Benefit fraud is crippling Britain – Labour and Liz Kendall must not delay reforms

Dawdleon fraud costs us all dear

BENEFIT fraud is the scourge of our welfare state.

Since the pandemic, a shocking £35billion has ended up in the pockets of criminal gangs or those scamming the system.

That could have paid for more than 900,000 extra nurses for a year, or 70 new hospitals.

Incredibly, it is also more than half the Government’s annual defence budget.

And fraud and error are still costing us £10billion a year.

New laws to recover money directly from the bank accounts of cheats are welcome.

But we’ve been demanding major welfare reforms on all fronts for far too long.

The sickening fraud is a shameful legacy of the Tories.

But Labour had 14 years to plan its tactics, so why is Liz Kendall’s Department for Work and Pensions still dragging its feet?

A Green Paper on reform is not now due until March.

By the time it gets through the system we will be lucky to get any action before next year.

Meanwhile, other key reforms such as social care, which could slash NHS waiting times, are also held up in the slow lane.

The Government can’t afford to let the grass grow under its feet.

We don’t have the time for these delays. And we certainly don’t have the money.

Courtroom farce

HARDLY a week goes by without a foreign criminal making a mockery of our justice system.

Only last Sunday we reported on an Albanian people-smuggler who is fighting deportation to Belgium because he doesn’t like the state of the prisons there.

This week we have another crook who was convicted of trafficking migrants by a Belgian court in 2018 but who — surprise, surprise — is still here seven years later.

Albanian Kujdesi Dauti has launched appeal after appeal against his removal from the UK after being handed an eight-year sentence in the EU country.

Incredibly because Dauti has since pleaded guilty to a further criminal offence here — aggravated vehicle-taking — and is still awaiting sentence two years on, his latest appeal cannot currently proceed and he cannot be extradited.

This farcical scenario is effectively an incentive to commit crime for those trying to evade or delay deportation.

Meanwhile, the Belgian authorities are furious.

And you can’t blame them.

Because our basket case legal system is now also wrecking theirs.