MIGRANTS bring only 4p a week in financial benefit to each person living in Britain.  The economies they left behind are receiving an enormous boost as workers send home £10 million to their families every day.

UNEMPLOYMENT costs the taxpayer a massive £61 billion a year, with more than five million who could work claiming benefits.  The analysis of official data by the House of Commons library takes into account not just the costs of benefits paid to the unemployed, but also the taxes they and their employees would pay if they were in a job.  The real level of unemployment is 5.2 million.  This is based on the numbers claiming benefits who could be employed if they were given support or training.  Taking into account the tax revenue lost the cost of unemployment is £61 billion. That works out to £2,810 for every household in Britain.  Those living on state aid account for 14 per cent of the working age population, or nearly one in seven.

How it all adds up:-  Incapacity £32.5 billion., Jobseekers £9.7 billion,  Lone parent £9.7 billion,  Income support, carers and disability benefits £9.1 billion.  This gives the £61 billion total if you add them up.

Labour's flagship welfare-to-work programme has become an expensive revolving door, with hundreds of thousands going straight back on to benefits after leaving the scheme.  Official figures show more than half a million unemployed - a quarter of the total - have been through the controversial New Deal programme more than once.

They reveal 543,750 benefit claimants have taken part in the scheme twice, 171,290 three times, 11,900 five times and ten people an extraordinary ten times.  More than 1.2million youngsters aged 16 to 24 are not in work or full-time education - more than in 1997. The New Deal has also failed to eradicate long-term youth unemployment, with 178,000 18-24 year olds remaining unemployed for more than six months.

And with the taxpayer shelling out around £1,289 per participant, the scheme is estimated to have cost almost £3billion since its conception in 1997.  Experts claim the growth of the economy has created four-fifths of New Deal jobs, regardless of the subsidies.  Liberal Democrat welfare spokesman Danny Alexander said: "For too many people the New Deal is no deal at all.

The Health Service could be "overwhelmed" by cancer sufferers from Eastern Europe, a leading doctor has warned.

There are almost twice as many smokers in Poland and neighbouring countries than the UK, which means they have far higher rates of lung and other cancers.  It comes as a new documents showed the bill for treating health 'tourists' amounts to at least £62 million a year.

Sky has a council house next door to her mother in Tonypandy, South Wales, while her big sister has moved away from the area.

The teenage mothers, their partners and Mrs Rees all rely on benefits to get by, at an annual cost to the taxpayer of £34,000, not including their free accommodation.

Both couples receive £160 a week in child benefit and tax credits, as well as £180 a fortnight in jobseekers' allowance, giving them a tax free income of £13,000 a year.

Mrs Rees herself receives jobseekers' allowance and a small amount of child tax credit as Sky is still under 18, giving her an estimated-income of £8,000.

Ashley Mote was elected in 2004 as an MEP for the UK Independence party, but was thrown out of Ukip after the fraud charges. He sat as an independent and joined a far-right bloc. Mote, who represented south-east England, was jailed for nine months. He would have been expelled from the European parliament had he been jailed for 12 months or more.

More than a million pounds a month in child benefit is going to youngsters who live in Eastern Europe, ministers admitted yesterday.

The money is being paid out to 14,000 Eastern European nationals who claim for offspring living in their home countries.

It is the first time the Government has acknowledged that the payments - funded by British taxpayers - are going abroad.

Even larger sums in tax credits for children are thought to be paid to recent migrants from Eastern Europe but ministers insist that total figures are 'not available'.

A gang of African asylum seekers pocketed £400,000 in a benefits scam - then used the cash to start building a hotel back home.

The four Angolans stole giro cheques and laundered them through fake bank accounts.
Demosthenes Barroso, 34, Paulo Alexandre, 38, Manuel Baltazar, 37, and Mizel Kinangh, 25 all face jail and extradition after being exposed in an 18-month investigation codenamed Operation Wasm.

Fraud officers have so far linked £243,000 of stolen cash to the men, although the true figure is believed to be twice that amount.

The gang, who were arrested in a series of raids, will appear at Oxford Crown Court for sentence on October 15 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud the Department of Works and Pensions.

At the home of Barroso, police found detailed blueprints of a hotel he and the gang were planning to build in Angola with the proceeds of their swindle.

Construction work had begun on the site. Police even found photos of Barroso - who claimed income support, disability living allowance, housing benefits and child tax credits - working on the site of the hotel.

Dole cheat Sadete Myrtozai has been warned she could jailed after admitting claiming tens of thousands of pounds in benefit while working.
Speaking through an Albanian interpreter the 48-year-old admitted plundering the cash from the state over a five year period.  Now the mum, who lives in Walcot, has been told by a judge at Swindon crown court she could end up behind bars as a result of her deception.  Myrtozai, of Lennox Drive, pleaded guilty to three counts of dishonestly failing to notify a change of circumstances and one of making a false representation to obtain benefits.  She also asked for a further 38 similar offences to be taken into consideration when she is sentenced.  Myrtozai continued to claim income support between December 2001 and July 2004, and September 13, 2004 and October 21, 2004, despite working.  She also had a job and claimed the cash from the end of November 2004 until the end of June 2005.  The final charge relates to her claiming housing and council tax benefit on or about July 16, 2003, and not revealing she was in work. John Dyer, prosecuting for the Department of Work and Pensions, told the court that the offending took place over a five year period.  He said that with the matters taken into consideration the total amount defrauded from the state was more than £20,000.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants are a drain on Britain and its economy, not a benefit, says a Left-leaning think tank. Migrants from many developing nations fail to pay their way, while those from wealthy countries, such as the United States and Australia, provide a boost for the economy.  The report, published today by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), sets out to reveal which nationalities are "a debit on Britain's balance sheet".  It found that fewer than half of Britain's 650,000 Somalis, Bangladeshis, Turks and Pakistanis, have jobs and the four communities have the highest levels of benefit dependency.  Britain's fastest-growing migrant group, the Poles, score above-average for employment, but have the lowest hourly pay and make a below-average tax contribution.  Channel 4 commissioned the report for a Dispatches documentary,
Immigrants: the Inconvenient Truth, to be shown tomorrow night.  The IPPR, which has close links to Labour, insisted that its report "is not an attempt to cast immigrant communities in a bad or good light".  However, its findings will be seized on by those campaigning for tighter immigration controls.  New government statistics predict a two million rise in population over the next decade due to immigration, more than previous projections.  Liam Byrne, the immigration minister, said last week that the forecast "underlines the need for swift and sweeping changes to the immigration system".  This newspaper revealed last week that one in five crimes in London is now committed by foreign nationals, with Poles, Jamaicans, Irish and Somalis at the top of the list.

