘fair rent’ system whereby landlords can only charge so much rent for a property, and this will help those who cannot get a mortgage, as well as stopping unscrupulous landlords from charging extortionate rents for grotty bedsits and flats. These measures will free up cash for those who genuinely deserve it – people who have been made redundant or become ill. We will not tolerate spongers within the welfare system and we believe that those who have paid taxes should, and will, be the first in the queue for assistance in times of need. In addition we plan to scrap the council tax (as it’s illegal anyway) and drastically reduce income-tax, so that workers feel the benefit of having a decent working-wage. And the money to support these policies will come through leaving the EU, which is currently costing our country some 17 million a day.

Mum of six:- I want my benefits delivered to my door.

A mother of six who lives in a large house rent free and owns a seven-seater people carrier is furious because her £1,500 a month benefits are no longer delivered to her door.  Libby Cummings said she is getting a raw deal because the postman no longer delivers her cheques.  She receives £242 a week income support, £250 a month incapacity allowance, £50 weekly family allowances plus £60 a month prescription chargers. Her daughter Shelly 17 lives at home with her baby and also gets £500 a month in state handouts. Mrs Cummings and her husband pay no council tax on the three bedroom house.

Dunscroungin'
WHAT kind of message does it send?
Jobless Dan and Suzanne Martin get a whopping £23,000 every year in state handouts. That's more than millions of hard-working folk earn. Yet the Martins demand a second council home to house their EIGHT children. They want to knock through to next door to create a seven-bed mansion worth £200,000. The couple bleat they need room for their kids' toys, DVD player, wide-screen TV, three computers and dishwasher. When people pump out children like a production line they should take responsibility for their actions. No one forced these scroungers to have such a large family.

REGIONS AS RELIANT ON STATE AS SOVIET COUNTRIES.

Handouts have made parts of Britain as dependent on the state as soviet bloc countries when communism collapsed. A study shows that in the North-East of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, Government spending now exceeds 50 percent of the economy. In North-East and Wales it is 60 percent and Ulster 67 percent.  Eastern European countries had spending at 60 percent when communism fell.

£16bn is how much we pay for the pen pushes of the NHS.

£16 billion a year is being spent on NHS bureaucracy almost a quarter of the health service budget. The cost to every family of funding pen pushes has doubled since Labour came to power in 1997, from £360 in 1997 to £647 in 2005.

A £1million benefit fraudster who claimed she acted under a voodoo curse - and produced her daughter's severed fingers in court as evidence - was jailed for five years yesterday. A judge told Remi Fakorede, 46, that her testimony had been 'utterly unbelievable'. Mother-of-six Fakorede had invented at least five phantom families, some with disabled children, to claim tax credits. During her three-week trial she claimed her bank accounts had been taken over by a 'voodoo man', whose curse had already killed her mother.Asked why she did not contact police, she told jurors that when her daughter was a baby, she suffered kidney failure and her fingers dropped off. She said the voodoo man told her she would suffer the same fate if she exposed the plot. It was at that point that she reached into her pocket and brought out a piece of tissue containing three little fingers. DNA tests confirmed that they belonged to her daughter, who is understood to have suffered from gangrene after her kidney failure. One juror was left in tears by the macabre stunt. Yesterday, Judge Jacqueline Beech told Fakorede: 'I find you to be a thoroughly dishonest woman. Your conduct in court was a barefaced attempt to manipulate the jury.' Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London had heard that £500,000 passed through Fakorede's bank accounts during the five-year scam, with a wider crime 'syndicate' linked to Nigeria pocketing £936,933. Fakorede, who holds British and Nigerian passports, was already receiving an annual income of up to £40,000 from property in Nigeria. She also ran a hairdressing salon and owned two East London properties worth hundreds of thousands. But she told housing benefit authorities she was penniless and out of work. She submitted 39 claims for tax credits, largely for children she had invented, and used a string of stolen National Insurance numbers.The court heard the handwriting on most of the false claim forms could be linked to Fakorede, of Hackney, East London, and the cash was paid into an account in her maiden name. In the only case where she used her own name, she lied about her work and claimed for a child she did not have. She said she was a single mother, but investigators discovered her husband was still with her, although he has since left.Judge Beech called the scam, which ran from August 2002 to June last year, 'a wholesale assault on the benefit system'. She condemned the ease with which Fakorede had been able to carry out the fraud and called for a review of the system which allows benefits to be paid into any bank account. Fakorede had denied committing fraud, but showed no reaction to the verdict until discussions began about confiscating her assets, when she sank her head into her hands. Her daughter, Denise Shofolawe- Coker, 21, was jailed for a year for laundering £70,000. HM Revenue and Customs said later: 'We have put in place vigorous strategies
to identify, combat and stop fraud".

BENEFIT cheats who were hauled before the courts last year still owe the taxpayer a staggering £70million. The 7,005 fraudsters in the dock in 2007 for fiddling their claims included a millionaire tycoon who claimed £109,000. A couple who dreamed up 190 false identities claimed £750,000 in benefits. Yet only a tiny percentage of those involved in the scams have stumped up what they owe. The figures, revealed yesterday by the Department for Work and Pensions following a Freedom of Information request, show that of the £92m claimed by tricksters in 2007 only £22million was repaid. Many conmen taken to court for illegally claiming 23 types of state handout will take up to 90 years to pay their debts because lenient judges ordered payments of as little at £5-a-week. The Government's statisticians said that even though 6,878 fiddlers were found guilty - 98 per cent of those taken to court - only £22million was recovered. Campaign group the Tax-payers' Alliance is outraged by the debt - and the revelation that the scroungers do not even have to pay interest on the money they owe. Chief executive Matthew Elliott said: "It's appalling that so many people are willing to steal from taxpayers. "But the blame does not lie just with the fraudsters. "It lies with the Government which allows the loopholes and the judicial system which does not hit criminals hard enough.

ASYLUM SEEKER GIVEN £750,000 HOUSE AND £21,000 IN WELFARE EACH YEAR.

A jobless immigrant, wife and four children have just moved into a house valued at £750,000 in Kew Riverside, London. Kosovo has been safe to return to since 1999.  The house is in a complex with a swimming pool, landscaped gardens and security guards.

Nexhmedin Ibishi and family claimed asylum after fleeing a war in the Balkans six years ago.  Mr. Ibishi gets over £21,000 a year in welfare payments and is delighted with his new state funded home. " I am a poor man with liver problems, therefore I can't work " , he said.  Under Government policy New Devlopments have to include affordable housing  for those on welfare.

Asylum Chaos has cost Northamptonshire County Council £50,725,362 since 1997 and our council tax has increased to pay for this by £516 for a band D property.

The passport factory.

Two Brazilian illegal immigrants who set up Britain's biggest fake passport factory were jailed for 5 years on the 26th September 2006.  Police believe Lucas Fernandez Jesus and Werleson Rodrigo Fernaira De-Oliveira could have cost  the British banking and credit card industry £360 million.  They produced hundreds of thousands of forged documents their passports alone were worth £12 million on the black market.

The passports could easily be used for benefit, credit card, loan and mortgage fraud.  The ID documents sold for £400 to £1000 a piece.  The potential loss to the UK was much greater.  The documents give illegal immigrants indefinite leave to stay in the UK.  This would have enabled them to get a foothold in the country which would have entitled them to state benefits.

THOUSANDS of workers from the EU are flocking to Britain as “National Insurance tourists” to get access to our generous benefits and pensions.

Polish-owned companies with UK offices are encouraging self-employed people who live and work in Poland to switch their NI payments to Britain.

All that is required is a one-day visit to London for an appointment at a JobCentre Plus to get a NI number and open a UK bank account. They are lured by the promise of a British basic pension of £412.75, compared with just £130 a month in Poland.

An investigation discovered how UK-based representatives of unscrupulous Polish firms regularly collect self-employed workers at British airports. These agents have already set up appointments at the JobCentre and bank. The Polish workers can legitimately claim to be employed by the UK-based company, performing five hours “consultancy” work per month, which can be done by telephone or computer from anywhere in the world. The UK-registered firm, which is paid up to £100 a month by each “tourist”, issues them with payslips and pays their British NI, often as little as £10 per month. The fee is considerably less than the £190 a month a taxi driver or hairdresser can expect to pay in contributions in Poland, and could allow them access to higher pensions and other benefits. Businessman Ireneusz Klader, whose firm in the Polish city of Rzeszow urges self-employed Poles to “live off the Queen”, insisted his business was completely legal.

