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| The Sunday Telegraph, 12 March 2006 |
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| ABOUT 200,000 "phantom'' single parents are receiving hundreds of millions of pounds in benefit payments to which they are not entitled, ministers will be told this week. |
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| The alarming statistics were uncovered by research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. |
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| HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions jointly estimate they are paying income-related support to 2.1 million single parents. But according to the institute, evidence supplied by the Office for National Statistics, in its family resources survey, shows there are only 1.9 million lone parents in Britain. MPs fear that the "phantom'' overpayment runs to about pounds 260 million a year, although precise figures are impossible to quantify. The total could be much higher, possibly as much as pounds 1 billion. |
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| The IFS report says a proportion of the "lone-parent'' payments are in fact going to cohabiting couples with children, "whether through deliberate fraud or errors made by claimants or the Government''. |
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| The report, to be published tomorrow, will be another headache for ministers on top of last week's news that the Government has overpaid pounds 130 million of pension credit. Tens of thousands of elderly people are now to be sent "begging letters'' asking for money to be returned. |
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| The institute, which has a reputation for rigour and independence, recommended that ministers urgently review the data it uses to calculate and pay benefits and tax credits. |
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| The Conservatives said the figures were a "fiasco''. David Ruffley, the shadow minister for welfare reform, said he would table parliamentary questions this week to establish just how much money was being wrongly paid out. |
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"This simply would not have happened if Gordon Brown had not over-complicated the benefits system during the past eight years. Now vulnerable lone parents who should be getting support will not know whether they are going to get demands to pay money back.''
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| Mike Brewer, one of the authors, said: "We already know the tax credit system is subject to fraud from people using stolen identities. The latest figures provide powerful - albeit circumstantial - evidence that the system is also subject to fraud from families not being honest about their circumstances.'' |
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| However, the Treasury said: "This is a wholly misleading piece of analysis which tries to draw conclusions by measuring very different things. Tens of thousands of people move in or out of the tax credits system every month. |
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| ''There are around 15,000 new lone-parent families every month, about 40,000 tax credit recipient's circumstances change every month. There are 300,000 marriages every year and 200,000 divorces.'' |
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