Latest news with #IncapacityBenefit
Sunday World
15-05-2025
- Sunday World
Brazen benefits cheat bodybuilder goes on TV to moan about surgery waiting list
Kerry Hayes illegally claimed incapacity benefit while also winning bodybuilding contests A benefits cheat who illegally claimed tens of thousands of pounds of incapacity benefit while also winning bodybuilding contests went on TV to moan about NHS waiting lists this week. Brazen Kerry Hayes, formerly Kerry 'Muscles' Boomer, shocked those who know her past when she appeared on the local BBC news to complain about being on a waiting list for eye surgery. But we can reveal Hayes was once ordered to pay back almost £50,000 in fraudulently claimed Income support, Incapacity Benefit, Housing Benefit and Disability Living Allowance (DLA). Hayes at court in 2015 Staggeringly, while she was claiming she was unfit to work and claiming DLA she was working as a personal trainer and competing in bodybuilding competitions – finishing runner-up in the prestigious Northern Ireland Championships the year before she was convicted at Downpatrick Crown Court of benefit fraud. Hayes also loved the high life and was a keen yachtswoman who competed in races across Ireland while she lived in a plush cottage in sought-after Cultra on Northern Ireland's gold coast - all while claiming benefits. She was jailed for 12 months but a judge decided to suspend the sentence for three years. However shortly after that case she was taken to court by the family of an elderly millionaire who had gifted her a luxury city centre apartment before he died. The married millionaire, who she met at a yacht club in 2010, had showered glamorous Kerry with gifts including a Rolex watch, jewellery, gym membership and sunshine holidays. Benefit fraud in Northern Ireland is estimated to cost more than £163m a year, according to Department for Communities figures released in February – that's about 2pc of total Stormont expenditure. That's money that could be spent on vital services like the NHS. Sources who remember Kerry Hayes when she was Kerry Boomer told the Sunday World they couldn't believe the 'cheek' of her appearing on TV to complain about NHS waiting lists. 'We honestly couldn't believe she had the cheek to go on television and whinge about NHS waiting lists,' said one woman who knew her. 'She a total liar for a start – I wouldn't trust a word that comes out of her mouth. She was always playing the victim and it looks like nothing has changed. 'But to be moaning about the NHS when you took thousands of pounds from the state which could have been used on the NHS and helping those people who really needed it, is shocking.' Kerry Hayes News in 90 Seconds - May 15th Kerry was introduced in a news piece about Health Minister Mike Nesbitt announcing he planned to take advantage of a £215m cross-border scheme which would allow patients waiting longer than two years for an operation to claim back money if they pay for a procedure in the Republic. She told the BBC she has been on a waiting list for eye surgery for almost eight years after experiencing sudden vision loss in 2016. She told BBC News NI she is in pain and feels very limited with her vision and what she can do. 'My biggest worry is losing my driving licence if I don't have the surgery early enough because my driving licence is my independence and means everything to all three of us,' she said. She said she also fears she would be 'at risk of losing my children' as she would not be able to care for them. Kerry Hayes She said her son is severely disabled and cannot use public transport. 'I already struggle a lot but I would be totally housebound. I don't know how I could cope caring for him. I don't know what would happen,' she said. The Department of Health said patients would require prior approval before accessing the scheme. Other measures include using NI's private healthcare providers to target anyone waiting longer than four years on a hip or knee replacement, colonoscopy, hernia or gallbladder surgery. Nesbitt said full details of the plan have yet to be outlined and the full range of eligible procedures covered by the cross-border scheme are not yet known.
