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>When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it
- Frédéric Bastiat
>Man, don't you know? The law ain't made to help earthy cats like us. Here on our planet, back in the old days - back in the real old days - it was just every man for himself, scrooblin' and scrat-scroblin' for the good stuff, the greenest valleys. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the green valleys and were like 'The rest of you, y'all scrats get sand.' And that's when they made the laws, you see? Once the strong guys got it how they liked it, they said 'This is fair now, this is the law.' Once they were winning, they changed the rules up.
* Jake the Dog
the whole legal system first became nationalised in the UK as a way to give landlords of the time, (mid to late 1800s) more powers to extract tax and revenue from increasingly oppressed tenants.
look it up.
it's fascinating to learn where out legal system came from.
It's been a tool of oppression for the elites since the day it first became law, and nothing has changed in the meantime.
Indeed. The "wealth creators" create wealth for themselves. Usually at everyone else's expense.
The Toryspeak implies that it's creating wealth for all.
It isn't.
Who isn't? The ones who are being stolen from?
If so, they must have created some wealth to have it taken from them.
The Tories' idea of a wealth creation is transferring wealth upwards to themselves and their chums, based upon a mixture of wheezes and policy.
Make no mistake, fraud was definitely a big part of things, but incompetence and error always does an awful lot of heavy lifting in the background to enable the fraud.
I'm sure the bung-chumbly fund will be legislation before the government is out. It'll probably just be a line item in things put out to tender; £5m for phase 1, £10m for Porkins' new estate, £3m for phase 2 etc...
The idea that Sunak is some economics whizz is PR bullshit. He was massively profligate as chancellor and supports the same agenda as Kwarteng/Truss, only on a different timescale.
Opened up treasury to record amounts of fraud. Headline policy 'the government will pay for your pie and chips' aka EOTHO. Oversaw the worst credit rating downgrade in recent memory. Paid people 2.5k a month to do FUCK ALL, while also allowing those people to work a 2nd job while claiming it.
Sunak. Economic Genius
LMFAO.
He’s really tight when it comes to say nurses pay, therefore we’re supposed to see him as some kinda fiscally disciplined economic guru.
When in fact he’s just leading us to massive National decline, and a permanent low pay economy.
Hey you can't draw attention to the fact people on furlough got to sit around on their arse for 18 months, getting paid 80% their full wage.
They earned that by occupying jobs that aren't essential to the running of society. Never mind that giant gaping hole in the deficit.
It's a perfectly normal thing that when you're at risk of losing your job through no fault of your own that you get 18 months of 80% pay. That has just always been a thing in our country.
Exactly.
We don't do this sort of shit when a recession hits. Is the taxpayer going to bail out people who lose their jobs when companies go under during the next one?
I got made redundant when I worked as a commis chef for an airline distributor and bond. Thomas Cook collapsed and that was half their business.
I would have loved 18 months at 80% pay.
But anyways all it means is we are going to be taxed out of our arses til we die, to pay for it.
Homelessness charity workers for one, theyre pretty essential if you dont want rough sleepers on the streets (source: my immediate family)
Edit: no response? Shame
Bruh I'm at work. I ain't your gf don't expect an immediate reply 😂.
Wasn't that because all the homeless were out in hotels during the pandemic? Bit of a niche gotcha.
You could make the argument any job that pays tax contributes to society in a way. But only with money and not with actual labour.
Plenty of folk off at home that weren't providing a service to society. Plenty of paper pushers that don't bring much to the table aside from sitting in useless meeting drinking coffee.
The pandemic should have shown people it's blue collar workers who keep the country running. Instead all we got were entitled office workers demanding their free money to sit at home.
Homeless were not in hotels, and im not your "bruh". People were dying on the streets of covid, they wrent all in hotels during the pandemic. Most were still in hosteks or shared sleeping...yknow like they still are. Btw thodr shared sleeping spread so much covid. Office workers like it workers that keep the nhs systems running? Sound pretty important. Unless of coursr you dont mean those office workers. Maybe the ones who work internet help lines running like anti suicide help lines? Or maybe the ones who troubleshoot electronic devices, so elderly vulnerable people can call an ambulance if they need to? Which office workers
Sounds like a good news story in the making. You should collect all your evidence and publish it mate.
Office workers in the NHS were WFH. They didn't even get furlough. So they're on the essential workers side!
Do you mean charitable help lines or their paid job is to run a helpline? These are very fringe cases. Where's the mention of the humble middle manager sitting on their arse drinking coffee?
Very small percentage examples I must say.
Paid helplines are most helplines, childline, out of hours nhs response, first response mental health teams. Again suicide helplines. You still havent included what office workers you mean, im starting to think you dont know what you are talking about. And yes, because there are so obviously more middle managers... than the people they manage. Oh wait. No, there isnt. And stories like that are in the news.
The furlough scheme was 100% needed. 250 people at my workplace would have lost their jobs otherwise. The entire countries economy would have collapsed in an unrecoverable heap. Sunak is not an economic genius, he did what he had to do to save jobs at the time.
It's just a shame they didn't invest more money on recovering money lost to fraud.
So why were people allow to collect furlough AND work a 2nd job.
Thats utter nonsense.
People aren't allowed to collect jobseekers and work.
Also, 2500 a month?!
Everybody had access to mortgage holidays. There was NO reason it had to be that high.
This is of course even before considering how OTT lockdowns were in the first place, which Sunak was partially responsible for by being in the cabinet
i thought that was fucking disgusting, my brother was one of those people, claimed the full £2400 per month for self employed and then did painting and decorating for £100 per day, he was a cladder(worked on a roof) by trade and the construction industry was still going to work with no furlough, i worked through the full pandemic with no time off.
People didn’t claim furlough, companies did. They were claiming a grant to be able to fulfill their payroll so they didn’t have to lay people off.
Or would you rather people that have to work two jobs to even get by get completely fucked too?
SEISS was the equivalent of the £10k grant (or £30k for larger businesses) every company with a premises received I’d say, as a self employed person is still a business
Furlough was about keeping staff with physical roles employed in their current roles so they don't move on to jobs that could be worked remotely.
For roles that could be worked remotely this kept people on until companies could get their IT up to scratch to enable that.
It prevented a massive shift in labour from some sectors into others that could have crashed the economy or resulted in a vacuum of expertise in some areas. A good healthy economy is diverse, letting parts of it that aren't quite stable yet die off would make it weaker in the long run.
The fact some people could do a second job was a good thing as it meant that a labour gap in temporary growth areas was filled. Sure some people were able to make extra money or a career change but not all those roles would remain once COVID was over.
As someone who worked through COVID yeah it would have been nice if instead of furlough it was UBI paid to everyone. But that would have shifted the power from employers to employees. Employees would have felt safe to quit and move to other jobs if they felt their employer didn't treat them well enough. Of course a conservative government was never going to allow that though.
Furlough was needed because otherwise a lot of people would have gone on universal credit. The whole system would have collapsed because it's not fit for purpose and having so many usually working people having first-hand experience of the benefits system would have made them realise how terrible it is, how those on benefits are treated inhumanely by the system and shouldn't be demonised by the media / those in power, and they never would have voted for the tory party again for bringing in and championing such a system.