A gang of African immigrants stole £250,000 in benefit cheques and then splashed out on luxury designer clothes.  The Conglese gang, whose conspiracy was so sophisticated and well-planned that it escaped detection for four years, now face deportation.  Birmingham Crown Court Recorder Justin Wigoder said the theft of more than 800 giro cheques from the post had left hundreds of needy people without funds.  Postal worker Massamba Lubamba, who stole more than 500 of the cheques, was jailed for four years.  Forger Basimo Ngolo - doctored the cheques using a typewriter, scalpels, crayons, glue, correction fluid and typewriter ribbons - was jailed for three and a half years.  'Middlemen' Willy Mazele and Cyprien Noumeme-Simetcho, were each jailed for 21 months.  A fifth defendant, a Cameroonian woman, was not recommended for deportation.

Hospitals and schools are struggling to cope with a huge influx of Eastern European children, new figures show.

The number of Polish babies born in UK hospitals has almost quadrupled since the 2004 EU expansion.

On current trends, there will be more than 13,000 such births this year, costing the NHS more than £20million.

In addition, more than 240,000 Eastern European children have arrived in Britain's schools - with head teachers warning that some are now close to breaking point

A benefits cheat netted more than £20,000 after claiming she had 18 children to clothe and feed.
Over a four-month period, Caockmari Omoike, 36, who has no children of her own, made up two imaginary families using both her own name and a false one.

As she was sentenced to a year's jail yesterday, a judge condemned the tax system, saying officials should have spotted the scam earlier.

Judge Anthony Ensor said: "It is disturbing that alarm bells did not ring when the seventh and eighth child were claimed for within weeks of the previous child appearing on the scene.

"I express my concern about the simplicity in which substantial sums were obtained over a period of time.
I would hope that steps have been taken to ensure the authorities are more vigilant."
Manchester Crown Court heard that Omoike, who was born in the Gambia but is a Swedish citizen, rented two flats in Crumpsall.

Funding hate on the State

Is anyone shocked that the wife of the senior Al Qaeda operative who planned to kill a British Muslim soldier and film him being beheaded "like a pig" is continuing to receive £20,352 of state benefits a year?

But why have the authorities allowed her to keep her children, considering that she let her husband groom them for terrorism, teaching their five-year-old how to stab a man to death and making them sleep and eat on the floor?

Surely she isn't a fit mother to raise these vulnerable and brutalised young children.

More than £1million a week is going abroad to pay for ex-pats on Incapacity Benefit. Despite a crackdown on sickness handouts at home, the Government sent up to £54.6million abroad to over 12,000 claimants last year. In the decade since Labour came to power, £496million is estimated to have been paid to those who have left the UK. Some of the money is ending up in the pockets of foreigners who fell ill while working in Britain before returning home. Claimants who live abroad do not even take regular medical checks to find out if they are still entitled to the cash. They are required only to send Department for Work and Pensions officials confirmation from a GP that they are still too sick to take a job.

Thousands of failed asylum seekers are entitled to free NHS care despite their cases being bogus, the High Court ruled yesterday.

A Palestinian who was denied treatment for a liver condition after his asylum claim was rejected used human rights laws to overturn standard NHS policy.

The landmark ruling means 11,000 other failed asylum seekers who cannot be deported could now claim free health care - at a cost of millions of pounds to the taxpayer.

After a two- day judicial review hearing, Mr Justice Mitting declared that all failed applicants who are unable to return to their homelands - either because it is too dangerous or because they lack the right documents - must have free treatment
Denying free treatment is a breach of human rights, he said.

The ruling comes amid growing concern over the impact of largescale immigration - and in particular so- called "health tourism" - on health care in Britain.

The NHS spends around £250million a year treating foreign patients, according to a recent Government report, of which an estimated £60million goes on those who have no right to free care.

THE shameless mum of Shannon Matthews has been raking in nearly £400 a week by cheating on benefits, The Sun can reveal.

Karen Matthews, 32 - accused over the abduction of her nine-year-old daughter - told officials she was looking after four of her seven children on her own.

But at the time that Shannon vanished for 24 days in February, she had been living for four years with her supermarket fishmonger boyfriend Craig Meehan, 22. He has been earning around £16,000 a year.

Meehan had bragged at the time of Shannon's disappearance: "I earn the money. I put the food on the table." He was dumped by Karen following his arrest on child porn charges.

BRITAIN is at the centre of a massive international trade in babies.
Thousands of children are being bought and smuggled into this country to help benefits cheats claim council housing and other handouts illegally.

The racket was uncovered when a woman arrived from Nigeria and went straight to council offices to demand a home, cradling a baby boy, whom she had bought for £150.

An official became suspicious and the woman is now facing jail after being convicted of child trafficking. But police fear the case is just the tip of the iceberg and that thousands of children are being smuggled in to defraud councils. They also believe that many of the displaced children end up leading lives of despair, forced to work as servants or worse.

Campaigners last night called for stiff new penalties to crack down on the scourge of the modern-day slave traders.

Last week a court heard how Nigerian-born Peace Sandberg, 40, paid £150 for a three-month-old boy in her native country. She then obtained a forged birth certificate, which she used to have a visa issued for the child by the British High Commission in Nigeria, and demanded a flat from Ealing Council in West London hours after arriving at Heathrow.

