Covid fraud cost us TWICE as much as Black Wednesday: Data shows shocking £11.8bn was lost in pandemic support schemes… dwarfing ’90s financial horror
Covid fraud cost us TWICE as much as Black Wednesday: Data shows shocking £11.8bn was lost in pandemic support schemes… dwarfing ’90s financial horror
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The party of fiscal responsibility.
…to all their mates and donors.
– Jobs for the boys!
Also,
Saw the other day about McDonalds – avoided paying tax during the pandemic and got a big payment from government.
“Throughout the pandemic McDonald’s benefited from £297m in furlough payments, £143m through Eat Out to Help Out, £60m from business rates relief, and £372m from a VAT cut”
Not only hasn’t Sunak resigned, he’s among the front runners to be the next PM!
I actually can’t believe how little traction this kind of stuff is getting. At best the handling of covid has been an economic disaster, hundreds of thousands have been left to rot with next to no support while others have engaged in fraud on a massive scale that the government now seems pretty disinterested in chasing up.
At worst we’ve just been *robbed* by our own government to the tune of billions with absolutely no accountability or justice looking to be even possible.
It wasn’t “lost”
It wasn’t “misplaced”
It wasn’t “wasted”
It was given knowingly and willingly to friends and associates of the Tory Party
Banks could have told you this would happen the day after the scheme was announced.
I wonder what the return was for the donors of Tory PLC
Prosecute them all at the next available opportunity. This is clear corruption that would make Putin blush. Knowingly handed out to their friends and families under the guise of “whoops shrug”. Not even trying to hide their crimes. Yet they hound the honest self employed or low earners that struggled through a pandemic they mismanaged.
No sorry, not good enough. We have a cost of living crisis. We have disabled trying to decide how they’re going to pay the energy bills they need to stay alive. We have families torn apart by this.
The UK has never seen a government and cabinet so dangerous to the country. Truly, each one an enemy of the state.
Sunak, Patel and Kwartang have made such a mess I’m surprised the loudmouth racist flag shagging supposed majority of this country that elected their clown leader Boris to “GET BREXIT DONE” and forced this dangerous, insidious incompetence upon us haven’t started turning on them and asking why they can’t “go back to where they came from?!”, because even I would quite happily put the entire cabinet on a dingy and send them out to sea.
Sick of them all, sick of this government, sick of the excuses and apologists. Sick of watching Boris using the Ukraine war as political opportunism to cover his ever constant failings. Sick of no consequences. Sick of the “it would’ve been worse under Labour”.
This country is long due a revolution, unfortunately maybe even a bloody one.
My bosses furloughed plenty of us because it was free government money – we had absolutely zero slowdown in work and had to adapt to remote working, the only justification for them to do it was purely so that the company owners could get additional funds that they didn’t need to claim but could.
The system works as its meant to – more power to the people with power already.
It is clear to anyone with a brain that the average bloke on the street can’t fathom how much money was wasted in fraud.
Most people think a million and a billion are similar in scale.
As soon as these Covid support packages were announced, I emailed my MP saying this would lead to massive fraud.
His reply. “Don’t worry about that, we will have all the checks in place to ensure that will not happen.”
Sadly he was wrong and I cannot find that old email now. Damn!
Weird, you’d think the press would be more mad about it in that case.
Brown sold the gold but Sunak sold you down the river.
That’s your money and my money that we work for and pay to the government to oversee for us and allocate it towards services that benefits us. What a shock it’s been stolen by all their mates. I’m stunned.
Serious question. As a British citizen, what can I do to bring justice? I literally don’t know.
Start a news website? Utilise Facebook propaganda tools? Freedom of information requests?
Some people got very much wealthier didn’t they Dido ?
Can someone explain to me (like I’m 5, say…) why the government is reluctant to try and recover some of the fraud? It seems to me that with this amount at stake, you could perfectly justify a task force of civil servants going through the roll of companies that took out loans?
Is it that fraudsters are likely to be party donours, and this was yet another way to redistribute tax money to friends and family?
Is there a more reasonable explanation?
One of my neighbors is a self employed cleaner, just her on her own, cleaning houses and declaring £12,000 of income a year.
When the covid business relief was announced she went online to apply and typed £500,000 into the annual turnover box.