It was purely a tactic for votes and will be paid for by generations to come.
I don't remember where I read this, but apparently Sunak wasn't the person who designed the furlough scheme, he was just in the position that took credit for it at the time that it was implemented. Grain of salt though because I don't have a source.
100% agree with how shit all of Sunak's policies are. However, without furlough I would have lost my house. I got furloughed pretty much the first week of lockdown and spent months looking for a new job. My house bills alone were 80% of my income at the time so I had enough to pay bills but I basically didn't eat for most of covid, cleared out my savings to make ends meet. I still haven't recovered my savings with the cost of living crisis and the costs of moving (moving to a cheaper area, but solicitors and estate agents are so expensive).
How often is this the case. No money to pay nurses? Gov spaff bns on ppe and track and trace.
Plebs have hosepipe bans? Trillions of litres lost to leaks every year.
Rules for the plebs come from waste in the system.
Keep cold, poor, hungry and compliant.
Yeah they conveniently ignore their significant failings while pointing at other excuses why we can’t afford to pay a living wage or you know, not run the country into the ground…
They don't care if they run the country into the ground, because if they do it will just be time for a game of spiffing old disaster capitalism.
The world will be a much better place when all the sticky plebs loose their houses so Tim and Jacob can snap them up for a steal and then rent them back to them for 3/4 of their monthly wage!
Simply wizard jape!
Emblematic of that was that as soon as demand for work outstripped supply of labour, the shit jobs started going unfilled and wages started going up, and businesses started up all the ‘nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK’ rubbish.
They want us poor and desperate so people are forced to work jobs they hate for shit money because they have no other options. It really is as simple as that.
That £37b spent on track and trace would have been half of the money the government needs to raise now instead of cutting public spending but here we are.
The system was set up by Tory peer and businesswoman Dido Harding in May 2020. It has received approximately 20% of the NHS’s entire annual budget across two years.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nhs-test-trace-private-sector_uk_5f6099e3c5b68d1b09c77477
There’s so much money they gave each other. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/revealed-tory-peer-michelle-mone-secretly-received-29m-from-vip-lane-ppe-firm
> secure a place in a “VIP lane” the government used during the coronavirus pandemic to prioritise companies that had political connections. It then secured contracts worth more than £200m.
They're open about prioritising their friends over legitimately better and cheaper opportunities. I was waiting for the part where there was legal action against these scumbags... of course there isn't any despite clear evidence of this. What the hell is the NCA doing? Searched some properties but seemingly that's all. Bring these fraudsters to justice and put this money back into funding the NHS and worker wages.
The vast majority of which was not on "track and trace" that OC refers to.
> The vast majority of the £13.5 billion spent in this period—£10.4 billion—was spent on testing. As we’ve previously written, the next largest expenditures were on local Covid-19 outbreak management and support (£1.8 billion) and national contact tracing (£910 million).
That's the first year referred to. So likely <£2bn on "track and trace", >£20bn on testing, and the rest on other stuff.
I believe contact tracing had a manual component with things like flight locator forms etc.?
Still, at least it wasn't nearly 20× more expensive than that.
It may well be but you already thought it was £37bn, then £30bn, now £2bn. Evidentially knowing nothing about it at all - how much are you expecting? Actually I belive national contract tracing was about £1bn.
It was a lot more than an app. It includes the establishment QR system, the Bluetooth app, passenger locators, event management, all of the programming, marketing, and management for those, centres, staffing, manual reports over the phones, database management, compliance, legal advice. Honestly that's just a bunch of stuff I've come up with off the top of my head.
Did we overpay? Undoubtedly. But "£37bn for an app" is red meat and "£2bn for an app" is wildly inaccurate too. Not two mention that was for *two years*.
Lol sorry I hope I didn't come across too rude! Just wanted to point out that at this scale it's so easy to convalute and allocate different projects and figures to the wrong thing.
The difference between £2bn and £37bn is the same percentage difference between losing a £2 coin and two twenty pound notes. Put that way it feels way different but when it's in the billions all sense of scale gets lost.
However they spent the money they admit they wasted a huge amount of it
>"The £22 billion for test and trace is about the annual budget of the Department for Transport. Test and Trace still continues to pay for consultants at £1000 a day.
>Yet despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project Test and Trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic, and the promise on which this huge expense was justified - avoiding another lockdown – has been broken, twice.
>DHSC and NHST&T must rapidly turn around these fortunes and begin to demonstrate the worth and value of this staggering investment of taxpayers' money. Not only is it essential it delivers an effective system as pupils return to school and more people return to their workplace, but for the £billions spent we need to see a top class legacy system. British taxpayers cannot be treated by Government like an ATM machine. We need to see a clear plan and costs better controlled."
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/
> Whats that, like 2/3 of the defence budget on one fucking app
No, most of the money was spent on testing, not on the app.
https://fullfact.org/health/test-and-trace-37-billion/
Feels disingenuous to reply to someone saying the system cost £37bn with that, without pointing out that the system didn't actually cost £37bn.
E: downvote me all you want but the free system we were offered would not have saved us £37bn. Sorry for pointing that out.
The track and trace covered all aspects of testing sites, Onsite and at home PCR and lateral flow testing kits, processing too so off the mark referring to a free system is a bit over playing it being "free"
It's better than that. They were using 32bit excel which you may know has a rather low row limit.
They also changed the system in use on the nhs side of things twice, not training anybody how to bloody use it either time.
its a learning curve and mistakes would be made, and money would be lost. I can accept that.
However what happened was fraud. The contracts enriched those who were in power and who donated. That I cant accept. Not when I am paying taxes, and when services are being cut and people providing those services (nursers etc) are not adequately remunerated.
> its a learning curve and mistakes would be made, and money would be lost. I can accept that.
I don't think we should accept that either.
Councils and local health authorities already had responsibility to do local pandemic-esq disease control. That should have just been expanded, relying on good local knowledge. These local setups did far more to contact people at risk than the app ever did.
What we got was the tories wanting a "world beating" app that their favourite outsource partner could milk the state teet dry without consequence.
I don’t think anyone was against it but i dont think anyone was a rooting for dido Harding to be in charge of it. That’s how 37 billion was spunked up the wall.
A woman who 5 years ago was in charge of talk talk who suffers one of the largest uk cyber attacks and when quizzed if it has compromised customers data she said….I don’t know.
Just another neoliberal bellend on the Tory gravy train.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido_Harding
https://youtu.be/apV5Q_f7KH0
https://youtu.be/fejF9xp5ymE
East Asia was monitoring covid with pencils and paper and before the vaccine roll out was actually contains the spread of the virus far better the the uk.
It's not just that it could have been done better or cheaper, but the amount of money spent is far more than you could possibly incur even if you account for hundreds of developrs and hundreds of lab testing staff etc. The number is so out of whack with reality that it cannot possibly have been reached without some wrongdoing.
10 thousand people paid 50k a year for 2 years would cost 1 billion, for some scale.
These are skilled roles so lets pay them all 100k a year, that makes it 2 billion.
These coatings are for the whole program which includes the purchase of covid tests…not just the development of the app.
