More money is lost due to error in the benefits system than is lost to fraud.
So alongside plans to create a new universal credit, the bill contains a series of measures to tackle fraud and error in the benefits system, which the government believes can save £2bn a year.
That should be seen in the context of research such as that carried out by Advice UK (pdf) in Nottingham in 2009, which found that 42% of legal advice in the city addresses administrative failures in government, and the National Audit Office's report about errors in the benefits system last year, which said that the Department for Work and Pensions has not reduced its processing errors since 2007.
The main measures to save money through tackling error and fraud in the benefit system (see 1.11am) involve more certification - getting parents to prove that they have childcare costs, and children in school, instead of relying on self-certification.
Amyas Morse, the comptroller and auditor general, had "qualified his audit opinion" on the department's accounts, which have been qualified every year since 1988-89, due to the high level of fraud and error in benefit expenditure, the National Audit Office NAOO) said.
HM Revenue and Customs HMRCC) and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have signed a deal with credit reference agency Experian to use its data to detect fraud and error in the tax credits and benefits systems.
It has been suggested that imprecision in the waggle dance of honeybees is an adaptation that spreads foragers over an optimal patch size: natural selection is proposed to have tuned the amount of error in the waggle dance, to balance the benefits of known nectar sources against benefits of wider searching (Weidenmuller and Seeley 1999; Gardner et al. 2007); but see Tanner and Visscher (2006).
Sarah Teather, who on Tuesday was one of the pitifully few (four) Lib Dems voting against the welfare bill, described the so-called "skivers" she encounters in her constituency office: "People who come to my constituency office these days for help with some kind of error in their benefits often spend the first few minutes trying to justify their worth.
Statistics from the last year for which figures are available suggest that £3.1bn was lost in the benefit system to fraud and error.
Total benefit overpayments due to fraud and error in the last financial year cost the Department for Work and Pensions £3.2bn – around 2% of the total benefit expenditure – according to the department's annual report and accounts for 2011-12.
