Benefit cheats could lose driving licences in anti-fraud drive
A proposed new law will also give ministers greater powers to request bank account information.
Why not a community order?
This is such a strange punishment which is completely unconnected with the offence in question.
That's a weird punishment.
It will be counterproductive in a lot of cases, if the ultimate goal is to get people back into work.
There’s a lot of areas of the country unfortunately where not being able to drive makes it very hard or near impossible to find work. It could also affect any of the sanctioned person’s dependents in a similar way.
Never mind a lot, it's most of the country.
Unless you live in a large city you're basically screwed without a car. The public transport here is atrocious.
Cruel and unusual punishment from a Labour government. Great.
Interesting that £1k of benefits cheating will give the government carte blanche to look through your bank accounts but fraud and tax avoidance by the richest in society and HMRC can't do a thing. Funny how that works...
Since very recently they can look through your bank accounts if you just receive any government payments, including stare pensions.
Meanwhile freebies all the way for the front bench. And no-one is expecting anything for it, would you believe. 🤬
UBI to all.
The real cheaters are the billionaires.
Benefit cheats like multi-millionaires who exploit loopholes and avoid paying their fare share?
I suppose that could be an effective punishment, even if it is a little unusual.
A monetary fine may mean little to a benefits scammer, and prison is obviously a silly punishment, particularly when prisons are in the shambolic and overcrowded state they're in now.
When you drive, it's a big part of your life (or maybe that's just my perspective, living in rural Northumberland where my "public transport" is a twice-weekly 50 minute shuttle-bus to Hexham that's prone to breakdowns), the threat of that being taken away would be a pretty huge deterrent in my view.
Not only that, it seems a lot more 'real' than the threat of prison. People hear prison and they think "pshhhh, I won't go to prison! That's for real criminals, and I'm a good person really!". Comparatively, a driving licence being taken away feels like something that can happen to anyone. You think "oh shit that could actually happen to me".
I just worry about possible knock-on effects. Ability to drive is useful in job-hunting for example.
Yes. Make sure that they can go to work by removing their ability to drive, as well as the criminal sentence, and jail time.
Another dumb idea by yet another corrupt government.
Everyone knows how desperate this government is to throw the disabled under the bus. So I have little confidence that those labelled frauds actually did anything wrong.
I'm old and it wasn't always like this. Or at least it wasn't so open.