A gang of African asylum seekers pocketed £400,000 in a benefits scam - then used the cash to start building a hotel back home. The four Angolans stole giro cheques and laundered them through fake bank accounts. Demosthenes Barroso, 34, Paulo Alexandre, 38, Manuel Baltazar, 37, and Mizel Kinangh, 25 all face jail and extradition after being exposed in an 18-month investigation codenamed Operation Wasm.

Fraud officers have so far linked £243,000 of stolen cash to the men, although the true figure is believed to be twice that amount. The gang, who were arrested in a series of raids, will appear at Oxford Crown Court for sentence on October 15 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the Department of Works and Pensions.

At the home of Barroso, police found detailed blueprints of a hotel he and the gang were planning to build in Angola with the proceeds of their swindle.

Construction work had begun on the site. Police even found photos of Barroso - who claimed income support, disability living allowance, housing benefits and child tax credits - working on the site of the hotel.

UNEMPLOYMENT costs the taxpayer a massive £61 billion a year, with more than five million who could work claiming benefits.  The analysis of official data by the House of Commons library takes into account not just the costs of benefits paid to the unemployed, but also the taxes they and their employees would pay if they were in a job.  The real level of unemployment is 5.2 million.  This is based on the numbers claiming benefits who could be employed if they were given support or training.  Taking into account the tax revenue lost the cost of unemployment is £61 billion. That works out to £2,810 for every household in Britain.  Those living on state aid account for 14 per cent of the working age population, or nearly one in seven.

How it all adds up:-  Incapacity £32.5 billion., Jobseekers £9.7 billion,  Lone parent £9.7 billion,  Income support, carers and disability benefits £9.1 billion.  This gives the £61 billion total if you add them up.

A leading campaigner for gypsies' rights today admitted her part in £3million benefits scam involving nearly 200 Romanians. Lavinia Olmazu, 30, and her 29-year-old boyfriend Alin Enachi masterminded the scam through which 172 Romanians claimed £2.9million. Olmazu, an academic, was working as an 'inclusivity outreach worker' with Roma gypsies for both Haringey and Waltham Forest councils in north London.
Lavinia Olmazu, 30, a campaigner for Roma rights who has admitted claiming illegal benefits for Roma gypsies Lavinia Olmazu, 30, a campaigner for Roma rights who has admitted claiming illegal benefits for Roma gypsies Enachi, a part-time interpreter and motorbike mechanic, helped immigrants - mainly from Romania - get National Insurance numbers with bogus documents such as bank statements and letters of recommendation purporting that they were working. Scores then used fraudulently obtained NI numbers to claim child benefit, working tax credit and child tax credit.

Olmazu, 30, an educational therapist with two degrees, has a 10-year-old son. She has dedicated her life to studying Roma gypsies and has addressed the United Nations on their rights. Today at Southwark Crown Court, Olmazu admitted a charge of conspiracy to defraud. A further charge of fraud by misrepresentation was left on file.

Enachi admitted the same charge at an earlier hearing and was sentenced to two years and eight months on July 16. The judge today lifted a contempt order banning details of his plea and sentence. The couple 'facilitated the obtaining' of National Insurance numbers under the umbrella of a charity called Roma Concern.Enachi acted as an interpreter for 356 National Insurance applicants between March 2008 and July 2009, with 172 of those people going on to make claims for tax credit, child tax credits and child benefits. Under rules introduced when Romania joined the EU in 2006, Romanian migrants cannot get a National Insurance number - which is the key to obtaining benefits - unless they can prove they have paid employment lined up.

A special constable was jailed for 16 months last week in Northampton Crown Court after she pleaded guilty to fraudulently claiming nearly £80,000 in benefits. Gina Conopo was legitimately entitled to income support, housing and council tax benefit in 1999 when she was separated from her husband, However she failed to notify authorities when they got back together and carried on claiming the money.

Conopo of Grasscroft, Long Buckby, continued claiming the benefits for a period of just over seven years. Over that time she was paid £46,321.27 in income support and £33,267.48 in council and housing tax benefit. Prosecutor Adam Western said: “The change of circumstances of which she should have informed the Department of Work and Pensions and Daventry Council is that her husband Simon Conopo was living with her again.

2010

The ONS also reported that the number of 16 to 24-year-olds out of work increased by 28,000 to 943,000, one of the highest figures since records began in 1992, giving a jobless rate of 19.8%. Male unemployment increased by 11,000 to 1.46 million, while the number of women out of work rose by 24,000 to 1.04 million, the highest total since 1988. The category showing the biggest increase was those who have taken early retirement, which rose by 27,000 to 1.53 million. More than 600,000 of the unemployed have faced sanctions for either refusing to take on work or quitting a job to go on benefits, it emerged last night. Around 177,000 of those on Jobseeker’s Allowance rejected reasonable job offers, while 444,000 quit their employment voluntarily and claimed benefit, figures show. A further 123,000 went on to the benefit after being fired for misconduct.

MINISTERS came under fire yesterday for failing to curb the soaring £17billion housing benefit bill. Despite the latest Labour crackdown, housing benefits could still cost the taxpayer £20billion by 2011.Yvette Cooper, the Work and Pensions Secretary, plans to cap rents paid to private landlords of up to £1,800 a week to prevent claimants living in palatial homes on benefits.People with mortgages who become unemployed have to wait 16 weeks until they get mortgage interest help this is unfair because those renting get their rents paid straight away. Many in social housing choose not to work as they get their rents and council taxes paid. The 16 weeks rule prevents those of us with mortgages taking short term work because you have to start the process again when you become unemployed again.

More than one million jobless Britons have been living off state handouts for more than 12 years, it has emerged. A hardcore army of unemployed have failed to find any sort of work since Labour came to power in 1997. The true scale of the crisis has been laid bare by figures which break down for the first time the length of time people have been out of work. A further 1.9million have been on benefits for seven years or more, according to the Department of Work and Pensions. The 1.1million unemployed since 1997 amounts to more than a fifth of the 5.2million currently claiming out-of-work benefits. The figures also reveal that youth unemployment has soared under Labour from 665,000 in 1997 to 888,000 today - a staggering 34 per cent. Opposition MPs said the cost to the public purse could be as much as £4billion. They added that an entire generation has permanently dropped out of society, leading to increased family breakdown and crime.

TEN MILLION PEOPLE IN UK ARE OUT OF WORK.

The headline unemployment figure for June 2007 was 1.65 million - a 45,000 fall from three months earlier.  But in the small print the ONS figures reveal that the real total is 9.6 million, because a further 7.95 million people (between the ages of 16 and 65) are 'economically inactive'.  The 'economically inactive' currently form 21.2 percent of the working age population - 124,000 more than a year ago and the second highest figure on record. Six million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job and "benefits are a way of life", a report by MPs revealed yesterday. And they cost the taxpayer nearly £13billion a year in state handouts. This army of families on benefit - nearly one in six of all households in the country - has been untouched by a decade of Labour's attempts to get them into work, said the Public Accounts Committee. Four out of five of these homes have no one who is even looking for a job.

Richard Bacon, a Tory MP on the committee, which acts as a watchdog over public spending, said: "The Department for Work and Pensions does not know how many people are out of work by choice, rather than by chance. "Properly targeted help must be put in place for those who want to work. Only then will the Government be able to flush out the shirkers who are sticking up two fingers at hard-working families and treating the benefit system like a cash machine." A total of 1.77million children - one in seven of under 16s-are now growing up in welfare dependant homes. In total there are 3million households in the UK with nobody working.

THOUSANDS of Eastern European migrants who lose their jobs plan to ride out the recession on British benefits – costing taxpayers around £200million a year.

Up to 200,000 migrant workers are set to lose their jobs this year as firms lay off staff in the construction, manufacturing and retail industries. But while some young single workers are expected to return home, many others are likely to stay in the UK and ask their relatives to join them. They are keen to take advantage of Government handouts which are four times higher than in other EU states. The average family with children can claim around £715 a week in benefits in Britain, compared with just £178 in countries such as Poland. Hungarian coffee shop owner Tamas Fekte, 29, who lives in Cambridge, said: “I would never move home. The benefits here are so much better.”

Last night there was anger at the research which shows that British taxpayers are facing a new benefits burden. Mark Wallace, of the Tax­Payers’ Alliance, said: “The British benefits system is meant to be a safety net for British nationals who have fallen on hard times. “Instead, due to Government laxity and EU rules, it has become a honeypot tempting people to take advantage of the taxpayers’ generosity.”

Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green mocked Immigration Minister Phil Woolas’s recent claims to be cracking down on foreign benefit claimants. He said: “Phil Woolas said entitlement to benefits should be for citizens of our country, not other people. We now see this was just more hot air from this dishonest Government.” Latest Home Office figures reveal 895,000 eastern Europeans have been allowed to work in the UK since the EU expanded to include former Eastern Bloc nations – Estonia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Of those officially registered, 199,677 are now in receipt of state hand-outs, including child benefit, job­seekers allowance and housing support.

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RE: Your query: What percentage of adults 16-65 in London living in council housing are not working thus living on benefits? The GLA's Data Management and Analysis Group have just published a report called: A profile of Londoners by housing tenure (DMAG Briefing 2007-17) which provides a range of data about the employment patterns of Londoners living in different types of housing. The report focuses on the working age population which is women aged 16-59 and men aged 16-64, not exactly the age group you were looking for but fairly close. The data show that 59 per cent of working age Londoners who lived in local authority housing were not in employment (2005). Data source: Annual Population Survey 2005 (Office for National Statistics). Please note: We do not have information about whether this group were in receipt of benefits or not as the analysis did not cover this.

Ms Flint said Labour wanted to break the link between social housing and long-term unemployment. She described "concentrations of deprivation and disadvantage - with long-term unemployment and some families without jobs for generations."

A report commissioned last year by her department suggested that half of all households paid for by benefits were without work, and many of these are under 25.

New statistics also reveal that the number of unemployed council tenants has risen by 20% to 55% since 1981.

ANOTHER DOLE SCROUNGER WANTS A BIGGER COUNCIL HOUSE.

As a mother of six by three fathers and living in a 3 bedroom council house, divorcee Vikki Ledger claims incapacity benefit for clinical depression brought on , she says, by the cramped conditions.  Yet with her new partner she is adding to the family because it seems the right thing to do.  Now after learning that she is expecting twins,  Mrs. Ledger is demanding a larger home to accommodate the ever expanding brood who exist entirely on state handouts.  She lives now with Gary Piggott who gave up his job because of his partners health.  The family receive £20,228 a year in benefits.  Their weekly income of £361 comprises of £71 child benefits , £255 income support and £35 incapacity benefit.  They also get £28 off their rent , free council tax , free prescriptions and a free house.  Their living room has a giant TV, hi-fi and DVD player etc.

The Welfare Trap.

There are 70,000 households in Britain claiming benefits in excess of £25,000 a year, figures obtained from a Parlimentary answer. Of these 20,000 take home more than £30,000 a year - the average wage in the UK. The statististics cover workers on benefits as well as the unemployed. The research into the UK jobs market since 2001, published by the think-tank Migrationwatch, shows that 1.08 million out of the 1.34million new jobs created since 2001 have gone to non-UK citizens. Many were taken by around 500,000 eastern Europeans who have arrived since 2004. Although 253,000 of the vacancies were taken up by UK nationals, the vast majority were naturalised citizens rather than native-born. The number of UK-born workers in employment fell by 62,000 during the period.More than one million unemployed east European migrants are being urged to claim generous UK benefits after returning home. Poles and others who have worked in Britain are entitled to claim dole payouts for up to three months. And it will be well worth their while - UK unemployment benefits are worth more than the average wage in Eastern Europe.The scam is perfectly legal under EU legislation. Polish job centres in Britain are even running master classes to help returning migrants to claim as much as possible from the welfare system. Polish Employment Office vice-director Renata Cygan said yesterday: “Why should we pay? We work on the assumption that if someone worked abroad they should claim benefits there.

Drug users and Alcholics get more benefits.

Some 100,000 drug users and alcoholics are claiming state handouts on the grounds that their habit is a disability and so get incapacity benefit. This means that nearly 1 in 25 of the 2.64million claiming Incapacity Benefit say they are too ill to work due to drink or drugs. Incapacity benefit is worth alot more than job seekers allowance. Taxpayers are forking out £8.5million a week in benefits to support jobless drink and drug addicts. The number of addicts claiming incapacity benefit or severe disablement allowance has doubled under Labour to more than 100,000. Tories said the toll underlines the Government's failure to deliver on welfare, adding that about £3.8billion has been handed out in long-term sickness payments to alcoholics and drug addicts in the past 10 years. LABOUR has spent almost £5billion on benefits for drug addicts and drunks, figures show. The annual cost of incapacity benefit for addicts has almost doubled from £243million in 1997-98 to £447million in 2008-9. Labour has also paid addicts £420million since 1997 in disability living allowance, according to the Conservatives. Their research previously revealed that claimants of incapacity benefit for drug or alcohol abuse had doubled under Labour, while the number claiming disability living allowance rose four-fold from 4,100 in 1997 to 16,500 in 2009.

THE WELFARE SYSTEM.

A HARD WORKING FAMILY ON 24,000 POUNDS A YEAR IS ONLY 4 POUNDS A WEEK BETTER OFF THAN AN UNMARRIED MUM ON WELFARE.

Britain's welfare system has encouraged family breakups and rewards lone parents.

A report by the Centre for Policy studies has shown that a hardworking family of four on the average wage is only 4 pounds a week better off than a single parent on full benefits.

If couples divorce they could see their weekly income boosted by 150 pounds.  Britain will soon be the lone parent capital of the Western world.  If a couple on the average wage of 24,000 pounds split up, their weekly income increases, after tax and housing costs, from 223 pounds to 301 pounds. If the husband evades child maintenance then the increase is 65 percent to 369 pounds a week each.

These figures omit the fact that Single parents also get a Free National Insurance credit which counts towards a state pension. Working people have to pay 27 pounds National Insurance per week and also transport costs of getting to work So in reality the single parent is better off than the family earning 24,000 pounds per annum.

12 percent of the UK's population are not working compared to only 8.5 percent in Germany.

Lone-parent families now make up more than a quarter of all families with children - 26 per cent. This compares with 14 per cent in 1971.

Immigrants were given the keys to 10,000 council houses last year.  The Government figures reveal the pressures which immigration is putting on housing and public services.  Foreign nationals are legally entitled to social housing - including housing association properties - after spending more than four years in the UK or successfully claiming asylum.  Some EU migrants are also entitled to be given taxpayer-subsidised houses, which are in short supply nationwide.  Last year only 25,596 new social housing homes were built.  The figures, released in a written reply to Tory MP James Clappison, represent around 5 per cent of all lettings to new social housing tenants last year.  The average cost of social housing is £133,941 a home.  The Government contributes an average of £62,000 of taxpayers' cash with the rest coming from developers or social landlords.  Based on those figures the value of the homes given to foreign nationals was £1.3billion - including a £ 620million subsidy from the public purse.

WHY WORK? Just be a freeloading parasite.

Many people I know have never worked officially since leaving school 20 years ago! Yet the system has given them free housing, paid their rents and Council tax, given them loads in income support and loads in child benefit for their ten children  and other payments like disability etc.
Yet a working man after an operation is only given 60 pounds per week to live on and receives no help towards service charges or utility bills.  I had to borrow 600 pounds of my parents after an illness whilst recuperating just to pay the mortgage.  Note I have friends in the same block of flats as myself who are also unable to work but because they are tenants the system pays all their rent money direct to the landlord (The rent hides service charges on the property etc) . Many of  the career unemployed scroungers actually have more assets than those who work some have Mercedes cars etc (through cash in the hand jobs, running home based businesses, selling cars / drugs , crime etc ) yet have to pay nothing in Taxes. Foreigners also can claim domicile status and avoid taxation. Our something for nothing society is what is attracting so many parasites to our shores. Why do we give Taliban's British passports and not Ghurka's? The brother of the local M.P borrowed a child from an ex-wife just to secure a Council flat and then shipped the child back to live with his ex wife. He has not worked since acquiring this property 8 years ago.  Economic migrants who have never paid a penny in taxes are now homed in top London hotels some costing in access of 100 pounds per day, they are exempt from council tax , get free luxury meals and some pocket money plus free golf lessons etc.  Many people get free Council homes by getting landlords etc to type bogus letters of eviction.