Daily Mirror
23-04-2025
- Business
- Daily Mirror
HMRC issues alert as it urges thousands of parents to claim £2,000 help
Tax-free childcare is a scheme where you receive a cash top-up from the Government to put toward childcare costs - here is how it works and who is eligible HMRC is urging thousands of parents to make sure they're not missing out on tax-free childcare worth up to £2,000 a year. Tax-free childcare is a scheme where you receive a cash top-up from the Government. It involves setting up an online account especially for paying for childcare, then for every £8 you pay in, the Government automatically adds in £2. If you're eligible, you can get up to £500 every three months for each of your children. This adds up to £2,000 over 12 months. For disabled children, the maximum amount you could get rises to £4,000. The money must be spent on a registered childcare provider, such as nurseries, nannies, after school clubs and play schemes. In a post published on Easter Sunday on the official HMRC X/ Twitter account, HMRC said: 'Are you missing out on egg-cellent childcare savings? Chick out our Tax-Free Childcare scheme and sign up to unlock savings of up to £2,000 a year per child on approved childcare costs.' Your child must be aged 11 or under and usually will need to live with you to claim tax-free childcare. They will remain eligible until September 1 after their 11th birthday. If your child is disabled, they may qualify until September 1 after their 16th birthday. Your child will need to get Disability Living Allowance, Personal Independence Payment or Armed Forces Independence Payment, or be certified as blind or severely sight-impaired, to receive the higher rate. In order to be eligible for the scheme, you need to be earning at least the minimum wage, for the equivalent of 16 hours a week, but under £100,000. This applies to yourself and your partner, if you're in a couple. This earnings threshold is the same if you're self-employed, apart from if you've been self-employed for less than 12 months, in which case the minimum income requirement would not apply. There are some circumstances where you can claim tax-free childcare if you're not working. For example, if you're on sick leave, annual leave, on shared parental, maternity, paternity or adoption leave, or if you're in a couple and one of you is working, and the other claims Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance, Carer's Allowance or contribution-based Employment and Support Allowance. You can open a tax-free childcare account for free through the But not everyone necessarily needs to pay for childcare in the first place. For example, parents can claim 15 or 30 hours free childcare a week, depending on the age of their child. Working parents of nine-month-olds and two-year-olds can access 15 hours of free childcare a week and this will rise to 30 hours from September 2025. You must be in work and earning the equivalent of the national minimum wage or for 16 hours a week, but less than £100,000 a year. All parents of three and four-year-olds are entitled to 15 hours free childcare a week as standard, regardless of whether they are in work. Working parents with children of these ages can claim the full 30 hours if they meet the earnings criteria. You can claim tax-free childcare on top of the 30 hours free childcare. Finally, if you claim Universal Credit and you're in work, you can claim back up to 85% of childcare costs, up to a maximum of £1,031.88 for one child or £1,768.94 for two or more children.
Yahoo
13-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Labour's benefits reforms are absolutely necessary and long overdue
One overcast Saturday morning in 2002, I was holding an advice surgery for constituents in Castlemilk, the poverty-stricken housing estate in the south-east corner of my Glasgow Cathcart constituency. It was a relatively quiet session, but a visit by two young men has remained in my memory ever since. They were about sixteen, had just left school and one of them (his mate was only there to offer moral support) wanted to know how to claim out-of-work benefits. The boy was explicitly looking for long-term financial support that would excuse him from the task of ever having to seek work or full-time education. When I asked him what physical ailment prevented him from getting a job, he replied with a knowing smirk towards his friend: 'Bad back.' I didn't ask if any of his own family members were claiming what was then known as Incapacity Benefit; I didn't have to. There were few families in the area, then or now, whose income didn't rely at least in part on the largesse of the state, despite the fact many members were of working age. Even before I became an MP, I had toured my local constituency Labour Party branches urging members to support the Blair Government's efforts to reform the system. I probably used many of the clichés and blithe assumptions that Labour MPs use today to defend their support of the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, and her plans to institute genuinely radical reform: that Labour is the party of work, not of benefits. The clue in the name! Many people on out-of-work benefits want to work; they just need more support to do so. Neither of these statements is strictly true. Yes, Labour was founded to represent the working classes in Parliament. It's also true that one of its founders, Keir Hardie, had little time for those who chose worklessness over employment. But culturally, today's party is dominated by middle class activists to whom the prospect of a Labour Government forcing benefit claimants into work is anathema. And while the claim that 'many' might prefer work to benefits is in some degree true, it is far too small a degree to make much difference to the economic necessity of reform. And that is the fundamental challenge that Kendall and the Government face: if Britain is to be transformed in a way that will radically reduce the numbers claiming out-of-work benefits, it will need to disappoint – nay, enrage – many of its supporters. It will need to annoy a large proportion of the people within the party itself, and also a considerable number of (well-paid and productively employed) media commentators and other stakeholders. There is, of course, an economic case for reducing the cost to the state's finances. And