The government sent her £30,000.
No checks, no balances, no due diligence, nothing. Taken on your word, and paid out of the public pocket.
I reported her. Nothing happened.
This is the government of fraud, by fraudsters, for fraudsters.
A quick google search has benefit fraud as £2.3bn for 2019-2020.
So is our daytime tv and newspaper headlines going to be filled with programs about scummy rich people ripping the taxpayer off?
Where’s that magic money tree when they needed it most!?
Seriously can guarantee if the fraud was investigated properly we would see countless Tories donors connected to this.
It’s easy to hang out on reddit and say the government nicked this money but the reality is, the general public stole this cash from the taxpayers.
In absolute terms but £5.4 billion in 93 would be over £12.5 billion today
I’m not excusing it, it’s dreadful, but it’s poor statistical literacy as a headline
Is is obviously depressing the the chancellor should burn for it. But fraud is fraud, can they chase up and recover some?
Think best way is to get papers onto it. Guardian for actual journalism.
Mail for kicking up an absolute stink with it running this story must mean their support for this government is waning slowly
so, £11.8 billion gets “lost” from fraud, and they’re not gonna chase it up? oh boy, I wonder why…
Explains why they can cheat on thier own expense forms so easily.
Gonna blame the tories though, instead of the chancer toe-rags that committed the fraud.
‘Blame the shopkeeper, not the shoplifter’
Right?
Just curious – how much evidence of corruption, brazen disregard for the public and general cuntishness do we tolerate before we bring out the guillotines?
Is there some sort of threshold I’m unaware of? Is it like one of those fund raiser diagrams that must reach this level of completion before we’ve reached our goal?
When do we wipe the smug grins off these fuckos faces?
Stolen **or allowed to be stolen** by the repeatedly demonstrable incompetents of the Conservative Party.
Absolutely shocking. Almost as if it was designed to be defrauded. One business I own received support, which was used to pay staff while it was closed. I could have had support for other businesses that did not need it, with basically no questions asked. Absolutely insane, and I’m not at all shocked that plenty of people could not resist that temptation. I know a few people who absolutely took the piss out of this scheme and the vibe was very “fuck the government, free money” but of course it’s really “fuck the taxpayer who will be paying this back”.
Ah, but the main thing is we it lost in into the hands of important donors.
That means we don’t need to investigate or follow up on it in any way at all, and in fact was the fault of the mythical Last Labour Government who planned all this while twirling villainous moustaches.
And yet they’re still demonising “benefit cheats” like they were bankrupting the country.
Recruiter reached out for a 6 figure equivalent government job related to covid. Struggling to recruit via normal channels (and third of pay), so it was sent to an agency.
Obviously I was up for it (I make a third of the income, though this was a short fixed term secondment). Interviewed, all agreed to hire. Then the job got killed at the government approval stage. Couldn’t justify the salary given other full time employees were earning a third. Fair enough, bit of my time wasted but worth a go.
6 months later, I get a consultancy client. Turns out, they got a contract to outsource the exact work I interviewed for. They have no idea how to deliver, or any experience *at all* in the area, and are now outsourcing again to fulfil the contract.
Guess what. They’re paying twice the equivalent hourly rate as a sub contract, and they’re obviously getting a lot more than that to be in a financial position to do so.
So my guess is that initial position that could have solved problem A quickly, with great expertise and existing talent, has now gone up in cost by 500%, and will deliver terrible results because 50% of the work is being done by people without a single fucking second of experience.
It certainly gave me a look inside the fuckery, and it’s such a small drop in the ocean of COVID related spending.
The Tories always blame labour for spending tax money ( on hospitals and schools etc) . Meanwhile the whole purpose of the Tory parry seems to be moving public money into private hands.
While having nothing to show for it.
Yep. Someone I know took two loans, closed the company and uses the capital to day trade.
The bounceback loans were approved with basically zero thought put into them.
I have a Ltd Company, voted Tory, didn’t take out any loans or apply for any additional assistance. Not all of us are dishonest 🤔
There was a new cafe near me that had just finished a refit and on the day of opening Covid hit. They were too new to claim the support. They went bust 3 months in, never so much as boiled a kettle. It was some ‘move to the seaside, open a coffee shop ‘ dream. Often think about those poor sods.