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The slogan says "it's money with your name on it" in the latest TV advertisement by our Government to publicize its social security handouts.
Beveridge raged against what he called a "Santa claus society" , arguing that the citizen should not regard the state as a dispenser of gifts as implied by the latest TV adverts. Norman Fowler in 1983 promised radical reforms to the social security monster but just ended up with a few name changes. The pattern has continued with new handouts such as income support, child benefit, housing benefit and also attendance allowance. The result is a state that spends 117 billion a year on social security a tenfold increase since 1948. The system is run by an army of 125,000 employees, administration costs are 5.1 billion pounds per  year. The burden of these handouts has led to a massive rise in taxation. In 1950, a married man on average earning with 2 children paid no income tax. Today the same man has to pay 3,600 pounds per year. Beveridge believed that benefits should be based on contributions the abandonment of this has led us to the mess we are now in.  Those who gain most from the welfare state have contributed the least. The growth of welfare has actually encouraged lone parenthood, work shyness as well as attracting economic migrants to these shores.  Labour has done nothing to change the system. So, the pernicious housing benefit to pay for housing costs remains encouraging fraud and exacerbating the poverty trap, by pushing up rents. Housing benefit costs the tax payer 12 billion per year. Tax credits also merely worsen dependency, as well as raising welfare spending by 4.5 billion.  The absurdities of our system mean that women in part time jobs are better off than those in full time work. While child care credit is so extravagant, subsidizing 70 per cent of costs up to 200 pounds per week, it is a recipe for disaster and more fraud.

LUXURY LIFE ON THE DOLE.

A jobless couple lived in luxury in a council house palace while claiming state benefits.  Mother of six Janis Gabriel had a private swimming pool, sauna and conservatory despite being out of work, jurors were told.  They had a four poster waterbed and corner spa bath.  The living room had a home cinema projector and also a plasma TV.  The garage had electric doors filled with two cars, a scooter and expensive bicycles.  Gabriel netted £384 a week in state benefits, paying no rent or council tax.  They banked income support, child benefit, carer's allowance and mobility care allowance because Mr Gabriel is registered disabled.  Each room had TV's and stereos.  Police found £18,450 in cash in the house and another £21,000 was in one of the three bank accounts.  The house was protected by a CCTV system.   Janis Gabriel , whose family claimed more than £26,000 a year in benefits said she could afford a life of luxury because of the handouts.  She has been charged with laundering money.

 EXPOSING THE GOVERNMENT LIES ON IMMIGRATION.

THEY SAID 13,000 WOULD COME FROM EAST EUROPE BUT TRUE FIGURE IS 91,000+

The Government pledged that only 13,000 people would migrate to this country from Eastern Europe after border of the EU were extended.  Britain's open door policy has attracted over 91,000 immigrants since EU was enlarged on May 1st 2004.  50,050 workers from Eastern Europe have landed jobs here since the expansion and another 40,950 have admitted that they were working here illegally thus robbing the treasury in Millions of pounds in tax.  The Government also claimed that these Eastern Europeans could only come if they landed a job and that they could not claim benefits yet there has been 1,018 child benefit claims, requests for income support and 14 immigrants have been given a free council house.

A small print allows those only working 16 hours per week to make a claim for benefits. Officials have allowed 51 tax credit claims to be made. Asylum seekers in Northamptonshire where I live have cost the taxpayers here over £50 million in the last six years.

ASBO'S A NEW WAY TO REWARD YOBS?

A family evicted from a council house because of their yobbish behaviour were last night enjoying life in a £700 per week hotel.  Jobless Sharon Griffiths who has five children to three different fathers has spent more than three months in two double rooms , running up a bill of almost £10,000.  Miss Griffiths gets £226 a week in benefits ( £177 a week income support , plus £49 a week child benefit) and £700 hotel bill paid each week.

Griffiths was evicted from her council house after her teenage son was made subject of an ASBO.  Now we know the truth ASBO's cost the taxpayers not the criminals and reward those who commit anti-social acts.   She was granted legal aid to fight her eviction from the council house and a judge has ruled she must stay in the hotel until another council house becomes available.  Guess this country does not have a clue on how to treat these yobbish people they will probably be rewarded with a free council house and welfare benefits when they turn 16.

ASBO CASE 2

A family evicted from their home for suspected drug-dealing are living at a Bed and Breakfast guesthouse at a cost to the taxpayers of £2,500 a month.  Dean Jeffrey and his partner and their three children were kicked out of their council flat under anti-social behaviour laws.  But Bristol City Council were forced to re-house them at a nearby B&B at a cost of £82.50 a day because they had not made themselves intentionally homeless.  The message being sent out is anti-social behaviour pays.

THE IMMIGRANT WHISTLE BLOWER.

Scams that enabled thousands of failed asylum seekers (economic migrants) have been revealed by a civil servant who is risking his job to bring the matter to the publics attention.  Anwar Rizvi,  a Pakistani immigrant, says he is compelled to speak out because the level of abuse is so bad.  

Asylum seekers manipulate the system by making up bogus claims that they are suffering illness or are gay etc.  Most of these ailments are only reported once asylum has been refused.  Court records show that more than 50 failed asylum seekers have falsely claimed to be gay, lesbian or suffering stress.  By dragging out their cases asylum seekers know that they have a much better chance of staying here.  The asylum appeals system is awash with over 22,000 cases of people whose original applications were rejected and many failed asylum seekers are just slipping through the net.  Those given permission to stay are not counted as asylum seekers - since 1997 this equates to about 67,000 people.  The failed asylum seeker can thus stay indefinitely which means forever.  Illegal immigrants are now sneaking into Britain in the back of cold storage lorries or horse boxes in an attempt to fool the high tech detection equipment.  

ASYLUM IS UP, NUMBER KICKED OUT IS DOWN, 29 PERCENT WANT BENEFITS.

The asylum crisis was threatening to overwhelm the Government last night as their promises were exposed as lies.   The number of would be refugees heading for the UK rocketed by 13 percent to 10,385 in the three months to September 2004.  But yet again the number of bogus claimants being kicked out fell for the fourth quarter in a row.  Mr Blair said we would deport 30,000 failed asylum seekers a year but then dropped this pledge to a watered-down target that should have seen more bogus refugees being evicted than arriving.  We have 28,000 refugees with false claims arriving each year while only 14,000 are being deported.  The number applying for handouts including housing soared by 29 percent last year to 9,920 in July, August and September.  The number of failed asylum seekers being deported has fallen by 30 percent since last year.  We have over 250,000 failed asylum spongers still living in Britain.  If you vote Labour then this will only get worse.

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This was a Court of Appeal case concerning a female Sudanese immigrant living in Britain married to another Sudanese immigrant. Both had lived in London since 1998 and then after the marriage had ended the father had returned to the Sudan with his child. The mother then applied to the Benefits office for the D.H.S.S to pay her flight costs to return to the Sudan, her accommodation costs whilst she was there and also her court costs to contest the father's right to keep the child in the Sudan. In the Court of Appeal Lord Justice Thorpe, Lord Justice Wall and Mrs. Justice Black decided that the British taxpayer and the Benefits Office should pay all the costs incurred by the Sudanese woman when she returned to the Sudan to fight for custody of her child. 

This ruling means that divorced asylum seekers, divorced immigrants and foreign individuals involved in custody cases abroad will all now be able to claim benefits to cover the costs of visiting their children and fighting court cases abroad. Basically the court has ruled that the British State should now not just accommodate asylum seekers but also that we should pay for their court cases and holidays back home. Those asylum seekers with children in their own countries will now also be able to claim that it ' is for the benefit of the child ' that the DHSS pay for their flights home and for them to see their progeny in their own countries. This ruling could cost the country billions of pounds a year as asylum seekers and immigrants on benefits apply for DHSS cheques to fly back home whenever they want to see their kids.

POLITICAL BENEFIT.

With apparently admirable candour,  Welfare Minister Jane Kennedy says most of the 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefit are perfectly capable of working.  A third could get a job immediately, with another third returning in the long term.  In a age of unprecedented prosperity ,  New Labour has allowed the welfare budget to swell to £42 billion.  Whilst incapacity claimants have risen by 45 percent.  The system positively invites those who lose their jobs to claim incapacity benefits - at £90 a week instead of £55 job seekers allowance.  Thus the system encourages long term dependency on the state.  Why - because there is one big advantage for the Government because those claiming incapacity benefit don't appear on the unemployment  figures - allowing the politicians to boast of creating full employment.  Ever wondered why they have turned a blind eye for so long? 