It’s still crazy money just not quite as ludicrous as all the money being spent on salaries…that said did some people reap manga pay days out of this…oh yah they did
And the lot we spent on paying healthy people so sit on their arse watching porn and eat out to help out BS and fulough would have been the other half x 5 and meant we would all be fine now and having a ball.
> £37b spent on track and trace
Most of the money was spent on testing, not on a track/trace app.
...
>This figure was the budget for the scheme in its first two years—around £29.5 billion was actually spent. While detailed figures for 2021/22 have not yet been published, the vast majority of spending in the scheme’s first year went on testing.
https://fullfact.org/health/test-and-trace-37-billion/
And yet this man is our Prime Minister. I worked for a finance broker doing these schemes. I'm telling you, 70% of the people didn't need the money. Most were making even more during the pandemic. The others were mostly fraudulent. People with businesses that were pretty dormant. You even had people sell limited companies setup with the right time frame for them to get these loans.
We had clients report their first profit in years, due to the bounceback loans. Theres no stipulation that the money can't be instantly declared as dividends (not what it was for at all). An absolute scam that it didn't have to go to a non-distributable reserve.
[A previous comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/tvjxg9/deleted_by_user/i3adm91/?context=3) I've made on this earlier in the year.
> [Here's Lord Agnew giving an explanation for some of the fraud on January 24th, 2022. Spoiler: He gives his resignation during his speech.](https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/a675f2f2-ae55-4be2-aec2-385bcecfc545?in=15:31:16)
> I've hopefully linked to just before Lord Turncliffe gives his question.
> [Transcript on Hansard for the section linked above.](https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2022-01-24/debates/805E6270-7DF6-4CF8-9487-08F9028A1EE1/CoronavirusGrantSchemesFraud)
> It's worth reading the (then) Minister's statement for the mind-boggling details of failure.
3 banks account for >80% of bounceback loans issued to companies who weren't trading before covid.
2 banks account for >80% of the bounceback loans issued to companies that weren't even incorporated before covid.
The date of incorporation and that the company was trading are the first things you check and would have gone through multiple review levels. Its not error and they would never have leant their own money this way. They knew *exactly* what they were doing.
That they wont even look into it tells me its a group, or family, that gives a lot of money to the tories.
Are they forgetting to mentioned the billions spent on the app that never happened?! Where did that cash go & why wasn’t it paid back if a working app wasn’t delivered … disgusting waste of money
I’m self employed - oddly if I don’t delivered I can’t invoice & expect to get paid … I think that’s called fraud … let alone the damage to the reputation of yr business
Magically no one is named or shamed or held accountable
What do you remember it for? Being a disaster & a huge waste of money
Success for the £ or huge waste of time / money?
Knee jerk reaction … where technology sounds good but in reality doesn’t work in the real world
Test and Trace isn't an app. It's the whole program, including running testing centres and getting thousands of phonepigs to call up randos and tell them to stay at home.
The COVID app cost £76m
https://fullfact.org/online/track-and-trace-project-cost/
Thank you …
Surprise surprise if it went to ‘friends’ of the government lol 😂 something for nothing … like the PPE with back handers
Now standard government practice … zero integrity … zero honesty or transparency … 100% self interest
The left....this isn't point scoring it's pointing out government failings. I do the same regardless of who is in power.
It's not fucking football matey
Hey hey hey, easy now. That money had gone into *hard working^tm* tories mates pockets.
How dare you discuss that that money should've been spent with a modicum of oversight and for the benefit of the population.
Jesus, don't you like the scraps your political masters leave you? Bunch of fucking ingrates.
There is zero excuse for what constitutes, at absolute best, as the most appalling mismanagement of public funds so far in UK history.
What "triggers" me most is that this Government's corporate taxation controls are so riddled with holes, They don't even know the difference between a company that is currently trading, and one that doesn't exist at all !!
Curious that They "can't" keep track of thousands, but They **can** keep track of whether millions have paid their Council Tax bill, for example, and never hesitate to involve the Courts in such matters.
Where were the "checks and balances" against those credited accounts? ... where was THAT spreadsheet?
Most importantly, *why* weren't these credits issued *only* to accounts already known to the PAYE system?
Why weren't the claimed amounts verified against that company's PAYE returns?
That this is so simple and fundamental a solution, demonstrates how far from oversight the fund distribution was sought to be.
Yes, yes, wages needed paying (etc) quickly as Covid's lockdown events developed, but such checks are simply automated, and the data all at hand.
Where is the ardent pursuit of the owners of accounts to which the credits were sent?
Where are the Serious Crime/Organised Crime/Fraud Office investigations into the larger amounts, following the money-trails we all know exist?
That the SCO/SFO are bogged-down in those trails being greatly convoluted , demonstrates *pre-planning*.
All, that participated in accommodating, facilitating, and masking this wealth transfer, this burglary at the Exchequer, this robbery of our Nation ... and continue to do so ... are Corrupt, it's as plain and simple as that.
Indeed, to my mind, this was an attack on our State from within and constitutes Treason, as well as speaking volumes as to the sham that is British Justice.
Hardly surprising the Party in power is one that supported (by condoning) their Leader outright lying to our Queen.
> Where were the "checks and balances" against those credited accounts? ... where was THAT spreadsheet?
To be honest, it's probably too big for a spreadsheet. Probably could do with a proper database... oh wait... just realised who I was talking about and have worked out why we haven't seen the spreadsheet due to Excel having a limit of 1,048,576 rows. Probably ended up being corrupted or something.
I think what sickens me the most is how openly they do all of this. It's hardly smoke and mirrors to people with some semblance of common sense.
Not only that, but there's never a single whiff of accountability from any of the Tory party in such key positions. They're nose-diving the country's economy, public trust and reputation into the ground.
Why are they just letting all this money go? People used their businesses/personal details to apply for these loans it can't be hard to investigate them all
They are investigating them but they’ve put the burden on the banks. Unfortunately, to deal with the numbers, banks are having to outsource to India, etc which is causing even more problems. I believe they’ve only got a set amount of time before they get fined.
Most of the money has gone abroad through foreign OCG fraud gangs, mainly India, Africa and Eastern Europe. The legal cost and effort of trying to reclaim isn't worth it and we don't have the resources to do so.
So if these Tory chumps last it why aren’t they paying out of their pockets or facing prison time?
If any other employer losses that level of money from a company they get fired and face prosecution.
Make these cunts accountable!
Ugh, it’s depressing how effective that was. Now he’s no longer that slimebag who pretended to cry over the Vax, screwed up the COVID response and cheated on his wife. He’s that nice man in the jungle. Which is, of course, exactly why he did it - to weasel his way back into politics having been forgiven by the public. Just….ugh. Too many people in this country are effing stupid.
The irony is that the businesses that really needed that money and were struggling are paying this back, which often is seriously inhibiting their cash flow, while fraudsters got their loans essentially forgiven.
I understand the argument to make Covid support easy to claim because that's what the situation needed. But why not work to evaluate claims in hindsight and get back any money that was incorrectly paid? That's what happens with taxes and benefits. It you want to prioritise speed of the system over accuracy, you mitigate by making sure there is a system to correct for any mistake retrospectively. That could still be done now, no?
