Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
Unfortunately, that is the nature of any process of scrutiny. Anger should be directed against the cùnts who abuse the system, not the poor sods tasked with trying to stop them.
And it partly is. Part of the problem is the political imperative to be seen as tough when it comes to public money. A noble enough thought but the problem is that the mounting costs are not really about those on the make. To put in place a tough policy that weeds these people out costs a fair bit of money- more than you lose to those who dont deserve the payouts.

So you have a tough and complex system that is underfunded and under skilled. For every scrounger you weed out you punish plenty of genuine cases and that is news.

THe winter fuel thing was a good example. Not opposed to means testing in general but it was clear that attempting to deny the allowance to those who didnt need it was going to cost more than it saved.

As usual, the real political figure is the number of people registered disabled. As long as that goes down nobody will ask whether the overall spend went down.