Pin photos of benefits cheats to lamp-posts, says DWP official

Benefits cheats should have their photographs pinned to ‘every lamp-post in the streets where they live’ in order to shame them, according to a senior official in the Department for Work and Pensions.

Terry Moran, DWP chief operating officer, told civil servants at a London conference he wanted to shame fraudulent claimants into stopping claiming. He said he was ‘distressed’ by healthy people who claim disability benefits illegally. Moran is the official principally responsible for introducing the universal credit programme.

He continued:

‘If I had my way I would put their photograph on every lamp-post in the street where they live because it is a very distressing thing for genuinely disabled people to see the reputation of disabled people damaged in the way that is by those people. We have got to do something about it constructively.’

Scope, the disability charity, called the comments ‘unhelpful and counterproductive’. Moran said afterwards he was speaking personally and not expressing government policy.

Source: Report in Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2012
Links: Telegraph report | Daily Express report | Scope press release

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