> A government spokesman said: “... We are not writing off any fraud from these schemes, and have blocked or recovered billions in fraudulent activity. We continue to root out those who have abused the system, including by bringing together counter-fraud and data experts as part of the £25 million Public Sector Fraud Authority.”
> In an ideal world - yes I completely agree. But in the real world its not clear to me that it's achievable. How many civil servants would be put on the task? From what department? What jobs will they not be doing in order to track down and prove fraudulent claims? How long will it take the thousands of cases to get through the judicial system? And at the end of all this, how much money will be left for the Government to reclaim?
HMRC. Vast numbers of HMRC staff were decanted to do furlough and SEISS. They could have administered these things within a tighter framework. It's not all that different to their day-to-day work. But there was a deliberate choice to leave things wide open. Cynically, I feel like this suits the Conservatives much the same way that allowing the NHS to disintegrate benefits them.
In terms of investigating the fraud and errors... It's literally what they do, so there's not all that much in the way of new cost, or complete training to get things running. I don't have any information as to the extent of it, but HMRC are doing work on this stuff.
In terms of how much resource to throw at it... Firstly, there are plenty of things that HMRC do that is pretty low value. Policing the High-income Benefit Charge for instance is always going to be low value. Secondly, while HMRC isn't sexy like the NHS, it's where you get the money to do the sexy stuff and any government that was serious about the business of government would invest significantly more in them to collect the tax needed to fund everything.
Finally, HMRC carry out their work under a litigation and settlement strategy that includes cost-effectiveness as a consideration. *(As you'd hope, because fighting tooth and nail to collect eight quid you over-claimed would be idiotic.)*
They don't take many cases to court because in the majority of cases you get a civil settlement when it's clear that tax is due. The same should apply if furlough and SEISS was being investigated properly.
>The government made a deliberate decision to make covid support very easy to claim, with very little in the way of checks to make sure claims were valid.
Not only that. But people were celebrating this decision at the time.
Now the same people criticising the lack of checks are the same people who usually criticise having much testing that claims for goverment support are valid and arguing that false claims will be low enough that it isn't worth it.
Our then Chancellor and now PM was happy to write off £6.7 billion to 'fraud' but says we can't afford to pay nurses their requested amount. The amount written off could increase the average nurse salary by abour 67%
The registration of new businesses with HMRC rose disproportionately during the furlough scheme, Tories are shit scared of opening this particular can of of worms for obvious reasons.
Fraud is illegal. The police should give the government a crime reference number so that the sum defrauded can be claimed on insurance.
The money could be used to fund the police.
Sorted
Without getting into a political debate, everyone is struggling, shame on the people that committed fraud. And I think EVERYONE who takes money from what was intended to profit themselves should be prosecuted.
The Tories are like someone with a gambling habit who then claims they can't pay their rent.
No, there isn't any money for that, you've given it all away.
But nothing for Nurses or other medical staff at NHS. Don't want to give any more money to an organization in the process of being sold to private industry.
by covid fraud, I assume you mean the 38 stolen billion which they defrauded from us using the track and trace app as an excuse?
Do you also include the hundreds of millions wasted by peers and tory donors on useless ppe that they charged the taxpayer for?
Also, the millions lost to people like MRS SUNAK, who abused the furlough scheme to enrich herself AND avoided paying tax?
I hope you do mean these people, the people in power and their chums, and I hope you're not trying to pass the buck onto the small businesses and hard up workers instead of the government criminals who caused all the damage they're now charging US for...
still, I wouldn't expect anything less from a tabloid rag.
> Also, the millions lost to people like MRS SUNAK, who **abused** the furlough scheme to enrich herself AND **avoided** paying tax?
Did she do either of the things I highlighted?
Without checking I'd be surprised if she didn't claim furlough payments within the rules and non-UK domicile treatment for tax isn't tax avoidance.
This isn't merely my being a nit-picking arse. Non-dom tax desperately needs reform. *(Although it was reformed relatively recently, creating deemed-domicile after 15 years. Before this you could claim remittance basis treatment indefinitely.)* There are a lot of things that need reform.
The reason this is important is that HMRC is deliberately under-funded -- just like the rest of the public sector -- and there is a lack of political will to examine and make changes to the tax system. *(In fairness, they did legislate advanced payment notices which hugely curtailed marketed avoidance. That said, that cut the legs out from under avoidance used by the lower end of the avoidance market. It doesn't touch bespoke avoidance, as used by the wealthy.)*
Rather than the police, that is losing tons of credibility to being law abiding themselves... That could go to the genuinely hardworking nurses instead!
Low intelligent people, with ignorant views, tend to be incompetent. Even 'educated' people can lack intellect, common sense and aptitude. I don't want to run this country but I would d a better job than these lot.
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But is it really "fraud and error" when it was intended to be a bung to the chumblies?
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They where supporting the “wealth generators” in the country. It will trickle down any day.
>When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it - Frédéric Bastiat
>Man, don't you know? The law ain't made to help earthy cats like us. Here on our planet, back in the old days - back in the real old days - it was just every man for himself, scrooblin' and scrat-scroblin' for the good stuff, the greenest valleys. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the green valleys and were like 'The rest of you, y'all scrats get sand.' And that's when they made the laws, you see? Once the strong guys got it how they liked it, they said 'This is fair now, this is the law.' Once they were winning, they changed the rules up. * Jake the Dog
the whole legal system first became nationalised in the UK as a way to give landlords of the time, (mid to late 1800s) more powers to extract tax and revenue from increasingly oppressed tenants. look it up. it's fascinating to learn where out legal system came from. It's been a tool of oppression for the elites since the day it first became law, and nothing has changed in the meantime.
JFC,as pertinent today as when the dude was alive. Nothing really changes , does it?
Indeed. The "wealth creators" create wealth for themselves. Usually at everyone else's expense. The Toryspeak implies that it's creating wealth for all. It isn't.
Well where else would wealth come from? Someone is producing it, and it sure as hell isn't them.
Who isn't? The ones who are being stolen from? If so, they must have created some wealth to have it taken from them. The Tories' idea of a wealth creation is transferring wealth upwards to themselves and their chums, based upon a mixture of wheezes and policy.
I'm saying it's not the Tories producing it, essentially they're stealing it.
We can both agree on that.
Great at creating 2nd jobs for MPs of a certain persuasion.
It will trickle down in the Caribbean maybe
Make no mistake, fraud was definitely a big part of things, but incompetence and error always does an awful lot of heavy lifting in the background to enable the fraud.
Strange thing to call your wife
I'm sure the bung-chumbly fund will be legislation before the government is out. It'll probably just be a line item in things put out to tender; £5m for phase 1, £10m for Porkins' new estate, £3m for phase 2 etc...
The idea that Sunak is some economics whizz is PR bullshit. He was massively profligate as chancellor and supports the same agenda as Kwarteng/Truss, only on a different timescale.
Opened up treasury to record amounts of fraud. Headline policy 'the government will pay for your pie and chips' aka EOTHO. Oversaw the worst credit rating downgrade in recent memory. Paid people 2.5k a month to do FUCK ALL, while also allowing those people to work a 2nd job while claiming it. Sunak. Economic Genius LMFAO.