Sandberg, who had been living here in a hostel, claimed she had returned to Nigeria in December 2006 to give birth and needed her own flat

Doctors are being pressured into signing off more than 70,000 workers a year who are well enough to work, a tribunal heard. The practice, which is an indirect result of Government targets, costs the taxpayer £300million a year, it was said. The claims emerged in a tribunal case brought by two doctors in Birmingham. They say targets had created a bias in the medical assessment system, which made it easier for false claimants. Up to one in five of those applying for benefits was wrongly assessed as incapable of work, the panel heard. Dr Jakes Branton and Dr Gail Young were employed by Atos Origin, which has a seven-year, £500million contract with the Department for Work and Pensions to carry out checks on incapacity benefit applicants. If a worker is ill, they receive statutory sick pay for about 28 weeks. After this, they can apply for incapacity benefit. But to receive it, they must be independently assessed by Atos Origin. Its doctors examine about 30,000 a month to see whether they are eligible for the Government handouts, of up to £84.50 a week. But Dr Branton and Dr Young say the firm was under "significant pressure" from the DWP to meet targets for levels of complaints from applicants.

A bowls club president has been found guilty of claiming £60,000 in disability benefits while he enjoyed his sport, worked as a pall-bearer and ran his own taxi business.

Leslie Webb, 61, claimed it took him 10 minutes to walk 50 yards yet carried coffins and drove a taxi for living - while serving as the match-playing president of his local bowls club.

BENEFIT cheats who were hauled before the courts last year still owe the taxpayer a staggering £70million.
The 7,005 fraudsters in the dock in 2007 for fiddling their claims included a millionaire tycoon who claimed £109,000.

A couple who dreamed up 190 false identities claimed £750,000 in benefits.

Yet only a tiny percentage of those involved in the scams have stumped up what they owe.

The figures, revealed yesterday by the Department for Work and Pensions following a Freedom of Information request, show that of the £92m claimed by tricksters in 2007 only £22million was repaid.

Many conmen taken to court for illegally claiming 23 types of state handout will take up to 90 years to pay their debts because lenient judges ordered payments of as little at £5-a-week.

The Government's statisticians said that even though 6,878 fiddlers were found guilty - 98 per cent of those taken to court - only £22million was recovered. Campaign group the Tax-payers' Alliance is outraged by the debt - and the revelation that the scroungers do not even have to pay interest on the money they owe.

Chief executive Matthew Elliott said: "It's appalling that so many people are willing to steal from taxpayers.

"But the blame does not lie just with the fraudsters.

"It lies with the Government which allows the loopholes and the judicial system which does not hit criminals hard enough.

£33m child benefit paid to foreign children who live abroad. British child benefit paid to foreign children living abroad has rocketed by
an astonishing 72 per cent in just nine months, to £33million a year. Most of the money is going on 36,000 children still in Poland whose parents
are cashing in on European rules that let them claim benefits in the UK after working and paying taxes here for a year.

THE number of jobless claiming handouts for being "too stressed" to work has soared by 800 per cent under Labour.
A record 51,790 claimants pick up stress-related incapacity benefit and cost hard-hit taxpayers £122million every year in Britain's sicknote culture.

The payments - which have soared from just 5,700 before Labour came to power in 1997 - reflect a growing awareness of illnesses linked to stress at work, insist officials. But critics suspect many claimants are workshy scroungers malingering at the taxpayer's expense.

The figures - revealed only after a Freedom of Information request - will fuel growing concern over the £12billion annual cost of sickness benefits handed out to around 2.7million people.

A £1million benefit fraudster who claimed she acted under a voodoo curse - and produced her daughter's severed fingers in court as evidence - was jailed for five years yesterday.

A judge told Remi Fakorede, 46, that her testimony had been 'utterly unbelievable'. Mother-of-six Fakorede had invented at least five phantom families, some with disabled children,
to claim tax credits. During her three-week trial she claimed her bank accounts had been taken over by a 'voodoo man', whose curse had already killed her mother.Asked why she
did not contact police, she told jurors that when her daughter was a baby, she suffered kidney failure and her fingers dropped off. She said the voodoo man told her she would
suffer the same fate if she exposed the plot. It was at that point that she reached into her pocket and brought out a piece of tissue containing three little fingers.

DNA tests confirmed that they belonged to her daughter, who is understood to have suffered from gangrene after her kidney failure. One juror was left in tears by the macabre stunt.
Yesterday, Judge Jacqueline Beech told Fakorede: 'I find you to be a thoroughly dishonest woman. Your conduct in court was a barefaced attempt to manipulate the jury.'

Snaresbrook Crown Court in East London had heard that £500,000 passed through Fakorede's bank accounts during the five-year scam, with a wider crime 'syndicate' linked to
Nigeria pocketing £936,933. Fakorede, who holds British and Nigerian passports, was already receiving an annual income of up to £40,000 from property in Nigeria.

She also ran a hairdressing salon and owned two East London properties worth hundreds of thousands. But she told housing benefit authorities she was penniless and out of work.
She submitted 39 claims for tax credits, largely for children she had invented, and used a string of stolen National Insurance numbers.The court heard the handwriting on most
of the the false claim forms could be linked to Fakorede, of Hackney, East London, and the cash was paid into an account in her maiden name.

In the only case where she used her own name, she lied about her work and claimed for a child she did not have. She said she was a single mother, but investigators
discovered her husband was still with her, although he has since left.Judge Beech called the scam, which ran from August 2002 to June last year, 'a wholesale assault on the benefit system'.

She condemned the ease with which Fakorede had been able to carry out the fraud and called for a review of the system which allows benefits to be paid into any bank account.

Fakorede had denied committing fraud, but showed no reaction to the verdict until discussions began about confiscating her assets, when she sank her head into her hands.

Her daughter, Denise Shofolawe- Coker, 21, was jailed for a year for laundering £70,000. HM Revenue and Customs said later: 'We have put in place vigorous strategies
to identify, combat and stop fraud".

Dear Adrian,

Thank you for your heartfelt email, and of course you’re absolutely right. Why should people who work hard be penalised, and those who do nothing get everything?

Speaking personally, I used to have some bone-idle neighbours (father off work permanently with a supposed ‘bad back’) who had their rent and council-tax paid, plus they claimed disability benefit, and the mother worked part-time in a shop but didn’t declare her wages. They were well-off in comparison to those of us who worked. Eventually, they decided they wanted a bigger house so the mother deliberately got pregnant again to get one – and she told me this herself!