Her harrowing account of being brutally gang-raped by armed militiamen in Somalia won Amina Muse refuge in Britain. The mother-of-six, whose asylum application graphically described her brothers being shot dead in front of her, was later given UK citizenship because of the ‘appalling atrocities’. But the terrifying ordeal, like her identity, was completely bogus – it was merely a front for an elaborate benefit fraud that cost taxpayers more than £400,000. On the day that Muse claimed that armed men stormed her family home in East Africa she was giving birth in Sweden. The 38-year-old, who investigators suspect might actually be Kenyan, conned that country out of £50,000. She spent the money on luxury living, flying between Stockholm and London to perpetuate her scam. In Britain, she applied for every welfare benefit possible under her false name and claimed further UK handouts using the bogus identity she had adopted to secure a Swedish passport. Yesterday she was jailed for four and a half years after a jury convicted her of a string of fraud charges. A woman who lied about being gang raped in Somalia to claim more than £250,000 in benefits had moved to Britain after boasting it was the ‘land of easy money’. Ayan Abdulle was jailed this week after investigators discovered that the story she used to win asylum – and later UK citizenship – was a pack of lies. Now l can reveal the full scale of her fraud and how easily she was able to milk the benefits system for years.

Abdulle, who also used the fake name Amina Muse and is from Somalia, was living in Gothenburg when the authorities insisted immigrants learn Swedish if they wanted to continue to claim handouts. She told a friend she couldn’t be bothered and moved to England where she knew it would be far easier to collect benefits. She made up a story to gain asylum and gave herself and five of her six children false names and dates of birth, fraudulently claiming benefits on both the real and invented identities.

And she somehow managed to continue claiming benefits in Sweden for three years after leaving. Abdulle was born in Mogadishu in 1969 but moved to Sweden in 1994.

A MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS HAVE SET UP HOME IN THE UK.

One million illegal immigrants could be living in the UK it was revealed in January 2005.  The figures are based on a report commissioned by ministers into the number of foreigners working illegally in the UK.

The report failed to estimate the scale of illegal immigration, but spelt out how other countries have measured the problem.  One popular method revealed there could be 900,000 illegal immigrants in Britain.

The figures is calculated by comparing the number of illegal immigrants who come forward during amnesties with the official number of recorded foreign residents.  If the ratio is the same as Spain and Italy, it would mean more than 900,000 illegal immigrants are in Britain.

Blunkett admitted he had no clue on how many illegal immigrants are in Britain.

The one million illegal immigrant estimate is also backed up by other methods of measurement which are mentioned in a report by the University College of London.  It is also estimated that 2.5 million people are working in the black economy in the UK.  The number of surplus National Insurance numbers is estimated at 1.8 million , most used by illegal workers.

SICKNESS BENEFITS UP BY 41 PERCENT UNDER LABOUR

The burden on the taxpayer of so-called 'bad back benefits' have grown by 41 percent since Labour came to power according to the Treasury figures.  When Labour came to power in 1997 sickness payment totaled £17.7 billion.  The cost of sickness benefits this year [2003] will soar to £23 billion.

These grim figures show that Britain's work-shy culture is spiraling out of control.  The dramatic rise is surprising as Unemployment is at a record low and the economy is buoyant.  Critics says the rise is due to Gordon Brown's obsession with means tested benefits and the tax credits system that no longer targets those who need the most help.  Seventy percent of all households rely on some form of benefit, more than ever before.  2.6 billion people are currently claiming incapacity benefit.

Doctors are signing more people of work making it easier for the work-shy to put in a claim.

Nearly a quarter of London households claim housing benefit to cover their rent.

The benefit, which was introduced in 1992 to bring clarity to a bewildering system of payments, cost £14.7billion when Labour came to power in 1997. This rose to £21billion last year. There are now 4.8million homes which rely on it, more than 800,000 of them in London. The Tory cap to come into force next month – set at £400 a week for the largest homes and £290 a week for two-bedroom flats – means benefit-dependent families will no longer be able to live in large houses in central London.

TWO in every three new UK jobs went to foreign-born workers, shock figures showed yesterday. The statistic emerged on the day Britain’s jobless total hit 2.5 million, including a record 951,000 16 to 24-year-olds. The Office for National Statistics figures intensified fears that unemployment will soar this year amid public sector jobs cuts.

But now a breakdown of workers by place of birth and nationality suggests even where new jobs are created, only a third go to people born in Britain. For example, there were 300,000 more jobs from July to September last year. Two-thirds went to overseas workers – roughly half to migrants from across the world and the rest to those born in eastern European countries like Poland that joined the EU in 2004.Overall, while a million jobs have been created here over the past six years, there are a third of a million fewer UK-born people working, while nearly 1.3 million foreign-born workers have found jobs.

A staggering £20billion will be paid in housing benefit this year as the effects of the recession push up the welfare bill. Official figures show the handouts are expected to rise by 15 per cent - despite a pledge by ministers to crack down on excessive claims.

The predicted total of £19.6billion is nearly £3billion up on last year. It is the steepest rise for 15 years as families are forced onto benefits as the recession bites and more people become unemployed. The Department for Work and Pensions revealed the year-on-year rise as it emerged that one family has been given a record £279,000 of taxpayers' cash to pay their rent.Information released under the Freedom of Information Act shows the claimants are being paid £2,875 a week for a seven-bedroom house in Brent, North-west London. The family - which has received £208,000 since July 2008 - is one of three in the capital who have claimed more than £200,000 in housing benefit. In November it was revealed that Somali-born Nasra Warsame and seven of her children were living in a £1.8million house in Westminster at a cost to taxpayers of £1,600 a week. Her husband Bashir Aden and her eighth child were living in an 'overspill' property, also on housing benefit. Another claimant, in Hackney, East London, has received £207,000 and some 550 families receive more than £30,000 annually.

Almost 500,000 women on Jobseeker's Allowance. Total of 963,000 18-24-year-olds now out of work Overall rate falls for first time since last autumn. Economically inactive level falls 71,000. The number of woman claiming Jobseeker's Allowance has soared to a 15-year-high, according to new figures. Unemployment actually fell for the first time since last autumn in the quarter to February, down 17,000 to 2.48million. But the numbers claiming job-related benefits rose, with the so-called claimant count up by 700 to 1.45million. This includes 462,300 women - the highest figure since October 1996, according to the Office for National Statistics. Almost one million - 963,000 - 18-24-year-olds are also now unemployed, a rise of 12,000 over the quarter.

Migrant workers have continued to flow into the country during the recession while Britons lose their jobs, a report shows. Over the past two years, 139,000 migrants have found jobs in Britain, it adds. But the number of British workers in employment dropped by 654,000. ‘The reason the migrants keep coming to France and slipping over the Channel is because the UK is too generous with them. 'Stop giving them money and a place to live and they will soon go somewhere else. End of problem.’ He revealed that his village was currently home to 200 Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, Sudanese, Vietnamese, Eritreans and Palestinians.‘For the past four weeks, numbers of migrants camping out have been increasing by 50 per week. Bogus students from overseas are costing taxpayers up to £493million a year, a report claims. The study by think-tank migrationwatch says tens of thousands of foreign students are ‘disappearing underground’ to take jobs on the black market. They are filling up to 32,000 posts which could be legally held by the 2.5million unemployed British workers, the report says.

NEARLY one in five households in Britain has no one who works and is entirely dependent on taxpayer-funded handouts, shocking figures revealed last night.

In an indictment of the “shameful” benefits legacy left by Labour, the number of workless households rocketed by 148,000 last year to just under four million.

It means more than seven million people – including almost two million children – are now living in homes where no one is in paid employment. A total of 2.45 million are classed as jobseekers, while a record-breaking 8.16 million are out of work and not looking for paid employment. It means more than one in four adults in the UK below the state ­retirement age are not working. THE SCALE of the economic challenges the new Government faces was starkly underlined yesterday when unemployment rose to a 15 year high. An astonishing 10.7million people in the UK do not work, figures showed. Youth unemployment has reached a 20 year high at 941,000 – or one in five 16 to 24-year-olds. Long-term unemployment now stands at 757,000, while more than a million people are “under-employed” – forced to take part-time jobs because they cannot find a full time one. Yesterday the monthly bulletin from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of people looking for work rose by 53,000 in the three months to March, to 2.51 million, its highest since December 1994. The ranks of the “economically inactive”, who include those who have given up looking for work as well as the early retired, carers and Britain’s students, reached 8.17million.

Taken with the officially unemployed, it means 10.68 million working-age adults are now not in jobs.