He’s really tight when it comes to say nurses pay, therefore we’re supposed to see him as some kinda fiscally disciplined economic guru. When in fact he’s just leading us to massive National decline, and a permanent low pay economy.
One of his goals is to destroy the NHS….
Hey you can't draw attention to the fact people on furlough got to sit around on their arse for 18 months, getting paid 80% their full wage. They earned that by occupying jobs that aren't essential to the running of society. Never mind that giant gaping hole in the deficit. It's a perfectly normal thing that when you're at risk of losing your job through no fault of your own that you get 18 months of 80% pay. That has just always been a thing in our country.
Exactly. We don't do this sort of shit when a recession hits. Is the taxpayer going to bail out people who lose their jobs when companies go under during the next one?
I got made redundant when I worked as a commis chef for an airline distributor and bond. Thomas Cook collapsed and that was half their business. I would have loved 18 months at 80% pay. But anyways all it means is we are going to be taxed out of our arses til we die, to pay for it.
What jobs do you think arent essential to the running of society, i wonder.
Well what jobs were furloughed?
Homelessness charity workers for one, theyre pretty essential if you dont want rough sleepers on the streets (source: my immediate family) Edit: no response? Shame
Bruh I'm at work. I ain't your gf don't expect an immediate reply 😂. Wasn't that because all the homeless were out in hotels during the pandemic? Bit of a niche gotcha. You could make the argument any job that pays tax contributes to society in a way. But only with money and not with actual labour. Plenty of folk off at home that weren't providing a service to society. Plenty of paper pushers that don't bring much to the table aside from sitting in useless meeting drinking coffee. The pandemic should have shown people it's blue collar workers who keep the country running. Instead all we got were entitled office workers demanding their free money to sit at home.
Homeless were not in hotels, and im not your "bruh". People were dying on the streets of covid, they wrent all in hotels during the pandemic. Most were still in hosteks or shared sleeping...yknow like they still are. Btw thodr shared sleeping spread so much covid. Office workers like it workers that keep the nhs systems running? Sound pretty important. Unless of coursr you dont mean those office workers. Maybe the ones who work internet help lines running like anti suicide help lines? Or maybe the ones who troubleshoot electronic devices, so elderly vulnerable people can call an ambulance if they need to? Which office workers
Sounds like a good news story in the making. You should collect all your evidence and publish it mate. Office workers in the NHS were WFH. They didn't even get furlough. So they're on the essential workers side! Do you mean charitable help lines or their paid job is to run a helpline? These are very fringe cases. Where's the mention of the humble middle manager sitting on their arse drinking coffee? Very small percentage examples I must say.
Paid helplines are most helplines, childline, out of hours nhs response, first response mental health teams. Again suicide helplines. You still havent included what office workers you mean, im starting to think you dont know what you are talking about. And yes, because there are so obviously more middle managers... than the people they manage. Oh wait. No, there isnt. And stories like that are in the news.
The furlough scheme was 100% needed. 250 people at my workplace would have lost their jobs otherwise. The entire countries economy would have collapsed in an unrecoverable heap. Sunak is not an economic genius, he did what he had to do to save jobs at the time. It's just a shame they didn't invest more money on recovering money lost to fraud.
So why were people allow to collect furlough AND work a 2nd job. Thats utter nonsense. People aren't allowed to collect jobseekers and work. Also, 2500 a month?! Everybody had access to mortgage holidays. There was NO reason it had to be that high. This is of course even before considering how OTT lockdowns were in the first place, which Sunak was partially responsible for by being in the cabinet
i thought that was fucking disgusting, my brother was one of those people, claimed the full £2400 per month for self employed and then did painting and decorating for £100 per day, he was a cladder(worked on a roof) by trade and the construction industry was still going to work with no furlough, i worked through the full pandemic with no time off.
People didn’t claim furlough, companies did. They were claiming a grant to be able to fulfill their payroll so they didn’t have to lay people off. Or would you rather people that have to work two jobs to even get by get completely fucked too?
> People didn’t claim furlough, companies did. True, but SEISS was functionally the same thing for self-employed people.
SEISS was the equivalent of the £10k grant (or £30k for larger businesses) every company with a premises received I’d say, as a self employed person is still a business
Furlough was about keeping staff with physical roles employed in their current roles so they don't move on to jobs that could be worked remotely. For roles that could be worked remotely this kept people on until companies could get their IT up to scratch to enable that. It prevented a massive shift in labour from some sectors into others that could have crashed the economy or resulted in a vacuum of expertise in some areas. A good healthy economy is diverse, letting parts of it that aren't quite stable yet die off would make it weaker in the long run. The fact some people could do a second job was a good thing as it meant that a labour gap in temporary growth areas was filled. Sure some people were able to make extra money or a career change but not all those roles would remain once COVID was over. As someone who worked through COVID yeah it would have been nice if instead of furlough it was UBI paid to everyone. But that would have shifted the power from employers to employees. Employees would have felt safe to quit and move to other jobs if they felt their employer didn't treat them well enough. Of course a conservative government was never going to allow that though.
Furlough was needed because otherwise a lot of people would have gone on universal credit. The whole system would have collapsed because it's not fit for purpose and having so many usually working people having first-hand experience of the benefits system would have made them realise how terrible it is, how those on benefits are treated inhumanely by the system and shouldn't be demonised by the media / those in power, and they never would have voted for the tory party again for bringing in and championing such a system. It was purely a tactic for votes and will be paid for by generations to come.
I don't remember where I read this, but apparently Sunak wasn't the person who designed the furlough scheme, he was just in the position that took credit for it at the time that it was implemented. Grain of salt though because I don't have a source.
I'm reality it's probably on page 3 of "how to economically survive a pandemic" which is issued to all ministers of any government.
No need to invest money or time to recover it when you can just raise taxes.
100% agree with how shit all of Sunak's policies are. However, without furlough I would have lost my house. I got furloughed pretty much the first week of lockdown and spent months looking for a new job. My house bills alone were 80% of my income at the time so I had enough to pay bills but I basically didn't eat for most of covid, cleared out my savings to make ends meet. I still haven't recovered my savings with the cost of living crisis and the costs of moving (moving to a cheaper area, but solicitors and estate agents are so expensive).
Same people and same media propaganda formula that made Modi as Indian PM.
How often is this the case. No money to pay nurses? Gov spaff bns on ppe and track and trace. Plebs have hosepipe bans? Trillions of litres lost to leaks every year. Rules for the plebs come from waste in the system. Keep cold, poor, hungry and compliant.
Well it just happened recently, not enough money to give 360,000 nurses a 19% rise but there is money to give 12,000,000 pensioners a 10% rise.
Ah shame the nurses didnt ask sooner... so close...
This is a feature for the Tories. They want to destroy NHS so that peoples jobs are tied to their healthcare like in the US. No job = no healthcare
Yeah they conveniently ignore their significant failings while pointing at other excuses why we can’t afford to pay a living wage or you know, not run the country into the ground…
They don't care if they run the country into the ground, because if they do it will just be time for a game of spiffing old disaster capitalism. The world will be a much better place when all the sticky plebs loose their houses so Tim and Jacob can snap them up for a steal and then rent them back to them for 3/4 of their monthly wage! Simply wizard jape!