Recently, I spoke to a gentleman who had been homeless for 12 years after his wife divorced him. He got in touch with us because he knew of a Romanian ‘Big Issue’ seller who came to England and got a council house within a week. The housing and benefits system in our country was originally set up to help the very poorest people in our country but has become utterly corrupt and misused for political ends.

The British National Party intend to have a full shake-up of the welfare system. Once we have closed the door on immigration, we will look at every long-term unemployed case and put them to work. There are plenty of jobs available to people with a ‘bad back’. Many fraudulently claim disability benefit and we will look at all of these cases as well. Pregnant teenagers will no longer automatically get a council house, and will have to live with their parents. For youngsters who refuse to get a job, there will be places in the Army. The situation is so dire and is costing our country a fortune that only strong policies can sort it out, and that is our intention.

We will also look at imposing a ‘fair rent’ system whereby landlords can only charge so much rent for a property, and this will help those who cannot get a mortgage, as well as stopping unscrupulous landlords from charging extortionate rents for grotty bedsits and flats.

These measures will free up cash for those who genuinely deserve it – people who have been made redundant or become ill. We will not tolerate spongers within the welfare system and we believe that those who have paid taxes should, and will, be the first in the queue for assistance in times of need. In addition we plan to scrap the council tax (as it’s illegal anyway) and drastically reduce income-tax, so that workers feel the benefit of having a decent working-wage. And the money to support these policies will come through leaving the EU, which is currently costing our country some 17 million a day.

One person who will not be losing any sleep over the impact of the financial crisis is Toorpakai Saiedi, an Afghan mother of seven living in West London and receiving £170,000 a year in benefits.
While millions worry about the prospect of losing their jobs, their homes, their savings and their pensions, she is luxuriating in a £1.2 million double-fronted, seven-bedroom Edwardian villa - her staggering rent of more than £12,000 a month picked up by the British taxpayer.
Ealing Council has a statutory duty to find accommodation for the family. But because it didn't have anything big enough on its books, it approached a private letting agent - and then agreed a rent five times the going rate.

Tracey Crompton has never had a job, and her husband Harry has been out of work for 15 years.

Yet the couple live for free in a seven bedroom house with their ten children and receive £32,656 in benefits a year.

They even have their own vineyard in their 270ft long garden.

In fact, they receive so much in handouts that they have already bought and wrapped £3,000 worth of Christmas presents, and plan to buy more.

The couple say they are enjoying the credit crunch because it has forced down the price of luxury goods like TVs and computer games, but do have two gripes.

A mother from Camden is living in Britain's most expensive council house worth £2million, it emerged today.

Ruth Ben-Adir, 44, is being housed in the historic Victorian lodge which sits on the edge of a 29-acre estate in Highgate Village.

The mother-of-one moved into the Grade II-listed building while repairs are being carried out on her council home in Kentish Town.

The lodge is situated in Waterlow Park and is close to homes belonging to personalities such as George Michael and Sting, as well as Government minister Tessa Jowell.

A family of 13 is demanding that town hall chiefs rehouse them, claiming life in their four-bedroom house has become impossible.
Michelle and Robert Neasham have 11 children between them, aged from two to 17, and say they are struggling to cope with four bedrooms and one bathroom between them.
The Neashams' two-year-old daughter Yasmine still sleeps in a cot in her parents' room, while 14-year-old Carol-Anne McFadgen - Mrs Neasham's daughter from a previous marriage - has to share a double bed with stepbrothers Conner, five, and Brandon, eight.
Crowded house: Michelle and Robert Neasham with their 11 children, who are forced to share beds in a four-bedroom house
Despite receiving £2,269 a month in child benefit and child tax credits - £27,228 a year - Mrs Neasham says the money does not go far enough and life is becoming impossible in the house in Felling, Gateshead.
She said: 'We have had enough. It's a total nightmare living here. None of us have any privacy.
'We are not coping, and when we ask for help we get fobbed off. We all get on and help each other out but it's not very easy.
She and her husband married 13 years ago, bringing together her three children from her former marriage and his four children from his last relationship. The couple have since had four of their own children.
The family is now made up of Santana, 17, Tina, 17, Natalie, 16, Carol-Anne, 14, Danielle, 15, Robert, 12, Hope, nine, Brandon, eight, Amiee, six, Conner, five and Yasmine, two.

A single mother with three children has been placed by her local council in a £1.5million mews house.

The luxurious three-storey property, in the heart of London's exclusive Kensington, costs an astonishing £1,125 a week to rent - a cost being met by housing benefit, at taxpayers' expense. Appalled neighbours say the house concerned is the biggest on the central yet quiet street. Boston Ivy climbs its walls, and it features a juliet balcony and a large garage.

A Nigerian mother-of-five is living in a five bedroom, detached house with an annual rent of £25,000 paid for by taxpayers.

The house, worth as much as £1 million at the height of the property boom, is situated in a smart cul-de-sac close to shops in Edgware village, north London.

The tenant, Omowunmi Odia, said today she was pleased to be living there - the family's previous home was a cramped flat.

Mother-of-five Omowunmi Odia is pleased with her new detached house which was worth as much as £1m at the height of the property boom.

'I was living in a two-bedroom apartment with my five children and only moved in here two weeks ago,' said Mrs Odia, who is in her thirties.

'They didn't have any council houses big enough for me so I found this one. I like it; the children like it,' she added.

Mrs Odia, who drives a six-year-old family car, was forced out of her previous home after a court order was obtained against her.

Threatened with homelessness, she was rehoused by Barnet council in her new house, bought by its owners in 2005 for £650,000.

This five-bedroom London home has an annual rent of £25,000 paid for by taxpayers.

Government rules entitle Mrs Odia, who has been in the UK for 10 years, to live in a five-bedroom house.

She lives off benefits and has not been in contact with her husband, who remains in Nigeria, for at least three years.

Mrs Odia's new home also has two large sitting rooms, a conservatory which backs on to a garden, and a double garage. It is, however, unfurnished and most of the rooms are empty bar a leather sofa and armchairs in one of the sitting rooms.

Mrs Odia said the council had tried to rehouse her in Enfield, north London, but she had held out for Edgware, close to her children's schools. One of the bedrooms, she said, was "no bigger than a shoebox".