this is especially crucial now because the excuses people come up with are getting more absurd. In previous decades the preferred excuse of my young constituent and many others for claiming benefits was 'a bad back'. This is a conveniently unevidenced malady. But today more psychological – and therefore even less provable – ailments have become more popular among those hoping to leave the burden of honest labour behind them for a life of watching daytime TV. The numbers claiming to suffer from stress, depression and even PTSD (which, oddly, affects many who have not served in the Armed Forces) has swelled the claimant numbers. Britain simply can't afford to continue to fund a situation in which a large proportion of the population is allowed to claim benefits rather than earn a living and pay taxes. This is a truth that can either be faced now, when there remains some opportunity to address it, or in the future, when the rot will have gone too far to stop the country from sliding into national decline and bankruptcy. Which is where the moral case for Kendall's mission comes in. Labour's Left-wing has been most vocal in its opposition to reform, which is only to be expected: what is the point of being on the Left at all if you don't seize every available opportunity to broadcast your morally superior concerns for poor people that callous Right-wingers, even in your own party, don't care about? But there is no moral case for living off the hard-earned taxes of those who actually have a job. And there is nothing noble about allowing those who suffer from a range of mental illnesses to remain at home when you know that having a job and working side-by-side with colleagues will do far more to improve their mental health than the status quo ever could. These are hard truths that previous Governments, including the Labour Government I served, managed to avoid. Electoral considerations always prevailed over the optimistic rhetoric of ministers. This meant that reform was downgraded to a mere tinkering at the edges of the benefits system. Kendall's appointment as Work and Pensions Secretary was one of Keir Starmer's most astute decisions. She is ambitious and supremely capable. But more importantly she understands what is at stake if she fails. She is far from the heartless caricature that her opponents in the Labour Party describe. In fact she could well be the saviour of countless working class communities that have been scarred by generations of political failure. But that success depends on difficult short-term decisions that will be drastically unpopular and which will have some painful consequences for some people. It would be easy for the Government to abandon this project for the sake of electoral advantage and popularity. That would be more than a mistake: it would be a betrayal of the very people the Labour Party claims to represent. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
13-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Labour's benefits reforms are absolutely necessary and long overdue
One overcast Saturday morning in 2002, I was holding an advice surgery for constituents in Castlemilk, the poverty-stricken housing estate in the south-east corner of my Glasgow Cathcart constituency. It was a relatively quiet session, but a visit by two young men has remained in my memory ever since. They were about sixteen, had just left school and one of them (his mate was only there to offer moral support) wanted to know how to claim out-of-work benefits. The boy was explicitly looking for long-term financial support that would excuse him from the task of ever having to seek work or full-time education. When I asked him what physical ailment prevented him from getting a job, he replied with a knowing smirk towards his friend: 'Bad back.' I didn't ask if any of his own family members were claiming what was then known as Incapacity Benefit; I didn't have to. There were few families in the area, then or now, whose income didn't rely at least in part on the largesse of the state, despite the fact many members were of working age. Even before I became an MP, I had toured my local constituency Labour Party branches urging members to support the Blair Government's efforts to reform the system. I probably used many of the clichés and blithe assumptions that Labour MPs use today to defend their support of the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, and her plans to institute genuinely radical reform: that Labour is the party of work, not of benefits. The clue in the name! Many people on out-of-work benefits want to work; they just need more support to do so. Neither of these statements is strictly true. Yes, Labour was founded to represent the working classes in Parliament. It's also true that one of its founders, Keir Hardie, had little time for those who chose worklessness over employment. But culturally, today's party is dominated by middle class activists to whom the prospect of a Labour Government forcing benefit claimants into work is anathema. And while the claim that 'many' might prefer work to benefits is in some degree true, it is far too small a degree to make much difference to the economic necessity of reform. And that is the fundamental challenge that Kendall and the Government face: if Britain is to be transformed in a way that will radically reduce the numbers claiming out-of-work benefits, it will need to disappoint – nay, enrage – many of its supporters. It will need to annoy a large proportion of the people within the party itself, and also a considerable number of (well-paid and productively employed) media commentators and other stakeholders. There is, of course, an economic case for reducing the cost to the state's finances. And this is especially crucial now because the excuses people come up with are getting more absurd. In previous decades the preferred excuse of my young constituent and many others for claiming benefits was 'a bad back'. This is a conveniently unevidenced malady. But today more psychological – and therefore even less provable – ailments have become more popular among those hoping to leave the burden of honest labour behind them for a life of watching daytime TV. The numbers claiming to suffer from stress, depression and even PTSD (which, oddly, affects many who have not served in the Armed Forces) has swelled