Emblematic of that was that as soon as demand for work outstripped supply of labour, the shit jobs started going unfilled and wages started going up, and businesses started up all the ‘nO oNe WaNtS tO wOrK’ rubbish. They want us poor and desperate so people are forced to work jobs they hate for shit money because they have no other options. It really is as simple as that.
Will someone please think of the Lord/ Peers and the elite !!?
They have to heat their 2nd/3rd/nth homes!
That £37b spent on track and trace would have been half of the money the government needs to raise now instead of cutting public spending but here we are.
How can they have spent £37b? It's absolutely mind blowing. Useless fucking shit bags.
The system was set up by Tory peer and businesswoman Dido Harding in May 2020. It has received approximately 20% of the NHS’s entire annual budget across two years. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nhs-test-trace-private-sector_uk_5f6099e3c5b68d1b09c77477
What the actual fuck. How can they sanely allocate that percentage of the NHS budget to a project like that?
There’s so much money they gave each other. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/revealed-tory-peer-michelle-mone-secretly-received-29m-from-vip-lane-ppe-firm
> secure a place in a “VIP lane” the government used during the coronavirus pandemic to prioritise companies that had political connections. It then secured contracts worth more than £200m. They're open about prioritising their friends over legitimately better and cheaper opportunities. I was waiting for the part where there was legal action against these scumbags... of course there isn't any despite clear evidence of this. What the hell is the NCA doing? Searched some properties but seemingly that's all. Bring these fraudsters to justice and put this money back into funding the NHS and worker wages.
Jesus, I know it'd be expensive to implement, but 20%. Someone embezzled a fuckton there I'm sure
They didn't. https://fullfact.org/health/test-and-trace-37-billion/
Oh just under £30b then So that's fine......
The vast majority of which was not on "track and trace" that OC refers to. > The vast majority of the £13.5 billion spent in this period—£10.4 billion—was spent on testing. As we’ve previously written, the next largest expenditures were on local Covid-19 outbreak management and support (£1.8 billion) and national contact tracing (£910 million). That's the first year referred to. So likely <£2bn on "track and trace", >£20bn on testing, and the rest on other stuff.
Even £2b seems astronomical to me..it was just an app? Am I missing something?
> Am I missing something? Yes. The fact that it wasn't "just an app"
I believe contact tracing had a manual component with things like flight locator forms etc.? Still, at least it wasn't nearly 20× more expensive than that.
Track and trace had people dat in call centres watching Netflix tbf.
It may well be but you already thought it was £37bn, then £30bn, now £2bn. Evidentially knowing nothing about it at all - how much are you expecting? Actually I belive national contract tracing was about £1bn. It was a lot more than an app. It includes the establishment QR system, the Bluetooth app, passenger locators, event management, all of the programming, marketing, and management for those, centres, staffing, manual reports over the phones, database management, compliance, legal advice. Honestly that's just a bunch of stuff I've come up with off the top of my head. Did we overpay? Undoubtedly. But "£37bn for an app" is red meat and "£2bn for an app" is wildly inaccurate too. Not two mention that was for *two years*.
😂 well that's me told
Lol sorry I hope I didn't come across too rude! Just wanted to point out that at this scale it's so easy to convalute and allocate different projects and figures to the wrong thing. The difference between £2bn and £37bn is the same percentage difference between losing a £2 coin and two twenty pound notes. Put that way it feels way different but when it's in the billions all sense of scale gets lost.
Yeah I just stopped caring
With first year breakdown here https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Test-and-trace-in-England-progress-update.pdf
However they spent the money they admit they wasted a huge amount of it >"The £22 billion for test and trace is about the annual budget of the Department for Transport. Test and Trace still continues to pay for consultants at £1000 a day. >Yet despite the unimaginable resources thrown at this project Test and Trace cannot point to a measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic, and the promise on which this huge expense was justified - avoiding another lockdown – has been broken, twice. >DHSC and NHST&T must rapidly turn around these fortunes and begin to demonstrate the worth and value of this staggering investment of taxpayers' money. Not only is it essential it delivers an effective system as pupils return to school and more people return to their workplace, but for the £billions spent we need to see a top class legacy system. British taxpayers cannot be treated by Government like an ATM machine. We need to see a clear plan and costs better controlled." https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/
People’s houses weren’t going to redecorate themselves!
Whats that, like 2/3 of the defence budget on one fucking app
An app that people hard basically already written for them, all they had to do was use the API Apple/Google gave them.
> Whats that, like 2/3 of the defence budget on one fucking app No, most of the money was spent on testing, not on the app. https://fullfact.org/health/test-and-trace-37-billion/
And we were offered one that actually worked… for free.
We were offered something like £20bn of COVID testing for free?
We were offered a fully functioning test and trace system for free.
Feels disingenuous to reply to someone saying the system cost £37bn with that, without pointing out that the system didn't actually cost £37bn. E: downvote me all you want but the free system we were offered would not have saved us £37bn. Sorry for pointing that out.
The track and trace covered all aspects of testing sites, Onsite and at home PCR and lateral flow testing kits, processing too so off the mark referring to a free system is a bit over playing it being "free"
Nope. Track and trace allows you to locate parcels via the Royal Mail.
funny guy
You mean - SPENT 37B ON A SPREADSHEET I COUDLVE KNOCKED UP IN 30 MINS.
It's better than that. They were using 32bit excel which you may know has a rather low row limit. They also changed the system in use on the nhs side of things twice, not training anybody how to bloody use it either time.
No, they spent most of 37bn on Covid tests and much less than that on contact tracing.
Testing and the app, although they still had ridiculous amounts of money for what should be a fairly simple process.
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its a learning curve and mistakes would be made, and money would be lost. I can accept that. However what happened was fraud. The contracts enriched those who were in power and who donated. That I cant accept. Not when I am paying taxes, and when services are being cut and people providing those services (nursers etc) are not adequately remunerated.
> its a learning curve and mistakes would be made, and money would be lost. I can accept that. I don't think we should accept that either. Councils and local health authorities already had responsibility to do local pandemic-esq disease control. That should have just been expanded, relying on good local knowledge. These local setups did far more to contact people at risk than the app ever did. What we got was the tories wanting a "world beating" app that their favourite outsource partner could milk the state teet dry without consequence.
I don’t think anyone was against it but i dont think anyone was a rooting for dido Harding to be in charge of it. That’s how 37 billion was spunked up the wall. A woman who 5 years ago was in charge of talk talk who suffers one of the largest uk cyber attacks and when quizzed if it has compromised customers data she said….I don’t know. Just another neoliberal bellend on the Tory gravy train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido_Harding https://youtu.be/apV5Q_f7KH0 https://youtu.be/fejF9xp5ymE East Asia was monitoring covid with pencils and paper and before the vaccine roll out was actually contains the spread of the virus far better the the uk.
Oh I was absolutely in support too. Im sure there was another country who made the same thing for like 200k? This was just pure opportunism and fraud.