More than £4 billion of taxpayers' money is being spent on housing benefit across London - an increase of more than 40 per cent in five years.

The new figures will fuel growing concern that private landlords are profiting from a system threatening to spiral out of control.

In the 12 months to April this year, £4.15 billion was spent by the Government on housing benefit in London, compared with £2.94 billion in 2003.

Somali immigrants are milking the system with multiple identity fraud schemes.

Immigrants were able to claim multiple benefits under fictitious names using different benefit offices which were unable to cross check their validity.

A BENEFIT fraudster claimed he could only walk 20 yards – but was caught running a 10k charity race.
Brian Rawsthorne, 50, took part in the BUPA Great Manchester run in May 2007, finishing in two hours and eight minutes.

A court heard he had received more than £12,000 in Disability Living Allowance (DLA) but carried on claiming – even after the race.

Rawsthorne, of Newton Heath, Manchester, even appeared in his local newspaper boasting of how he had lost two-and-a-half stone in pre-race training.

AN ex-factory worker was yesterday ordered to repay £11,000 he fiddled by claiming he could barely walk – while he taught martial arts.
Adrian Blayney, 49, got disability living pay after hurting his back in a fall at work in 2001.

He claimed he also had a heart attack in 2002. But the court heard he ran two martial arts classes at a sports centre.

A Department of Work and Pensions official saw Blayney show fighting moves in Aberdare, South Wales, after a tip-off.

UP TO 5,000 families on benefits may be living in luxury mansions funded by taxpayers, the Government has admitted.

New legislation introduced last year allows larger families to claim housing benefit running into tens of thousands of pounds a year.

The handful of cases that has so far come to light has already prompted a public outcry and forced ministers to order a review.

As many as 5,000 families may be living at taxpayers’ expense in homes worth more than £1million.

In total, 16 families are living in million-pound-plus London properties funded by the Local Housing Allowance.

A family of benefits fraudsters falsely claimed more than £130,000 by saying they were too sick to work – while moonlighting as cleaners.

Allan Peters, 56, said he was so disabled he could barely walk, could not
leave home without an oxygen cylinder and was so weak he could not pull the bed covers over him at night.

His wife, Lorraine, 53, said she needed a stick to walk, could not go out on her own and became ‘breathless at the slightest exertion’. She also claimed she was too weak to pull a duvet over her.

Their son Garry, 31, said he was unable to work because he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis.

Another son Martin, 28, told benefits officials he was an alcoholic and that he had to look after his poorly father.

Even their uncle, Compton McKenzie, 51, was in on the act, claiming he was unable to work because he had severe agoraphobia.

A £47,000 benefit cheat couple who claimed they couldn't walk have been jailed after being filmed taking motorbike rides across Britain.

Kevin Crawford, 56, claimed he was so disabled from a damaged kneecap he could only stroll short distances.

Meanwhile, his wife Elizabeth, 59, told the authorities her rheumatoid arthritis meant she was unable to dress, bathe or even go to the toilet without having someone help her and was unable to walk or get up the stairs.

Easy riders: Kevin and Elizabeth Crawford claimed £47,000 benefits.
But the pair's scam ground to a halt when pictures of them riding their customised motorbike at rallies appeared on a bikers club website.
Fraud investigators then kept watch on the couple as they were spotted dressed in biker gear and touring the country going to festivals.

Investigators managed to capture the pair pitching their tent and camping at events they helped to organise as members of the Gold Wing motorcycle club.

A family of travellers is living in a £1million house at taxpayers' expense.

John and Serena Connors and their seven children have their rent paid by housing benefit.

Their landlady is trying to evict them because she claims they have caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage.
Luxury: The house lived in by the travellers has five bedrooms and three bedrooms.

Her case is lent weight by a leaflet issued by the Metropolitan Police allegedly about the family, which claims they are suspects in a series of 'distraction' burglaries.

But the parents, who have five girls and two boys aged four to 19, are determined to stay put and are threatening legal action over 'racism against travellers'.

The Connors moved into the home in February with the help of Barnet Council in North London. They are benefiting from the Local Housing Allowance, which was introduced last year to encourage private landlords to take in the homeless because of a shortage of council housing.
Parents: John and Serena Connors.

The council is under obligation to find them a large enough house, hence the family being placed in one of the most expensive areas.

The property in Totteridge, which has been valued at nearly £1million, has five bedrooms and three bathrooms and lies on a usually peaceful street.

Businesswoman Sapna Bukhari and her IT project manager husband Zulfi, both 38, used to rent it to professionals for £4,000 a month.

But with the market deteriorating they agreed to let it out to the Connors for £2,400 a month through housing benefit, after being assured that they were 'good tenants'.

He claimed to be penniless and fleeing persecution in his native Iran.

But, in reality, failed asylum-seeker Massoud Montazery had £550,000 in the bank, wore designer clothes and drove top-of-the-range cars.

The 29-year-old conned benefits staff into paying him nearly £25,000 before his lies began to unravel.

An immigration officer spotted him at the wheel of a Mercedes wearing expensive clothes with his wife in the passenger seat dressed in a fur coat.

He remains at liberty, however, to spend the fortune which is believed to have come from relatives.

A judge at Liverpool Crown Court decided not to jail him, despite labelling him 'dishonest', or order his deportation.

Instead, Judge John Phipps imposed a suspended jail sentence of nine months and ordered him to do 100 hours of unpaid work to be followed by a two-year supervision order.

Montazery was also found to be working illegally as a salesman for a babywear company.

THE estranged son of a mum-of-11 who lied that nine of her children were disabled to illegally claim £52,000 benefits has blasted a decision not to jail her. Marrie Louise Freeman, 42, was told by a judge she had only missed being sent to immediate custody because of the additional burden it would impose on tax payers who would have to foot the bill for the care of her seven dependant children. Freeman, of Meadow Park, Cabus, Garstang, pleaded guilty to 10 counts of tax benefit fraud in June, after her ruse was uncovered by customs officials in 2007. Recorder Rachel Smith, who sentenced her to nine months suspended for two years said: "It is not in the public interest to cast this further financial burden on the tax payer for the period of a custodial sentence which would be short in any event." But the sentence was criticised by her eldest son Callum, father of her only grandchild, whom she has disowned. The 24-year-old postman, who lives in east Lancashire, said: "It's ridiculous - she has effectively got away scot free.