Britain's benefits bonanza has been laid bare as it emerged 100,000 households rake in more than the average wage in welfare every year.
They collect £30,899 before tax, while many workers can only aspire to an average wage of £23,422. Meanwhile 50,000 of those households are entitled to more than £500 a week - which adds up to more than £26,000 a year. THE housing benefits bill is set to rocket by more than 40 per cent to a massive £30billion a year. Only radical cuts can avoid the huge burden by 2020, it was revealed last night. And there was outrage after the chilling forecast that the price of one of the costliest welfare handouts will equal more than £1,200 for every UK household within 10 years.

Nearly 900,000 individuals have been out of work on sick benefits for at least a decade - costing the taxpayer more than £4billion a year. The astonishing figures were revealed in an analysis of incapacity benefit claims released by the Coalition. It shows that 889,000 people have spent the past ten years living off the state handout of up to £91.40 a week for long-term claimants. The taxpayer is now forking out £81million a week for those who have been out of work for a decade, which adds up to more than £4.2billion a year. MORE than half a million people have falsely claimed sickness benefits for the last 10 years – at a cost to taxpayers of a massive £28billion.

Two-thirds of Incapacity Benefits claimants unemployed for the whole decade were in fact fit to work, new official figures reveal.

There are more than a quarter of a million homes in Britain where no one has ever had a job, according to shocking new Government figures.

They were unearthed as part of David Cameron’s campaign to find new ways of preventing the workshy living off benefits indefinitely, in some cases with a higher income than people with jobs.

The Prime Minister has ordered an investigation into the numbers of long-term out-of-work and claims that the benefits system makes it more profitable for some people to stay unemployed. Experts say that children brought up in homes where neither the father nor the mother has had a job are far more likely to go straight from school to the dole queue and stay there. Of the 264,000 homes where no one has ever had a job, most are made up of lone parents and single people, though a substantial number include two adults. Employment Minister Chris Grayling said: ‘We have to tackle this problem now and make sure no one is ever left behind again. These households make up some of the five million people who have just been cast aside on benefits with no meaningful attempt made to help them.

Almost 700,000 families are now pocketing more than £15,000 a year in benefits - meaning it does not pay for them to go to work, official figures showed today.
A ‘state of the nation’ report published by Iain Duncan Smith has laid bare the shocking scale of welfare dependency that has built up under Labour.
The study - based on internal figures from the Department for Work and Pensions - found an astonishing 670,000 households now receive benefits worth more than £15,600 a year. Between them they pocket at least £13billion a year in benefits - more than the entire annual budget of the Home Office.

ALISTAIR Darling’s boast that he would crack down on the scandal of massive housing benefit giveaways was exposed as a sham yesterday.

Critics said the plan he hailed in the Budget would save only a modest amount, will still pay out rent of more than £1,000 a week and will not take effect for 18 months.

Labour’s failure to get to grips with housing benefit reform has seen the total bill grow from £11billion in 1998 to £17.4billion in 2008-09. Around 4.5 million low-earning or unemployed claimants get an average of £81 a week to pay some or all their rent. But some large families get thousands of pounds a month to occupy huge houses in wealthy parts of London. The Treasury has warned the total could rise to £20billion by next year because of the recession, soaring rents and a shortage of social ­housing.

The principle should be that no able-bodied person should ever receive more in welfare than a typical family takes home in wages yet large dole scrounging family's will still be able to get £1,100 a week in rent paid by our stupid welfare system to live in luxury homes. Many of these family's are immigrants and come from countries where men, women and children share just one room in a home - our country is too soft and stupid. We are watching a nation build its own funeral pyre.

Benefit scams and blundering officials cost the taxpayer £2.7 billion in 2007.

30 percent of households receive half or more of their income from state benefits.  The Government spends £151 billion on welfare each year.  £57 million was paid to the dead last year; prompting fresh accusations of fraud and incompetence in the benefits system.  The Government asks very little of single parents with only a requirement to seek work when their youngest child reaches 16.  Even then, a third move on to incapacity benefit or make a further claim for income support within 12 months. Some 777,000 lone parents claim benefits, with the average payment for those with one child being £75.07 per week.  Most lone parents receive 100 percent housing benefit, 100 percent council tax benefit and tax credits. Many are given a free council house and get free dentist, free prescriptions and free school meals.

An astonishing 140,000 households are pocketing more in benefits than the average take-home wage. The families are living on handouts worth in excess of £20,000 a year, official figures show. The enormous payouts dwarf the incomes of millions of hard-working families who are struggling to cope with the recession and the rising cost of living. The average salary is £25,100 before tax, but after deductions it shrinks to £19,126. In contrast, state benefits are tax-free.

A worker would have to earn £27,000 a year to take home more than £20,000. There are 200,000 more people claiming single parent benefits than there are single parents in Britain. British taxpayers are paying £2million a month in child benefits for children living in Eastern Europe. At least £1.67 billion has been sucked out of Britain’s benefits system by foreign fraudsters who can easily abuse the system, official figures have revealed. The benefits system is open to widespread abuse because the foreigners know there is no properly trained staff or procedures in place to check claims. The sort of claims which are now being paid include payments for bogus rent, handwritten payslips and child support for children of whom no proof is shown that they actually exist. According to a News of the World report on the topic, a whistleblower has revealed how just one single mum with six kids could get £114,000 a year from the council. The number of people classed as economically inactive, including those who have given up looking for work, has reached a record high, figures show. Ministers welcomed a 15,000 fall in unemployment in the three months to April to 1.68 million, and a 9,300 reduction in the claimant count in May to 880,400, the 10th time the figure has fallen in the past 11 months. But the figures were overshadowed by a big increase in the number of people classed as economically inactive, which includes students, those looking after a relative, workers who have taken early retirement or given up looking for a job. The figure increased by 77,000 in the latest quarter to 7.95 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1971. The number of jobs in manufacturing firms also fell to a record low of 2.96 million after a fall of 49,000 in the latest three months compared with a year ago.

In 2009/10, the Treasury is expecting to take in £140.5 billion in gross income tax receipts. Social security benefits are projected to be £164.7 billion. The disparity between tax revenue and welfare costs was identified by Andrew Brough, a fund manager at Schroder Investment Management, who suggested that the amount of money spent on social protection could soon exceed that raised from both income tax and national insurance.

MEDDLING EU judges sparked outrage last night after giving scrounging foreigners the green light to sponge thousands of pounds from British taxpayers.

In a blow to millions of hard-working Britons, immigrants will now be entitled to claim rent, income support, council tax and a host of other benefits simply if their children go to school in the UK. They will be able to claim the cash even if they don’t have a job, UK citizenship or any genuine claim to live in this country. Critics fear the landmark ruling will open the “floodgates” to a wave of foreigners seeking state support from Britain with no intention of putting anything back into the country. Fury erupted after the judges yesterday ruled that a Somali mother-of-four was entitled to receive £2,500 a month in benefits because two of her children are attending UK schools. Nimco Hassan Ibrahim, 34, was denied housing assistance because she and her estranged husband – a Danish national – failed to qualify for residency rights. Her husband has now returned to Denmark while she remains in Britain. She appealed against the decision by Harrow Council in north-west London, claiming that as her children’s “primary carer” she should be allowed to stay in Britain and qualify for state handouts. Incredibly, the European Court of Justice yesterday directed Britain’s Appeal Court to find in her favour. It said that parents of children in school have the right of residence even when they cannot support themselves. FAMILIES of suspected terrorists can claim thousands of pounds in benefits from British taxpayers, a European court ruled yesterday. In a judgment that sparked a ­furious response, the European Court of Justice said handouts to suspects’ wives were unlikely to fund terror activities. As a result, they can continue to claim income support, disability allowance, and child, housing and council tax benefits. And those payments should not be monitored by the Treasury.

They lived in a smart house, drove top-of-the-range cars and enjoyed luxury holidays in Florida, Barbados and Marbella. To friends and neighbours Peter Campbell and Suzie Dwyer appeared to be well on their way to their first million. But the façade came crashing down after it was revealed they were actually a couple of benefit fraudsters who funded their lavish lifestyle with almost £140,000 of taxpayers’ money. For more than a decade, the couple lied to the authorities to claim a string of benefits they were not entitled to – despite the fact that BMW-driving Campbell was earning up to £70,000 a year managing his own electronics business.

MILLIONS of jobless scroungers will be stopped from ripping off the welfare system under a £5billion crackdown being launched today.

The shake-up will see charities, voluntary organisations and private-sector firms paid up to £14,000 for every unemployed person they get into a job for at least two years.