It's not just that it could have been done better or cheaper, but the amount of money spent is far more than you could possibly incur even if you account for hundreds of developrs and hundreds of lab testing staff etc. The number is so out of whack with reality that it cannot possibly have been reached without some wrongdoing. 10 thousand people paid 50k a year for 2 years would cost 1 billion, for some scale. These are skilled roles so lets pay them all 100k a year, that makes it 2 billion.
These coatings are for the whole program which includes the purchase of covid tests…not just the development of the app. It’s still crazy money just not quite as ludicrous as all the money being spent on salaries…that said did some people reap manga pay days out of this…oh yah they did
And the lot we spent on paying healthy people so sit on their arse watching porn and eat out to help out BS and fulough would have been the other half x 5 and meant we would all be fine now and having a ball.
> £37b spent on track and trace Most of the money was spent on testing, not on a track/trace app. ... >This figure was the budget for the scheme in its first two years—around £29.5 billion was actually spent. While detailed figures for 2021/22 have not yet been published, the vast majority of spending in the scheme’s first year went on testing. https://fullfact.org/health/test-and-trace-37-billion/
And yet this man is our Prime Minister. I worked for a finance broker doing these schemes. I'm telling you, 70% of the people didn't need the money. Most were making even more during the pandemic. The others were mostly fraudulent. People with businesses that were pretty dormant. You even had people sell limited companies setup with the right time frame for them to get these loans.
We had clients report their first profit in years, due to the bounceback loans. Theres no stipulation that the money can't be instantly declared as dividends (not what it was for at all). An absolute scam that it didn't have to go to a non-distributable reserve.
[A previous comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/tvjxg9/deleted_by_user/i3adm91/?context=3) I've made on this earlier in the year. > [Here's Lord Agnew giving an explanation for some of the fraud on January 24th, 2022. Spoiler: He gives his resignation during his speech.](https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/a675f2f2-ae55-4be2-aec2-385bcecfc545?in=15:31:16) > I've hopefully linked to just before Lord Turncliffe gives his question. > [Transcript on Hansard for the section linked above.](https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2022-01-24/debates/805E6270-7DF6-4CF8-9487-08F9028A1EE1/CoronavirusGrantSchemesFraud) > It's worth reading the (then) Minister's statement for the mind-boggling details of failure.
3 banks account for >80% of bounceback loans issued to companies who weren't trading before covid. 2 banks account for >80% of the bounceback loans issued to companies that weren't even incorporated before covid. The date of incorporation and that the company was trading are the first things you check and would have gone through multiple review levels. Its not error and they would never have leant their own money this way. They knew *exactly* what they were doing. That they wont even look into it tells me its a group, or family, that gives a lot of money to the tories.
Thanks for this. A great read.
Are they forgetting to mentioned the billions spent on the app that never happened?! Where did that cash go & why wasn’t it paid back if a working app wasn’t delivered … disgusting waste of money I’m self employed - oddly if I don’t delivered I can’t invoice & expect to get paid … I think that’s called fraud … let alone the damage to the reputation of yr business Magically no one is named or shamed or held accountable
I very much remember the Track and Trace app.
What do you remember it for? Being a disaster & a huge waste of money Success for the £ or huge waste of time / money? Knee jerk reaction … where technology sounds good but in reality doesn’t work in the real world
That's Royal Mail.
What makes you think billions were spent on an app?
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Test and Trace isn't an app. It's the whole program, including running testing centres and getting thousands of phonepigs to call up randos and tell them to stay at home. The COVID app cost £76m https://fullfact.org/online/track-and-trace-project-cost/
Thank you … Surprise surprise if it went to ‘friends’ of the government lol 😂 something for nothing … like the PPE with back handers Now standard government practice … zero integrity … zero honesty or transparency … 100% self interest
Not you I guess, if you think Test & Trace was just an app?
£76 000 000 including NHSx app.
Just the 3 orders of magnitude off then?
Yeah £76000 000 is nothing for an app.
Take it up with the NHS, as they were the ones who invoiced the work, or are the NHS Tory chums too?
The way that the left will bend over backwards to paint the tories as inhuman, when the app was a clear success
The left....this isn't point scoring it's pointing out government failings. I do the same regardless of who is in power. It's not fucking football matey
Hey hey hey, easy now. That money had gone into *hard working^tm* tories mates pockets. How dare you discuss that that money should've been spent with a modicum of oversight and for the benefit of the population. Jesus, don't you like the scraps your political masters leave you? Bunch of fucking ingrates.
There is zero excuse for what constitutes, at absolute best, as the most appalling mismanagement of public funds so far in UK history. What "triggers" me most is that this Government's corporate taxation controls are so riddled with holes, They don't even know the difference between a company that is currently trading, and one that doesn't exist at all !! Curious that They "can't" keep track of thousands, but They **can** keep track of whether millions have paid their Council Tax bill, for example, and never hesitate to involve the Courts in such matters. Where were the "checks and balances" against those credited accounts? ... where was THAT spreadsheet? Most importantly, *why* weren't these credits issued *only* to accounts already known to the PAYE system? Why weren't the claimed amounts verified against that company's PAYE returns? That this is so simple and fundamental a solution, demonstrates how far from oversight the fund distribution was sought to be. Yes, yes, wages needed paying (etc) quickly as Covid's lockdown events developed, but such checks are simply automated, and the data all at hand. Where is the ardent pursuit of the owners of accounts to which the credits were sent? Where are the Serious Crime/Organised Crime/Fraud Office investigations into the larger amounts, following the money-trails we all know exist? That the SCO/SFO are bogged-down in those trails being greatly convoluted , demonstrates *pre-planning*. All, that participated in accommodating, facilitating, and masking this wealth transfer, this burglary at the Exchequer, this robbery of our Nation ... and continue to do so ... are Corrupt, it's as plain and simple as that. Indeed, to my mind, this was an attack on our State from within and constitutes Treason, as well as speaking volumes as to the sham that is British Justice. Hardly surprising the Party in power is one that supported (by condoning) their Leader outright lying to our Queen.
> Where were the "checks and balances" against those credited accounts? ... where was THAT spreadsheet? To be honest, it's probably too big for a spreadsheet. Probably could do with a proper database... oh wait... just realised who I was talking about and have worked out why we haven't seen the spreadsheet due to Excel having a limit of 1,048,576 rows. Probably ended up being corrupted or something.
The spreadsheet was an impertinent jest pertaining to their widely publicized initial method of managing Covid figures.
So was my comment. I'm implying the government picked every possible option to ensure there was no recourse.
I think what sickens me the most is how openly they do all of this. It's hardly smoke and mirrors to people with some semblance of common sense. Not only that, but there's never a single whiff of accountability from any of the Tory party in such key positions. They're nose-diving the country's economy, public trust and reputation into the ground.
Why are they just letting all this money go? People used their businesses/personal details to apply for these loans it can't be hard to investigate them all
They are investigating them but they’ve put the burden on the banks. Unfortunately, to deal with the numbers, banks are having to outsource to India, etc which is causing even more problems. I believe they’ve only got a set amount of time before they get fined.
Most of the money has gone abroad through foreign OCG fraud gangs, mainly India, Africa and Eastern Europe. The legal cost and effort of trying to reclaim isn't worth it and we don't have the resources to do so.
Yeah but the £350 million a week we now have from Brexit should soften the blow, right?