A couple who set sail on a luxury yacht while running an elaborate £50,000 benefits fraud are due to be sentenced.
Swindlers Shashi Bacheta, 52, and Jeffrey Cole, 58, last month admitted a combined 20 charges connected to the fraud.
Both could be jailed after their con was revealed in an 18-month undercover investigation by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).
The couple are due to be sentenced at Swansea Crown Court after admitting conning tax payers out of thousands of pounds.

A FAMILY of former asylum seekers is living in a £1.8m central London home at a cost to the taxpayer of £1,600 a week, despite a pledge by ministers to crack down on housing benefit payments.

Somali-born Nasra Warsame, seven of her children and her mother moved into the six-bedroom property last month after Westminster council agreed to pay the rent.

Her husband and an eighth child are living in a separate “overspill” property also paid for by housing benefit. Warsame’s five-storey home boasts three sitting rooms and four bathrooms. It is within walking distance of the West End.

This weekend critics said the £1,600 payment — £83,000 a year — was “excessive” and accused the government of failing to get to grips with Britain’s annual £17 billion housing benefit bill.

Last year James Purnell, then work and pensions secretary, promised to make housing benefit “fair to taxpayers” as well as to people on low incomes.

Today’s revelations, however, appear to contradict that claim. The Warsame family home is part of a smart 1960s development just yards from Edgware Road Underground station.

It is understood that the house was previously rented out at £800 per week — considered by estate agents in the area as the going rate for similar properties. It is unclear why the taxpayer is having to pay twice that rate.

SIX moaning asylum seekers have landed bigger council houses after winning a legal battle with taxpayers’ cash. The Somalians were given free homes shortly after they arrived in Britain. But they soon complained the accommodation was too small after their families arrived from abroad. One refugee was in a two-bed flat, but a year later was joined here by his wife and six children. Another was also joined by his wife and six children before she gave birth to another child. They took their demands to court – using legal aid cash – after Birmingham council said it had no accommodation left. But yesterday it was revealed they been moved into bigger houses after winning the action. One got a five-bedroom mansion, four got four-bedroom homes and another received a three-bedroom house. None of the asylum seekers is believed to be working and all were said to be living off welfare benefits.

THOUSANDS of workers from the EU are flocking to Britain as “National Insurance tourists” to get access to our generous benefits and pensions, the Daily Express can reveal.

Polish-owned companies with UK offices are encouraging self-employed people who live and work in Poland to switch their NI payments to Britain.

All that is required is a one-day visit to London for an appointment at a JobCentre Plus to get a NI number and open a UK bank account. They are lured by the promise of a British basic pension of £412.75, compared with just £130 a month in Poland.

An investigation discovered how UK-based representatives of unscrupulous Polish firms regularly collect self-employed workers at British airports. These agents have already set up appointments at the JobCentre and bank.

The Polish workers can legitimately claim to be employed by the UK-based company, performing five hours “consultancy” work per month, which can be done by telephone or computer from anywhere in the world. The UK-registered firm, which is paid up to £100 a month by each “tourist”, issues them with payslips and pays their British NI, often as little as £10 per month.

The fee is considerably less than the £190 a month a taxi driver or hairdresser can expect to pay in contributions in Poland, and could allow them access to higher pensions and other benefits.

Businessman Ireneusz Klader, whose firm in the Polish city of Rzeszow urges self-employed Poles to “live off the Queen”, insisted his business was completely legal.

Two in three of those applying for incapacity benefit should be in day-to-day employment while tens of thousands more could undertake some form of work.

Fewer than 10 per cent of around 300,000 claimants were found unable to work at all. The findings reveal the culture of dependence created by Labour and suggest that more than two million of the 2.6 million currently claiming incapacity benefit should be at work – and are costing the taxpayer more than £11billion.

The problem is a massive drain on Britain with the total incapacity benefit bill adding up to some £12.5billion a year, despite repeated pledges by Labour to reduce the burden. Last night Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “Taxpayers will be very concerned that so many fit and well people have been receiving incapacity benefit on top of other generous allowances.

“The review is long overdue but essential. Incapacity benefit should be there for people who really need it and those who are able to should be helped back into work.

LABOUR stands accused of a catastrophic mishandling of the benefits system after a huge rise in fraud in recent years.

Ministers have paved the way for what amounts to a charter for shirkers and cheats to exploit the system to the tune of billions of pounds a year by failing to scrutinise claims properly, warn critics.

Government figures reveal benefit fraud costs the taxpayer £1.1billion annually – a six-year high – but the real figure is likely to be much more as thousands of cheats continue to evade detection.

Incapacity Benefit fraud alone has multiplied sevenfold in three years while there have been huge increases in the cost of bogus claims for Housing Benefit, Income Support and Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Government action to stem the haemorrhaging of Incapacity Benefit payments has revealed the true extent of the problem, say analysts.

Initial testing of a new, tougher assessment to be rolled out over the next three years indicates that up to two-thirds of the 2.6 million Incapacity Benefit claimants, who receive a total of £12.5billion a year, would not qualify for handouts or would receive a smaller payment. The bill for Incapacity Benefit fraud may run into several billions, dwarfing the £70million claimed in a Department for Work and Pensions report.

Thirty years ago about 700,000 were paid the benefit if deemed unable to work through ill health or disability. Today recipients outnumber unemployment benefit claimants by more than three-to-one.

Official figures show that while Housing Benefit fraud cost the taxpayer £140million in 2005-6, that shot up to £260million last year, a rise of 85 per cent.

A campaigner for Roma gipsies' rights has been charged with helping scores of Romanians illegally claim millions in benefits.

Lavinia Olmazu, 30, and her boyfriend Alin Enachi, 29, are said to have masterminded a scam by which 172 Romanians claimed £2.6million.