the claimant numbers. Britain simply can't afford to continue to fund a situation in which a large proportion of the population is allowed to claim benefits rather than earn a living and pay taxes. This is a truth that can either be faced now, when there remains some opportunity to address it, or in the future, when the rot will have gone too far to stop the country from sliding into national decline and bankruptcy. Which is where the moral case for Kendall's mission comes in. Labour's Left-wing has been most vocal in its opposition to reform, which is only to be expected: what is the point of being on the Left at all if you don't seize every available opportunity to broadcast your morally superior concerns for poor people that callous Right-wingers, even in your own party, don't care about? But there is no moral case for living off the hard-earned taxes of those who actually have a job. And there is nothing noble about allowing those who suffer from a range of mental illnesses to remain at home when you know that having a job and working side-by-side with colleagues will do far more to improve their mental health than the status quo ever could. These are hard truths that previous Governments, including the Labour Government I served, managed to avoid. Electoral considerations always prevailed over the optimistic rhetoric of ministers. This meant that reform was downgraded to a mere tinkering at the edges of the benefits system. Kendall's appointment as Work and Pensions Secretary was one of Keir Starmer's most astute decisions. She is ambitious and supremely capable. But more importantly she understands what is at stake if she fails. She is far from the heartless caricature that her opponents in the Labour Party describe. In fact she could well be the saviour of countless working class communities that have been scarred by generations of political failure. But that success depends on difficult short-term decisions that will be drastically unpopular and which will have some painful consequences for some people. It would be easy for the Government to abandon this project for the sake of electoral advantage and popularity. That would be more than a mistake: it would be a betrayal of the very people the Labour Party claims to represent.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A return to Blairism could slash billions from our welfare bill
The vast public debt that is holding the country back could be reduced if Keir Starmer simply followed the policies of the last Labour Government. The cost of incapacity and disability benefits alone could be reduced by about £10 billion. Blair's New Labour was well aware of benefit fraud and understood the need to double-check claims and require work obligations, but judging by his November white paper, Starmer's Labour party does not accept that individuals bear any personal responsibility for their situation. All claimants are seen as victims of barriers beyond their control. As a result of this failure, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts an increase in the benefits bill. Parties of the left – Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US – have long defined themselves as the parties of the underdog that set out to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. The Democrats were the first to recognise that welfare policy had been exploited and that it could undermine the spirit of independence and personal responsibility on which freedom relies. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, passed in 1996 while Clinton was President, introduced policies that significantly cut the welfare bill and allowed millions of Americans to rediscover the dignity of work. It took them a while, but Blair's Labour party came to see that welfare policy in the UK was in need of similar reform. Let's focus on incapacity benefits, which now cost £24.9 billion per year. From 2005, New Labour began planning a major reform and Incapacity Benefit was replaced by Employment and Support Allowance from October 2008. The white paper of 2006 said that the aim was to assess capability for work rather than benefit entitlement and the result was the Work Capability Assessment (WCA). In 2008-09, 6.7 per cent of working-age people (aged 16-64) were claiming an incapacity benefit. By 2017-18 the proportion was 4.9 per cent, a reduction of 27 per cent. The Tories had been in office from 2010 but continued Labour's policy until they started to phase in Universal Credit from 2016. Since then, the caseload has increased substantially. It was 7 per cent of the working-age population by 2024 and was forecast by the OBR to reach 7.9 per cent by 2029. Today, a 27 per cent reduction in the working-age population claiming incapacity benefits would reduce the bill by £6.8 billion. A reduction in claimants of incapacity benefits will also lead to a fall in disability benefits. Incapacity benefits are designed to replace income, while disability benefits (the Personal Independence Payment and Disability Living Allowance) are intended to cover the additional costs of disability. About two-thirds of incapacity benefit claimants also receive disability benefits, and so a reduction in the number of incapacity benefit claimants will also trigger a fall in disability benefits. Disability benefits cost £19 billion in 2024, with about £12.5 billion going to recipients of incapacity benefits. A reduction of 27 per cent would save £3.4 billion. This could mean a combined saving of over £10 billion, which is reported to be the 'headroom' allowed by the Treasury in the recent budget. If we look back to the Labour Government before Blair, that of Jim Callaghan, incapacity benefits were being claimed by 3.6 per cent of the working age population in 1978-79, nearly half the current proportion. A 48 per cent reduction today would save around £14.2 billion. But neither the philosophy of Old Labour nor that of New Labour are in keeping with Starmer's Labour party. It inhabits a world of victims and their oppressors, whether the issue is welfare reform or identity politics. Personal responsibility is not in their vocabulary. But they don't need to abandon all commitment to the less fortunate. Less Corbyn and more Blair and Callaghan would do just as well. David Green is former CEO of Civitas Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