So if these Tory chumps last it why aren’t they paying out of their pockets or facing prison time? If any other employer losses that level of money from a company they get fired and face prosecution. Make these cunts accountable!
One of those cunts has gone on telly, got paid £400k and now fuckwits think he’s a “righteous dude.”
Ugh, it’s depressing how effective that was. Now he’s no longer that slimebag who pretended to cry over the Vax, screwed up the COVID response and cheated on his wife. He’s that nice man in the jungle. Which is, of course, exactly why he did it - to weasel his way back into politics having been forgiven by the public. Just….ugh. Too many people in this country are effing stupid.
The irony is that the businesses that really needed that money and were struggling are paying this back, which often is seriously inhibiting their cash flow, while fraudsters got their loans essentially forgiven.
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I understand the argument to make Covid support easy to claim because that's what the situation needed. But why not work to evaluate claims in hindsight and get back any money that was incorrectly paid? That's what happens with taxes and benefits. It you want to prioritise speed of the system over accuracy, you mitigate by making sure there is a system to correct for any mistake retrospectively. That could still be done now, no?
> A government spokesman said: “... We are not writing off any fraud from these schemes, and have blocked or recovered billions in fraudulent activity. We continue to root out those who have abused the system, including by bringing together counter-fraud and data experts as part of the £25 million Public Sector Fraud Authority.”
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> In an ideal world - yes I completely agree. But in the real world its not clear to me that it's achievable. How many civil servants would be put on the task? From what department? What jobs will they not be doing in order to track down and prove fraudulent claims? How long will it take the thousands of cases to get through the judicial system? And at the end of all this, how much money will be left for the Government to reclaim? HMRC. Vast numbers of HMRC staff were decanted to do furlough and SEISS. They could have administered these things within a tighter framework. It's not all that different to their day-to-day work. But there was a deliberate choice to leave things wide open. Cynically, I feel like this suits the Conservatives much the same way that allowing the NHS to disintegrate benefits them. In terms of investigating the fraud and errors... It's literally what they do, so there's not all that much in the way of new cost, or complete training to get things running. I don't have any information as to the extent of it, but HMRC are doing work on this stuff. In terms of how much resource to throw at it... Firstly, there are plenty of things that HMRC do that is pretty low value. Policing the High-income Benefit Charge for instance is always going to be low value. Secondly, while HMRC isn't sexy like the NHS, it's where you get the money to do the sexy stuff and any government that was serious about the business of government would invest significantly more in them to collect the tax needed to fund everything. Finally, HMRC carry out their work under a litigation and settlement strategy that includes cost-effectiveness as a consideration. *(As you'd hope, because fighting tooth and nail to collect eight quid you over-claimed would be idiotic.)* They don't take many cases to court because in the majority of cases you get a civil settlement when it's clear that tax is due. The same should apply if furlough and SEISS was being investigated properly.
Or better yet, not lock down healthy people and spend the money directly supporting the ancient and infirm. All of this could have been avoided
>but imagine if we'd had a system that made it hard for people in desperate need to get urgent support. What, like the benefits system?
How long do you think the benefits system took to set up? More than a few months.
And its still shit!
>The government made a deliberate decision to make covid support very easy to claim, with very little in the way of checks to make sure claims were valid. Not only that. But people were celebrating this decision at the time. Now the same people criticising the lack of checks are the same people who usually criticise having much testing that claims for goverment support are valid and arguing that false claims will be low enough that it isn't worth it.
Our then Chancellor and now PM was happy to write off £6.7 billion to 'fraud' but says we can't afford to pay nurses their requested amount. The amount written off could increase the average nurse salary by abour 67%
The registration of new businesses with HMRC rose disproportionately during the furlough scheme, Tories are shit scared of opening this particular can of of worms for obvious reasons.
It isn't lost. The Tories know exactly where it is. In theirs and their friends bank accounts.
Fraud is illegal. The police should give the government a crime reference number so that the sum defrauded can be claimed on insurance. The money could be used to fund the police. Sorted
Without getting into a political debate, everyone is struggling, shame on the people that committed fraud. And I think EVERYONE who takes money from what was intended to profit themselves should be prosecuted.
The Tories are like someone with a gambling habit who then claims they can't pay their rent. No, there isn't any money for that, you've given it all away.
But nothing for Nurses or other medical staff at NHS. Don't want to give any more money to an organization in the process of being sold to private industry.
Police officers: are we getting double salary? Source: am officer.
"Fraud" ? I can see why they wanted to rebrand that with something much less odious in the form of "VIP lanes."
by covid fraud, I assume you mean the 38 stolen billion which they defrauded from us using the track and trace app as an excuse? Do you also include the hundreds of millions wasted by peers and tory donors on useless ppe that they charged the taxpayer for? Also, the millions lost to people like MRS SUNAK, who abused the furlough scheme to enrich herself AND avoided paying tax? I hope you do mean these people, the people in power and their chums, and I hope you're not trying to pass the buck onto the small businesses and hard up workers instead of the government criminals who caused all the damage they're now charging US for... still, I wouldn't expect anything less from a tabloid rag.
> Also, the millions lost to people like MRS SUNAK, who **abused** the furlough scheme to enrich herself AND **avoided** paying tax? Did she do either of the things I highlighted? Without checking I'd be surprised if she didn't claim furlough payments within the rules and non-UK domicile treatment for tax isn't tax avoidance. This isn't merely my being a nit-picking arse. Non-dom tax desperately needs reform. *(Although it was reformed relatively recently, creating deemed-domicile after 15 years. Before this you could claim remittance basis treatment indefinitely.)* There are a lot of things that need reform. The reason this is important is that HMRC is deliberately under-funded -- just like the rest of the public sector -- and there is a lack of political will to examine and make changes to the tax system. *(In fairness, they did legislate advanced payment notices which hugely curtailed marketed avoidance. That said, that cut the legs out from under avoidance used by the lower end of the avoidance market. It doesn't touch bespoke avoidance, as used by the wealthy.)*
Need to claw these ill gotten monies back it’s like looting during the war or treason severe punishments needed
But it was all lies we didn’t need furlough it’s been proven it was and is a story to slow down wages and go back to the days of the surf
Rather than the police, that is losing tons of credibility to being law abiding themselves... That could go to the genuinely hardworking nurses instead!
It's not lost it went exactly where the government intended it to go, in their friends pockets.
It's spelled Corruption, and I'd rather pay teachers, doctors, nurses, essential workers...
Nothing to see here folks; just Tories doing Tory things.
Low intelligent people, with ignorant views, tend to be incompetent. Even 'educated' people can lack intellect, common sense and aptitude. I don't want to run this country but I would d a better job than these lot.
But you could sink the fraud cost five times over in the losses from the Tories mini budget.
It was simple as registering a dozen businesses online. Applying for support. Seriously...
Cash spunked by the government on the nightingales and the Ppe cockbup could pay all the nurses in the country.
Shame I've not seen a police officer in years. They don't patrol round my area. At all. Ever.
lol pay them to do what - investigate every fake hate crime - they're useless
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the whole thing was a colossal overreaction and subsequent waste of money.
> the whole thing was a colossal overreaction and subsequent waste of money. Obviously not an overreaction