Olmazu, who was arrested last week, was working as an 'inclusivity outreach worker' to Roma gipsies for both Haringey and Waltham Forest councils in North London.
Fake documents: Lavinia Olmazu allegedly helped Romanian migrants to claim millions in benefits

The academic, who has campaigned for greater understanding of gipsy culture, is accused with Enachi of using a supposedly charitable organisation called Roma Concern to help coordinate the fraud.

The couple appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Friday alongside six gipsies, each of whom is alleged to have pocketed thousands of pounds from the scam.

Under rules introduced when Romania joined the EU in 2006, Romanian migrants cannot get a National Insurance number - which is the key to getting benefits - unless they can prove they have paid employment lined up.

Olmazu and her boyfriend are accused of giving unemployed Romanians false documentation which purported to offer them work. They are also said to have provided false invoices and references purportedly showing they were working.

Scores then used fraudulently obtained NI numbers to claim child benefit, working tax credit and child tax credit, the court heard.

The fraud was allegedly facilitated by Enachi, who attended Benefits Agency interviews with Romanians as a translator.

Alin Enachi is also accused of masterminding the £2.6billion benefits scam

Prosecutor Matthew McCabe revealed that over a 17-month period to last July, Enachi attended 356 interviews, mainly at the Jobcentre Plus office in Tooting, South London. And 172 of these individuals went on to claim benefit.

Mr McCabe said Olmazu 'saw Roma gipsies to advise them in how to apply for a National Insurance number and benefit'.

IT IS a monstrous injustice to expect British taxpayers to bankroll the full panoply of welfare benefits for claimants from other European Union member states. This country has enough difficulties financing the benefits claims of its own citizens without being turned into the number one hot spot in Europe for welfare tourism.

But that will be the impact of the High Court decision that found in favour of a Portuguese citizen seeking to force the UK taxpayer to stump up child benefit for his children in Portugal.

Jose Lopes Ruas is already a substantial burden on the British taxpayer, having become reliant upon disability benefits after working here for just four years. It is utterly ridiculous that such a short-lived economic contribution should entitle him to receive additional support for family members living back in Portugal. A nightmare combination of EU integration and a liberal judiciary is leaving British people acutely vulnerable to those from all corners of Europe who recognise a soft touch when they see one. Each time somebody wins a new concession at the expense of the taxpayer, the message goes out to the indolent classes across the EU that Britain is the place to be. This country used to be known as a great place to do business. Not any longer. Now it is a great place to come and sponge off.

A RECORD number of bogus claims means fraudsters are cheating taxpayers out of millions of pounds every year, a report reveals today.

The Audit Commission has exposed £215million of fraud in 2008/09 – and that is likely to be only a fraction of the real level.

The new figure is up more than 50 per cent from the £140million identified in 2006/07.

Fake claims included £62million cheated by people falsely claiming the single person discount on council tax and 16,535 cases of disabled parking badges being used by those who were not entitled to them.

Other scams saw £32million overpaid in housing benefit while £84million was tracked down in pension fraud.

The details were uncovered after a huge nationwide operation to match benefit, tax, housing and employment data.

The National Fraud Initiative compared information from 1,300 organisations, including councils, police, the NHS and nearly 100 private companies, to uncover thousands of cases of wrongly-obtained benefits, pensions and jobs.

The initiative brings together data on a secure website, allowing the authorities to carry out their own matches to find possible fraud overpayments. Since its launch in 1996, it has helped detect wrongful payments totalling £664million.

Thousands of families are raking in housing benefit worth more than £26,000 per year, according to an analysis of the welfare system.

A total of 3,400 people are receiving the bumper handouts - the equivalent to having an interest-only mortgage worth around £650,000.

The study, based on Treasury figures, shows that families are allowed to claim up to a maximum of £94,000 a year - or £1,800 a week - to live in a five-bedroom property in Central London.
Bashir Aden, husband of Nasra Warsame, is shown sitting in his wife's rented home, where she lives with seven of their children

Bashir Aden, husband of Nasra Warsame, is shown sitting in his wife's rented home, where she lives with seven of their children

It paints a depressing picture of Britain's dependency culture and will enrage millions of hardworking taxpayers who are struggling to make ends meet.

Britain's bill for housing benefit is this year expected to hit nearly £20billion - up £3billion on last year - despite repeated pledges by ministers to crack down on excessive claims.

It is the steepest rise for 15 years and comes as more families are forced on to benefits by the recession.

In November, it was revealed that Somali-born Nasra Warsame and seven of her children were living in a £1.8million house in Westminster at a cost to taxpayers of £1,600 a week.

Her husband, Bashir Aden, and her eighth child were living in an 'overspill' property, also on housing benefit.

The study also shows that more than 750,000 families receive benefits and tax credits worth in excess of £20,000 a year.

In total, the Government will this year spend £200billion on social security and tax credits - the largest area of public spending.

This equates to more than 13 per cent of gross domestic product and is nearly double the amount spent a decade earlier.

The analysis also found that nearly 13 per cent of Britain's working age population are on out-of-work benefits and nearly two million children live in workless households - the highest of all industrialised nations.

The UK also spends £11.5billion on disability allowance - more than the budget for the Home Office.

Around two million - or 70 per cent of Disability Living Allowance claimants - will never have their benefits reviewed as they have been given an indefinite award.

People can claim more than 30 benefits, which leads to in excess of 1,000 possible combinations of handouts.

The new Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, has warned that hundreds of thousands now have little hope of ever getting off benefits.

Speaking last week, he said: 'We literally cannot afford to go on like this. A system that was originally designed to support the poorest in society is now trapping them in the very condition it was supposed to alleviate.'

Whitehall sources said they were shocked to discover the scale of welfare dependency that built up under Labour.

More than 710,000 foreigners were given the right to live and work in Britain last year - including 321,0000 Eastern Europeans.

It takes the total number of National Insurance numbers handed out to immigrants to more than two million in the past four years alone.

Yesterday's figures reveal that - despite Labour's promise to switch to a policy of "controlled" immigration - the number of people being handed the right to work here is still increasing.

Last year's total of 713,0000 foreigners allocated NI numbers is an increase of 51,000, or 8 per cent, on 2005/6. The 321,000 Eastern Europeans arriving was a rise of 16 per cent, or 44,000.