And jobless claimants face being stripped of benefits if they refuse to cooperate with the scheme. Details of the Government’s “Work Programme” for tackling long-term unemployment are to be unveiled by Employment Minister Chris Grayling.And in a further step designed to curb the country’s spiralling £168.5billion welfare bill, a new strict cap on housing benefit claims also comes into force today. Housing payments will be limited to a maximum of £20,800 a year rather than claims of up to £104,000 that have been racked up under the current system.

A SINGLE mother with four children who claims £37,000 a year in benefits has called for changes to the welfare system to encourage more claimants back into work.

Kellie-Ann Cottam described state handouts as a “trap”, saying how she would need to earn £60,000 a year in employment not to be worse off. As details of the Government’s Spending Review were released yesterday, Kellie-Ann insisted on “putting her head above the parapet” to call for radical change. And in a refreshing approach, she is preparing to launch a scheme called “Challenge Britain” to try to end people’s reliance on handouts.

More than one in three children in some cities is living in a household where no one has a job.

And the number of youngsters in homes that rely solely on benefits is on the rise in the worst-affected parts of the country, figures show. Almost four in ten children in Manchester are being brought up by unemployed families, according to the analysis from the Office for National Statistics. In parts of London the proportion of youngsters in ‘Shameless’ homes is close to 36 per cent, while in Liverpool 31 per cent of children do not know what it is to have a parent who has a job.

MORE than 150,000 illegal immigrants are said to be claiming benefits despite not having any rights to live in Britain, it was claimed last night. Government ministers have found that Labour allowed tens of thousands of people to wrongly qualify for sickness benefits and maternity pay – costing the tax-payer “tens of millions of pounds”. It is thought most of the 155,000 abusers of the system did so by outstaying their working visas or managing to find employment without having any work permit. At present someone could be working illegally in the UK and be able to claim Employment and Support Allowance and statutory payments such as maternity or paternity pay and sick pay, a source claimed. This is because the Department for Work and Pensions has not asked to see work permits when assessing claims and employers have not been asked to prove those claiming benefits are working in Britain legally. Mass immigration has been fuelled by the ‘broken’ welfare system, the Work and Pensions Secretary said. ‘We had 16 quarters of growth, and two million jobs were created. ‘Between 50 and 60 per cent of those jobs, mostly ordinary jobs in ordinary communities, went to foreign nationals, people from overseas coming in,’ Mr Duncan Smith explained. ‘So over half of those jobs we created went to people who for the most part took their money home. ‘In the meantime, we have had five to five-and-a-half million people who have been sat on benefits not doing any work.

MOTHERS who choose to give birth to more than 10 children are costing the British taxpayer around £1million a year in child benefits, it was revealed yesterday.
New figures show an increasing number of “baby-machine mums” are breeding huge families to get bigger and bigger state handouts.
The newly published statistics for 2009, the latest year available, recorded some 137 births to women who already had 10 children. These multiple birth mothers cost the taxpayer a total of more than £1million a year through a whole array of benefit claims.
Two of the mothers recorded in the figures gave birth to their 16th child. Another had her 17th. The extraordinary data also revealed that four of the mothers detailed were still in their 20s when they gave birth to their 11th child. The group was eligible jointly to be raking in £22,000 a week – around £1.2million a year – in benefits. Since the figures were compiled by the Office for National Statistics, even more mothers are believed to have joined the multiple-births club.

A JOBLESS mother of 16 children who is raking in £600 a week in benefits has said she is paid too much money by the welfare system.Kathy Black, 45, had her children with five fathers. And her family say she is pregnant with her 17th child – by yet another man. She has claimed tens of thousands in handouts over the years, despite leaving her children from her first two marriages with their fathers. Ms Black, who does not use contraception, now lives rent-free in a £135,000 three-bedroom house in a picturesque Essex village, and gets £1,000 a month maintenance from a former partner, Tony Blackburn, on top of her benefits. Her children, seven of whom she no longer sees, have claimed she spends the money on herself, dressing them in hand-me-downs and leaving them to cook for themselves. But Ms Black blames “the system” for giving her too much money. She said: “My ex pays me maintenance but I still get child benefit, regardless of how much he pays me. So in a way they pay me too much sometimes. The benefits system is just wrong. It’s a joke.” Three-times-divorced Ms Black, who lives with her seven youngest children in East Hanningfield, Essex, defended her decision to have 16 children. “I didn’t want to have abortions,” she said. “I will go to work when my children are old enough but at the moment it will cost the state more to put them in child care while I go to work.” Ms Black, who has been pregnant for a total of 12 years, said: “I think it is a blessing that I’ve had so many children.”

Roma rights campaigner jailed for £2.9m benefits scam. A woman who helped more than 170 Romanians illegally claim £2.9m in benefits has been jailed for two years and three months. Lavinia Olmazu, a leading campaigner for the rights of Roma (Gypsies), helped mastermind the scam involving 172 members of the Romanian community. Olmazu, of north-east London, gained access to them through her work with Haringey and Waltham Forest councils. The 31-year-old admitted a fraud charge at Southwark Crown Court in July. As well as working as an outreach worker with the councils, the university graduate was involved with the Big Issue. She set up companies with her boyfriend to help facilitate the frauds they carried out as part of a gang.

MORE than £435million of "mobility" benefits for the disabled are going to junkies, alcoholics, asthmatics and people with bad backs. The handouts of up to £49.85 a week are meant for people with "severe" walking difficulties. Many get it simply by filling out a form, without any checks by a doctor. Ministers fear the rules are so lax that cash is being handed to the wrong people. Official figures show 19,400 people with drug or booze problems get the help, along with 30,900 asthmatics and 128,300 with "unspecified" back problems. The cash is part of the Disability Living Allowance designed to help those with a serious disability.

MINISTERS faced fury last night after it was revealed Labour’s welfare benefits bonanza costs the average working household almost £1,000 a year or £20 a week.

The soaring bill to fund Britain’s army of jobless has cost the country more than £28billion for every year under Labour.

MORE than 10 million people of working age in Britain do not have a job, shocking official figures revealed last night.1.4 million people have been on benefits for the last ten years. There are over 90,000 unemployed single parents in Britain with four or more children. Among those in receipt of JSA, Incapacity or lone parent allowance are 6,870 with six children.

The shocking report by the right-wing think-tank Centre for Policy Studies revealed that 11.5 per cent of UK adults - almost one in eight - live in workless households.

This is the highest rate in the six largest economies in the European Union, and almost twice the level in the Netherlands. ONE in 30 Brits has NEVER done a day's work in their life, shock figures reveal. It means a staggering 1.4 million have not held down a single job.

Just under half - 600,000 - are under 25, fuelling fears of Britain's "lost generation" who could spend a lifetime on state handouts. The Government called the Department for Work and Pensions statistics Labour's "dreadful legacy" and a "shocking waste of human talent". The DWP figures fuelled fears of a growing “underclass” of children brought up on welfare as they revealed nearly 100,000 people living on one of the three main benefits have four children or more. Of these, 7,000 have six children and 2,260 have seven. A total of 910 have at least eight. More than half of those with four or more children – 56,490 – are on single-parent benefits. Another 23,410 claim incapacity benefit, the rest are on Jobseeker’s Allowance. Mr Grayling said: “There’s a generation in danger of growing up in a welfare trap.” One in six UK children will grow up in homes where no one works, prompting fears they will produce another benefit-dependent generation. IT WAS originally created as a safety net for the poor. But today the benefits system is a vast engine of family breakdown and irresponsibility. In an amoral world of endless handouts, feckless parents can go on producing children without any thought to the financial consequences. This is a recipe for social chaos and a gross injustice against hard-working taxpayers who try to live within their means but are forced to subsidise the lifestyles of spongers. Almost 500,000 people claiming long-term sick pay will be forced to work or risk losing their benefit, it was revealed today. The move comes as Iain Duncan Smith introduces medical assessment tests on people receiving incapacity benefit. The Work And Pensions Secretary is seeking to slash £4billion from his department's costs. Three-quarters of people who applied for new benefits for the long-term sick failed tests to prove they were too ill to work. Out of about 840,000 who tried to obtain the £95-a-week Employment and Support Allowance, 640,000 were told they were fit for work, or withdrew their applications before they took the tests – suggesting they were ‘trying it on’. Incredibly, 7,100 tried to claim because they had sexually transmitted diseases and nearly 10,000 because they were too fat. Only 178,000 – one in four – were given the payment after convincing doctors they were actually unable to work. Councils detected 119,000 cases of fraud in 2009/2010 totalling £135million, which the Commission said was ­“significant’’, although low compared with total council spending of £160billion.

