The annual report that reveals the damning failures of the ministry to keep a grip on benefit and error fraud and the high pay and pensions of the people running the Universal Credit programme
Benefit error and fraud has reached record levels at the
Department for Work and Pensions and it is going to get worse, according to its
own figures released in its annual report for the last financial year.
For the 30th year
running the National Audit Office has qualified the ministry’s £86.6 billion
benefit accounts because it considers them to be inaccurate
The most damning section of the report is on Universal Credit – whose current and previous directors – have just received bonus payments up to £15,000 each for their work.
While MPs were enjoying drinks and snacks in parties and receptions across London last week – I admit I was at one in the gardens of Westminster Abbey – a team of intrepid campaigners from BackTo60 took to the streets with the support Media Gang Guerrilla Marketing.
They stopped outside the Bank of England, The Law Courts in the Strand and opposite the House of Parliament to project images backing the 50s bornwomen campaign. One of my blogs was projected on the Bank of England and the Backto60 logo appeared on the side of Parliament overlooking the Thames.
Certainly if nothing else this campaign is creative – equal to some of the stunts of the younger generation. They should be proud that people never give up campaigning.
Peter Lilley, the Tory Secretary of State who decided not to spend money in 1997 telling the 3.8 million women born in the 1950s that their pension age was going up. Pic credit: Policy Exchange
Secret ministry documents reveal that successive government
ministers and Whitehall officials failed over two decades to tell over 3.8
million women born in the 1950s that they would lose their pensions for up to six
years.
The documents – made public in last month’s judicial review – call into question whether the ministry was up to the job to properly inform millions of people of such a drastic change to their retirement plans.
For those who are not yet following me on Byline there is now a two part investigation by me into the cost – both financial and personally damaging – to British taxpayers of cabinet minister Chris Grayling. His nine years in office – from Employment Minister to Lord Chancellor and now Transport secretary – have brought misery to millions of people whether they are rail commuters, prisoners, victims of criminal attacks or faced discrimination at work. Some people have even had to plead guilty to criminal offences they did not commit to save money. Others have become victimised twice because of the debacle of his probation privatisation programme.You read the two part series in bylinehereand here.
Department for Work and Pensions – still misleading the facts on 50swomen pensioners.
The Department for Work and Pensions has produced statistics to frighten the public into believing that compensating 3.8 million women born in the 1950s who lost out through the rise in the pension age from 60 to 66 will cost more than double the real price.
A new DWP research report issued a day after judicial review hearing on June 5 and 6 and given widespread coverage in mainstream media put the cost at an eye watering £188 billion and £212 billion instead of a previous figure of £77.2 billion. The directly comparable figure hidden in a footnote is £91.1 billion at today’s prices.
Now I am back in the UK after going around the world and visiting 22 countries I am introducing some changes to my blog.
I have a number of major projects for the current year and a backlog of challenging investigations following a number of you contacting me on this site to ask me to write about issues which are not being reported or ignored in mainstream media.
I am currently employed as a consultant to a national newspaper and an independent television production company scoping a long term investigation which hopefully will appear later this year.
BYLINE
I will also be regularly writing for byline.com on their new project bylinetimes – a print and on line paper that specialises in reporting issues not covered by the mainstream press. This will mean that my coverage of Whitehall mismanagement and political scandals will first appear on their site but every article will be highlighted on this site so you can link to it and read it.
This site has run a number of articles on the plight of the 3.8 million women born in the 1950s who have been hit by the raising of the pension age from 60 to 66. I decided to back the campaign by BackTo60 after seeing the poverty, stress and misery caused to so many people by this mismanaged policy. Apart from the Guardian and the Press Association, this site and bylinetimes were the only people to cover a judicial review hearing which could affect the lives of 3.8 million people.
Coverage of this issue will be intensified over the next few weeks as I have a string of exclusive stories and analysis in the pipeline.
This site has also covered very challenging child sex abuse stories in the past and some very controversial investigations through Exaro News . I am still planning to cover issues raised in this area and will come back to it shortly.
YOU DECIDE
The rest of the news agenda on this site will depend partly on you, the reader, when you ask me to either investigate something that has manifestly gone wrong or expose mismanagement and corruption wherever it might be. I have had a number of you contacting me about local government scandals, housing and business scandals, racism, mental health issues to name but a few. Please bear with me as it takes time to do a proper investigation.
Finally I have made one change. My figures from WordPress show though this a UK site some 10 per cent of the traffic is from overseas – notably Spain, France, the US, Canada, Australia, Cyprus and Turkey. It also has had sizable hits from the United Arab Emirates, Croatia, Mexico, Bulgaria and Thailand to name a few. Many of these could be migrants or expats but I have added a Google translate button so the blogs can be read in other languages.
In the meantime I am very gratified by the huge increase in the number of hits on this site – mainly as the result of my support for the 50s born women. The site is running at record levels, so thank you all.
The fight by 3.8 million women born in the 1950s. Film by Jasper Warry and Hello Deer Productions
This up beat film rightly pitches the mood of a generation of women who are not going to lie down and lose tens of thousands of pounds each because of a cruel, incompetent government which thought it could get away with raising the pension age without telling them.
It is a worthy rebuke to George Osborne, the multi millionaire former Tory chancellor and editor of the Evening Standard who once boasted about the removal of the benefit:
“I’ve found it one of the less controversial things we’ve done and probably saved more money than anything else we’ve done.“
Instead he has left the Department of Work and Pensions with a multi million pound legal bill and that’s only for starters. If the women win it is going to be one of the most costly decisions George Osborne has ever made.
Oxfam to be damned tomorrow while 23 other international charities could have a worse history of sex exploitation of women
The Charity
Commission will tomorrow issue an excoriating report on Oxfam’s mismanagement
and failure to act over the sexual exploitation of victims of the Haiti
earthquake in 2011.
But the Commission will ignore a much wider scandal that suggests that 23 of the world’s biggest overseas aid charities are hiding far worse sexual exploitation of vulnerable people by their own staff and of fellow women and gay aid workers.
Crowds of BackTo60 and Waspi supporters outside the High Court celebrating the hearing today
The 3.8 million women born in the 1950s who lost lost billions
of pounds by the raising of the pension age from 60 to 66 had no right to
expect to be told about the changes to their pensions, lawyers for the Department
of Work and Pensions told a judicial review today.
Sir James Eadie,QC, on behalf of Amber Rudd, the current work and pensions secretary, argued that the women had no legal remedy to get their money back because the judges hearing the case could not challenge the primary legislation which authorised the change. He said constitutional grounds prevented the judges challenging any major primary legislation passed by Parliament.
Internal Whitehall documents released yesterday reveal that
the Department of Work and Pensions secretly knew on six separate occasions that there
was “ widespread ignorance “ among 3.8 million women born in the 1950s that
they were about to lose their pensions for up to six years.
The disclosure by Michael Mansfield, QC came on the first day of a landmark judicial review brought by the campaigning group Back to 60 into the raising of the pension age from 60 to 66 which has left this group of women living in poverty after they had relied on the money for their retirement.
Westminster Confidential 