The figures also showed that 145,000 NI numbers were given to arrivals from Asia and the Middle-East, 103,000 from old EU countries, 61,000 from Africa, 33,000 from Australia and Oceania, 32,000 from the Americas and 16,000 from non-EU countriesin Europe. The report also revealed that, of the total number allocated NI numbers last year, 16,000 were claiming outofwork benefits within six months of registering. The Tories estimated the bill to the taxpayer for the handouts could be as much as £80million.

Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "These extraordinary figures show that over two million new foreign workers have come to Britain in the last four years - and this is simply the number for those who are working legally

POLYGAMOUS HUSBANDS CAN CLAIM CASH FOR EXTRA WIVES.

Polygamous husbands settling in Britain with multiple wives can claim extra benefits even though bigamy is a crime in the UK it has emerged.  A DWP official insisted the rules did not reward polygamy as second wives receive less in benefits than single women.  A single person can claim just under £60 per week in jobseekers allowance, while couples get £92.80, but each extra wife in a polygamous marriage gets an extra £33.65.

BENEFITS cheats who languish on state hand-outs after lying that they are too ill to work are to be targeted in a fresh Government crackdown, it emerged yesterday.
David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne are to launch the attack in a second wave of welfare reforms planned for the autumn following measures announced in last week’s Budget.
Housing benefit was the number one target in last week’s Budget, with a tough cap slapped on the amount that jobless and low income claimants can get from the accommodation allowance.
But the Prime Minister and Chancellor also believe that big savings can be made in the £13billion a year incapacity benefit system.
The move comes after official data revealed that 476 reasons were given last year for claiming the help – including minor medical complaints like coughs, indigestion and even warts. Shockingly, more than 1,000 said they were too fat to work and claimed £5million last year while a further £10million was paid out to people because they had headaches.
Ten people even receive benefits for blisters.

A leading campaigner for gypsies' rights today admitted her part in £3million benefits scam involving nearly 200 Romanians.

Lavinia Olmazu, 30, and her 29-year-old boyfriend Alin Enachi masterminded the scam through which 172 Romanians claimed £2.9million.

Olmazu, an academic, was working as an 'inclusivity outreach worker' with Roma gypsies for both Haringey and Waltham Forest councils in north London.
Lavinia Olmazu, 30, a campaigner for Roma rights who has admitted claiming illegal benefits for Roma gypsies

Lavinia Olmazu, 30, a campaigner for Roma rights who has admitted claiming illegal benefits for Roma gypsies

Enachi, a part-time interpreter and motorbike mechanic, helped immigrants - mainly from Romania - get National Insurance numbers with bogus documents such as bank statements and letters of recommendation purporting that they were working.

Scores then used fraudulently obtained NI numbers to claim child benefit, working tax credit and child tax credit.

Olmazu, 30, an educational therapist with two degrees, has a 10-year-old son. She has dedicated her life to studying Roma gypsies and has addressed the United Nations on their rights.

Today at Southwark Crown Court, Olmazu admitted a charge of conspiracy to defraud. A further charge of fraud by misrepresentation was left on file.

Enachi admitted the same charge at an earlier hearing and was sentenced to two years and eight months on July 16. The judge today lifted a contempt order banning details of his plea and sentence.

The couple 'facilitated the obtaining' of National Insurance numbers under the umbrella of a charity called Roma Concern.

Enachi acted as an interpreter for 356 National Insurance applicants between March 2008 and July 2009, with 172 of those people going on to make claims for tax credit, child tax credits and child benefits.

Under rules introduced when Romania joined the EU in 2006, Romanian migrants cannot get a National Insurance number - which is the key to obtaining benefits - unless they can prove they have paid employment lined up.

Four Ukrainians who filed false tax claims after arriving in Britain certainly did find new lives of luxury – through an £8million tax fraud.

The gang, Marek Kriniki, Voldymyr Panchak, Oleg Zdyshchuck and Vitilijus Kostrominas lived it up with top-of-the-range 4x4 cars, luxury apartments, expensive holidays and nights out.

They submitted 1,600 fraudulent online self assessment claims for fictitious migrant workers and amassed more than £8million in income tax “rebates”.

A grandmother who swindled taxpayers out of almost £600,000 in a benefits scam has been jailed.

Enid Bell, 67, masterminded the scheme, involving a number of family members, to steal from the Department of Work and Pensions and local councils.

Her daughter, mum-of-two Lorraine Bell, 30, was her 'right hand' in the cunning scheme, which went on for 12 years, and allowed the pair to buy eight houses.

Yesterday Enid Bell, who sat through the court hearing in a wheelchair, was sent to prison for four-and-a-half years. The court heard she'd been jailed previously for deception in 1995.

A special constable was jailed for 16 months last week in Northampton Crown Court after she pleaded guilty to fraudulently claiming nearly £80,000 in benefits.

Gina Conopo was legitimately entitled to income support, housing and council tax benefit in 1999 when she was separated from her husband, However she failed to notify authorities when they got back together and carried on claiming the money.

Conopo of Grasscroft, Long Buckby, continued claiming the benefits for a period of just over seven years. Over that time she was paid £46,321.27 in income support and £33,267.48 in council and housing tax benefit.

Prosecutor Adam Western said: “The change of circumstances of which she should have informed the Department of Work and Pensions and Daventry Council is that her husband Simon Conopo was living with her again.

A funeral director who claimed he could barely climb up stairs has been fined after being caught striding through the streets leading corteges.

Wayne Brindley, 40, began claiming disability benefits after breaking a leg in an accident 10 years ago.

However a court has heard how he failed to inform benefit bosses his condition had improved in 2007 and was overpaid some £6,700 in benefits.

Welfare cheats include a former soldier claiming disability benefits who was caught stealing lead from a church roof, an undertaker who said he was nearly crippled only to be found leading a funeral cortege and a £4,000-a-month glamour model claiming a carer’s allowance for her sick father, despite living 100 miles away. A former gymnastics star also faces jail for a £34,000 benefit fraud. Benefit fraud is an insult to ordinary working taxpayers and claimants who play by the rules

Estimates suggest more than £5.2billion a year is lost to the Treasury through fraud and error in the benefit system – equivalent to 200 secondary schools or the salaries of more than 150,000 nurses.

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