If in doubt about wasteful spending in welfare, the safe thing is to label it fraud

If in doubt about wasteful spending in welfare, the safe thing is to label it fraud, writes Columnist of the Year Michael Clifford.

The guards aren’t the only ones who can’t count. In recent weeks, the two top dogs in Fine Gael also need a few lessons in how to do their sums. Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar have been spinning the wheel to come up with numbers in their respective bailiwicks.

These numbers are being spun not for general consumption, but for the dereliction of the thousands of good burghers who will vote for the next leader of Fine Gael.

All the stuff of politics you might say, except in both cases the spinning has implications for the general public, most particularly that cohort of the public least able to stand up for themselves. They are the ones who will pay the cost of the phoney war being fought between the princes who hope to take the crown.

Coveney has been telling us how many houses are getting built as part of his grand Rebuilding Ireland plan. He has been entirely off the mark. And like the mistakes that banks frequently make in dealing with money, the mistakes have coincidently served his interests.

The same goes for Leo. Lately, he’s been telling us how many n’er-do-wells are cheating on social welfare. These cheats are apparently costing around half a billion euro, money that could be spent not on services, but on Fine Gael’s beloved tax cuts.

Coveney has the cut of a man intent on developing a reputation for getting things done at a time of general chaos. Those involved in the housing and homeless sector speak positively of his attitude and listening skills. He does appear to be somebody who genuinely cares about the human cost of the housing crisis.

But his sums are all wrong. In attempting to show how much is being done for those without a home Coveney and his department have been using electricity connections to houses. By this measure, there have been 51,359 new homes created in the last five years, which is the bare minimum required. Yet recent census data shows that the housing stock has increased by only 8,800 units in the same period.

Last year, for instance, there were 14,923 connections, yet only 2,076 new homes were completed in the same 12 months, as Fianna Fáil’s Michael McGrath has pointed out.

Last Wednesday Coveney wrote a long letter to the Irish Times pointing out that there are many ways to count houses, but his way is probably the best. Despite bigging up his counting, and shouting down the skills of others, nowhere did he provide a definitive figure for the number of house completions. Is it that he doesn’t actually know? Or is it that he does but he doesn’t want to tell us?

It’s a hard call as to which of these is worse, particularly coming from a man who does care about what he’s doing. It’s also a sad indictment of the man who would be Taoiseach. How can Mr Coveney credibly be elected as leader of the country if his one big initiative is falling down around his ears?

And that’s before we even begin to parse his promise from last July that nobody would be living in a hotel room by this coming summer. As of now, that is going to be another giant failure.

Then there is his leadership rival’s crusade against the dastardly species known as welfare cheats.

Leo has been on the airwaves and his posters are adorning passing buses bearing the legend: “Welfare cheats cheat us all”. Of course they do, but the problem once again is with sums. The minister has claimed that “anti-fraud and control measures” saved the exchequer €500m in social welfare payments in 2016.

Oh no they didn’t. Sinn Fein’s Eoin Ó Broin has crunched the numbers which show overpayments as the main source of so-called fraud. This can be attributable to genuine mistakes, or failure to update systems to take account of the changed circumstances of recipients.

Ó Broin references a parliamentary question last year which stated that the cost of overpayments in 2015 was €115m, of which €48m was due to fraud. So the real cost of social welfare cheating is about one tenth of what Varadkar claims it to be. In addition, many of the overpayments were subsequently the subject of appeals, where typically up to half of all appeals are upheld.

In reality, the minister is trotting out the kind of stuff that his predecessors were also apt to do every now and again. In 2011, this column touched on a kerfuffle de jour which claimed social welfare fraud was costing around €600m. Yet a Comptroller and Auditor General Report the same year put fraudulent payments that year at around €26m.

Go back to 2008 when on August 8 the then Department of Social and Family Affairs issued a press release with the headline: “€238 million saved in first six months of year through welfare anti-fraud crackdown.” It was the same story. The annual report from the Social Welfare Appeals Office the previous year contained a note from the chief appeals officer who criticised colleagues for “applying the ‘fraud’ applications of the legislation in all cases involving overpayments”.

In other words, if in doubt of where wasteful spending has occurred in social welfare, label it fraud. That in turn projects the image that a huge cohort of welfare recipients are ripping-off everybody else.

Losing tens of millions in fraud is not acceptable, but it is not hundreds of millions, and represents a tiny percent of the overall budget. It’s also a tiny fraction of what’s lost in tax evasion each year.

So did somebody whisper to Leo it’s time to dust down the “tough on fraud, tough on fraudsters” line? It’s the kind of noise that is well received among those who will vote, and those who will influence the vote, for the next party leader.

We have been told that the phoney war ahead of the leadership battle is resulting in precious little getting done in government. Now, though, it would appear that the two lads certainly are busy, giving the impression of getting things done for the benefit of the party faithful.

These matters do impact on governance. Fake figures for housing are designed to take the heat out of what is now a humanitarian crisis.

It’s also playing for time.

Irrespective of whether or not he wins the leadership, Coveney can look forward to moving on from the housing headache to at least another portfolio.

Varadkar’s fraud crackdown feeds into the ignorance that prevails around most welfare recipients.

If you’re throwing out a figure for fraud that could build a first class hospital, anger directed at the alleged fraudsters is inevitable.

Meanwhile, far away in another part of the world, Enda Kenny is smiling his scary smile.

There’ll be no change of leadership next week, as Enda is otherwise disposed, out representing d’oul country in Canada.

He might be getting a great kick out of all this stuff, but it is unacceptable that ministers are using fake numbers to grab for the crown.