There were hints of toughness in his article at the weekend, but now David Cameron has rolled up his shirt sleeves and pulled out the baseball bat. In a
combative piece for the Manchester Evening News the PM outlines out a zero tolerance approach to
welfare fraud and administrative error. The two problems “cost the taxpayer £5.2 billion a year,” he says, “that’s the cost of more than 200 secondary schools or over 150,000
nurses. It’s absolutely outrageous and we can not stand for it.” And so IDS is going to prepare “an uncompromising strategy for tackling fraud and error,” which will be published
this autumn.
Two things are worth keeping a close eye on. First, the Lib Dem reaction to all this. Cameron’s direct rhetoric probably won’t sit right with some in the yellow corner, but their real concern will be one proposed element of the crackdown: allowing private
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