These cases included 63,000 housing and council tax benefit frauds, worth £99million, and more than £15milion from 48,000 false council tax discount claims, including ­people wrongly applying for the single-person allowance.

Benefits support for single mothers: It is important for ordinary working men to realize just how much support is provided to women through the benefits system. This support allows women options in life which men just don't have, and allows them to readily do without, or to get rid of, a husband. Yet these women still achieve many of their life's ambitions of having a family with very little effort. After the children are grown up, they also benefit from women-returnee's courses at our universities, so they can then get jobs. In other words they have it all ways.
We note that in 2000 about 26% (i.e. 1 in 4) of all children were being raised in a lone-mother 'family'. Ordinary families have about 1.64 children on average, but to make the sums more straightforward let's say 1.5, i.e. 2 parents have 1.5 children to support, or 4 parents have 3 children to support. We will assume that lone-mother 'families' consist of 1 mother and 1 child. A simple analysis of figures shows, adhering to the 1 in 4 ratio of lone-mother children, that each lone-mother 'family' of 1 mother + 1 child, is being supported by ordinary families of 4 parents + 3 children. Hence 4 ordinary parents are supporting the 3 children of their own, plus 1 mother and 1 child. I.e. they are supporting 2 more people beyond their own 3 children, which is a burden of 66% extra costs. If we assume each lone-mother 'family' consists of 1 mother + 2 children, the figures change slightly, and the extra burden is 50%. In simple terms, each normal family must support about 50-66% more people as a result of the prevalence of lone-mother 'families'.  48 percent of the adult population are not working.

The exploitation of sickness benefits was laid bare today as new figures showed just six per cent of claimants should receive the handouts.

Most people who apply for the Employment and Support Allowance are found fit to work or give up their claim before the medical test.

The coalition published the data to justify its insistence that huge savings can be made in the welfare system without unfair penalties.

Up to two million people who have been living on sickness benefits for years may be perfectly fit to work, official test results show.

The first reassessments of those on long-term incapacity benefit found that more than two-thirds of those checked could return to work if they received help.

Trial re-tests of claimants in Burnley and Aberdeen found 68.6 per cent did not have a valid claim and were unable to prove they were too ill to take a job.

The government wants to re-assess all current incapacity benefit claimants by 2014, including the 81,670 people claiming the allowance as a result of health problems stemming from alcohol, drug and obesity conditions.

According to figures released by the DWP on Thursday, in August 2010 there were 42,360 claimants with alcohol addiction, 37,480 with drug dependency and 1,800 who were obese.

FRESH outrage over Britain’s sicknote culture erupted last night after new Whitehall figures showed three-quarters of Incapacity Benefit claimants are not entitled to the money.

Nearly half a million people receiving the cash were exposed as being fit for work after undergoing medical tests in a Government crackdown on welfare scroungers.

And a further 428,000 voluntarily dropped their claims before completing the assessments – making a total of around 887,000.

The astonishing figures, released by the Department for Work and Pensions yesterday, suggest that more than £4billion of taxpayers’ money is wrongly paid out every year to workshy spongers feigning serious disability.

Ministers last night seized on the statistics as evidence of the way that welfare dependency and fraud has become endemic in many parts of Britain.

But all is not as it seems. For 32-year-old Contessa Calinescu is a Romanian gypsy and is not homeless. In fact, she was driven to Bradford from Manchester, where the rent on her home is paid by taxpayers via welfare payments. She also claims nearly £500 a month in benefits for her large brood of children.

Like hundreds of other Roma women, she is exploiting a loophole in the law, in order to claim huge amounts of benefits.

Romanians who have migrated to Britain are restricted from claiming benefits — unlike other East European nations which joined the EU three years earlier.

But in a sophisticated scam, many Romanians have circumvented the system by claiming to be ‘self-employed’ Big Issue sellers — a status which entitles them to a National Insurance number and to claim the full panoply of welfare benefits, such as rent payments, council tax rebates and child benefits.

According to the Department of Work and Pensions’ website, Romanians working ‘in a self-employed capacity’ can claim housing and council tax benefit and child benefits.

More than 80 per cent of the jobs created last year were taken by people who were not born in this country, official figures revealed yesterday.

In 2010, employment rose by 210,000 compared with the previous year, but 173,000 jobs went to those born in countries from Poland to Pakistan.

Only 39,000 of the new jobs – less than one in five of the total – were taken by people born in Britain.

The reason is obvious foreigners can send the money they earn home where it buys far more.

The solution to unemployment is to let everybody earn 10K before paying tax and lower corporation tax.

SUPERSIZE scrounger families are being housed for free in luxury mansions with up to NINE bedrooms. But while they live it up in huge homes, UK taxpayers are footing the £5MILLION bill. The investigation of 100 town halls to find out exactly how Britain's giant families cost us. We found the average rent bill for each area's biggest benefit-claiming clan was about £16,000 a year. That means the cost across all 335 of England's councils could be more than £5.3million - just to house the biggest family in each area.

The homes are as big as the bills. In Calderdale, West Yorks, a family of nine is living free in a nine-bedroom home. We found another 22 UK properties with six, seven or eight bedrooms housing huge families. The most expensive is in Westminster, central London. It houses eight people in its five bedrooms for £1,250 a WEEK. The largest family consists of two adults and 14 kids. They have an eight-bed home in Newcastle for £1,000 a month. Ten families in England are sharing an astonishing £1million a year in housing benefits, it emerged last night. The huge sums being lavished on the families by the taxpayer are allowing them to live in streets normally reserved for millionaires. Five of the families are receiving the maximum payment of £2,000 per week. It is the first proof that George Osborne was correct when he claimed some households were receiving sums in excess of £100,000 a year. Toorpakai Saiedi, a jobless Afghan immigrant with seven children, had rent of £2,875 per week on a large house in Acton, West London, paid by Ealing Council. The total benefits bill was £170,000 a year. Outrage at the 2008 case led to Labour introducing the £2,000 per week limit. In another case, Abdi Nur, along with his wife and their seven children, was given a £2.1million townhouse at the expense of the taxpayer. The 42-year-old, from Somalia, moved into the three-storey property in Notting Hill after he objected to the ‘poor’ area of North-West London they were living in.

A FORMER asylum seeker who symbolised Britain’s soft-touch welfare system by living in a £1.2million house at taxpayers’ expense faces jail after yesterday admitting swindling £29,000 in benefits. Toorpakai Saiedi, 38, originally from Afghanistan, pleaded guilty to cheating the system of tens of thousands of pounds while living rent-free in her huge London home. The mother-of-seven kept a secret account allowing her to claim £29,000 to which she was not entitled, Isleworth Crown Court was told. At a previous hearing the single mother appeared in the dock, clutching a Dolce & Gabbana handbag and wearing gold jewellery, to deny four charges of dishonestly obtaining income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit from 2006 to 2009. Yesterday, she stepped back into court wearing a blue face veil and changed her plea to guilty. The swindler was later warned she could find herself behind bars when she returns for sentencing.

WHAT PERCENTAGE OF LONDONERS LIVING IN COUNCIL HOUSING ARE WORKING?
The Annual Population Survey (APS) 2007/08 shows that of people over 16 living in social housing in London, 37.5% are in employment.2.7 million people are claiming incapacity benefit in the UK costing the country £235billion a year. It was once a bustling centre for the textile industry with thousands hard at work in the cotton mills. But now Falinge in Rochdale has been branded the sick-note capital of Britain with almost half the population apparently too ill to work. An astonishing 42.9 per cent of all working-age adults living in the council ward are claiming incapacity benefits.The Office of National Statistics revealed that 490 of the 1,141 people of working age in the area rely on the handout. The figures are a major blow to the Government which claims new measures are helping those on incapacity benefits get back to work. Earlier this year, the same area was identified as having the highest unemployment in the country, with over three-quarters on benefits. Yesterday, politicians, residents and community leaders rushed to defend the reputation of the urban housing estate. But older people living in the district, who remember its industrious past, claimed there had been a relentless rise in 'work-shy scroungers' who manipulate the benefits system.There are 128,270 IB claimants across Merseyside, a legacy of the industrial meltdown of the 1980s when the unemployed were pushed on to sickness benefits to keep the jobless count down. The blackspot is Knowsley, where 13.6% of the working population claims IB, followed by Liverpool (13.3%), Halton (11.4%) and St Helens (11.2%).