WE OWN YOU 

A short comment on this case. Joanne Gibbons, "a benefit cheating single mum" as the MEN nicely puts it, was claiming Income Support and Child Tax Credit when she started a job which must have been for over 16 hours a week. What she was supposed to do then was to switch her  Income Support claim to a claim for Working Tax Credit. She didn't, she went on claiming Income Support and didn't tell the DWP about her work.

Someone informed on her, anonymously as always. The DWP investigated and got details of the work. She will have been interviewed under caution, admitted the work and her Income Support will have been stopped. Then she was charged, probably with 'knowingly' failing to disclose a material fact under S112, Social Administration Act. This is a relatively minor charge, used when dishonest intent cannot be proved.

As part of their preparation for Court, the DWP will have prepared a statement of how much extra money Ms Gibbons received through her non-disclosure as compared to what she would have received had she gone about it in the approved way. At that stage they made what should have been an embarrassing discovery: her Working Tax Credit, had she claimed it, would have been approximately double the amount she in fact claimed. It's not possible to check these figures without knowing more of Ms Gibbons' circumstances but this is perfectly plausible.

Even a couple of years ago, this discovery would, in all probability, have led to the charges being dropped. They might have issued a caution or applied an administrative penalty (£350 or a 50% increase in the sum to be repaid) instead. Not now; the case went ahead. Ms Gibbons was convicted as charged, sentenced to 80 hours community service and required to pay £100 costs. Her solicitor, Julian Farley, described the case as "perhaps an indictment of the benefits system".

No, Mr Farley, it is most definitely an indictment of the criminal justice system. What happened was that Ms Gibbons made a decision to let her benefits roll on rather than take the risk of disruption and accidental overpayments associated with the tax credit system. I don't know if that was a fully informed decision, whether Ms Gibbons was aware of the respective figures for each benefit, but it wasn't either a simply stupid or a remotely criminal decision.

Now she has a conviction, she has costs and a community order to contend with and, unless the DWP are unwontedly generous, the civil penalties that flow from a conviction are still to follow. She will probably have to repay the £3,140 Income Support overpaid - I think the statement to the contrary in the article just means that the Court didn't order repayment. However the DWP can still recover that amount, do not have to offset notionally underpaid tax credits against overpaid Income Support, and generally don't. And since she has been convicted of a benefit offence she also faces an automatic three month benefit sanction, during which period she cannot be paid either Income Support or working tax credit.

So what was the point of this prosecution where there was no fraud and no loss to anyone except Ms Gibbons? I think the DWP and CPS prosecuted simply because they can - it was an exercise of power. They want to assert that power because they, and their political masters, want to send a message to anyone claiming benefit: we own you.

We own you because you are poor and have to claim benefit. If you break our rules, you will pay. We will humiliate and disempower you at every turn. We will use our press to denounce and stigmatise you. We will sneer at you behind your back. We will do this if you do not work and we will do this if you do work. Your labour is at our disposal through workfare schemes. Your children are under our scrutinity. You are poor: only our rules apply.

This, more or less, is the intended outcome of the government's sustained hate campaign against anyone who, through poverty or disability, has to claim benefit - a sort of modern helotry. They are not there yet. Universal Credit will take them closer. Solidarity in action between workers, especially workers in the state machine, benefit claimants, disabled people and any other oppressed groups can roll them back.