Editorial: Gordon Lyons is right to launch a crackdown on benefit fraud in Northern Ireland

Stormont’s communities minister is due credit for his benefit fraud crackdown.​

Gordon Lyons, as we report on page six, has set out of some of the key reasons why this is important, and why Sinn Fein has been wrong to back peddle on attempts to make benefit fraud both more difficult and public.

To add to his points, we say: benefit fraud costs a large, indeed unknown, amount of money at a time when public services and budgets are under great pressure. It is also morally repugnant, because it entails people taking vital taxpayer funds under false pretences.

Not only that, but it adds to an existing – and massive – benefits problem in the province, which is economic inactivity. For various reasons, exacerbated by covid, Northern Ireland has one of the highest levels of dependency on benefits in the UK. Almost 12% of the entire population was already on Disability Living Allowance, as it was then called, a decade ago, yet this figure was barely known outside of reports in this newspaper.

Serious questions have long been needed as to whether that figure is remotely justified by the health difficulties in NI – the percentage of people out of work due to illness was several times that in parts of England (and even there, a far lower percentage of economically inactive people is seen as too high). But those serious questions have not been asked at Stormont, where this is cross-party agreement that welfare reforms in Great Britain should not apply here.

While the grossly excessive number of people on benefits in NI is partly caused by over-diagnosis, and an insufficiently robust process of assessing claims, rather than fraud, it sustains a culture of entitlement that can lead to fraud or near fraud.

All of this is unfair on modestly paid workers who do not evade the jobplace and pay taxes that help keep other people out of work. A tougher approach is overdue.