Benefits officer lifts lid on shocking abuse of system and outrageous scams some are pulling to cost taxpayers billions

UP to £5billion a year is to be slashed from Britain’s ballooning ­benefits bill under plans announced this week.

One of the handouts under close scrutiny is PIP — the Personal Independence Payment ­â€” which an astonishing 3.7million people in the UK receive.

Most of those claiming PIP have to be physically assessed — but today an assessor reveals the shocking truth about how people clearly able to work are blatantly scamming the system, costing taxpayers billions.

The final straw for ex- soldier Jonathan Richards’ job as a ­benefits assessor came when a ­Gulf War ­veteran claimed he had PTSD — brought on by watching TV footage of ­missiles hitting ­Baghdad in 1991.

Jon lasted just six months as a PIP assessor before he became fed up with seeing people gaming the ­benefits system day in and day out.

As a trained paramedic he was well qualified for the job of assessing people with disabilities in the South West of England.

But he says: “It was shocking and heartbreaking because I knew that many of the people I saw were lying.

“They were scamming the system to get benefits and there was nothing you could do in the assessment to stop it.

Playing the game

“And the worst thing was that the people who had genuine problems would most likely never get the help they needed because they would play down their symptoms.”;

PIP assessors must have a ­medical background and former ­soldier Jon, who served in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Iraq, is a highly qualified paramedic.

He says: “I had returned from working abroad and I thought being a PIP assessor would be a steady job working nine to five, Monday to Friday, for about £45,000 a year.”;

After two weeks’ training in ­Bristol, he began assessing up to five claimants a day in the West Country — often in hotels.

Father-of-three Jon says: “You could only assess them from when they walked in the door. I would look out of the window and see them turning up in taxis, get out without any difficulty, pay the fare then walk normally to the door.

“Outside the room there were chairs for them to wait in. I’d watch as they walked painfully slowly to the chair. It would take them a ­minute to sit down because they were supposedly in agony.

“I could only report what I saw in the building. I was not allowed to write in my report what I’d actually seen outside.

“One woman, an ex-prison officer, was claiming benefits after getting her arm trapped in a prison door.

“I’d seen her running around the local area with no problems at all and the next day she turned up for assessment with a plaster cast on her arm that hadn’t been there the day before. She told me she was so disabled she couldn’t do anything.

“Because I was only allowed to judge on what I saw in the actual assessment, I had to recommend her for benefits. These people know how to manipulate the system. They play the game.

“One of the checks we had to do was testing strength by getting the claimant to push against my hands. Most of them said, ‘I can’t, it’s too painful’. A total lie.”;

He would ask a series of questions: Can you manage to use the lavatory?

The scammers replied, ‘No, I can’t — I have to use handrails’.

Can you cook a meal? ‘No, I can’t. I have to use special cutlery because I can’t grip the knives to cut up fruit or vegetables’.

Jon, 53, says: “Honestly, it’s a total joke. Another woman came in with her friend. Suffering from ‘anxiety, depression and fibromyalgia’, she wasn’t able to hold her child, which she wanted to do. Her life was apparently ‘unbearable’.”;

Many came with notes from ­doctors who had diagnosed their patients were suffering from fibro- myalgia — a chronic condition that causes musculoskeletal pain and fatigue.

Jon says: “People can go to the doctor repeatedly and say, ‘I’m tired, I’ve got aches and pains’ and the doctor will diagnose fibromyalgia.

“While I was saying to this lady, ‘Can you lift your arms up?’ she actually lifted her arm up, but said, ‘No, I can’t do that’.

“Then she asked me, ‘Can I have a form to claim for fuel?’

“As I reached down to a bottom drawer for the form, I saw her put her hands underneath the arm of the chair and shuffle it forward.
Barrage of abuse

So, in formal observations I wrote she was able to raise her arms, even though she said she couldn’t, and I saw her move the chair ­forward.

“About nine months later, I was working on the ambulance and got a call to a child who’d had a ­cardiac arrest. But on the way we got a message that control could hear the child crying — happy days.

“I grabbed all the bags and knocked on the door to be met by a woman and the first thing she said was, ‘You stopped my benefits’.

“I got a barrage of abuse from her — swearing at me because she didn’t get extra money owing to my assessment.

“I always found that people who had genuine problems, for instance some form of cancer, would always play down their condition because their pain wasn’t constant. I would ask, ‘How far can you walk?’

People can go to the doctor repeatedly and say, ‘I’m tired, I’ve got aches and pains’ and the doctor will diagnose fibromyalgia

“And they would say, ‘It all depends — some days I can walk quite some distance, but other days when it’s really bad I don’t walk any distance at all’.

“You could easily tell they were not trying to rinse the system. It was absolutely heartbreaking.”;

Former sergeant Jon suffers from complex PTSD after being caught up in a bomb blast in Belfast in 1993 and serving in Bosnia, where he and his comrades supervised the digging up of mass graves.

He was medically discharged from the Army after suffering a serious ankle injury on active ­service.

Jon says: “I was on a ­prescription medicine — codeine phosphate — for pain relief as well as venlafaxine for depression.

“I was in a world of pain but despite my injury and illness I never dreamed of not going to work and instead claiming benefits.”;

The straw that broke the camel’s back for Jon was when a fellow British Armed Forces veteran turned up for assessment.

He had been diagnosed with PTSD because he’d found it ­traumatic to watch TV coverage of Cruise missiles striking Baghdad and he was thinking about all the poor Iraqi civilians

Jon says: “I watched him get out of a taxi and stride to the building with his walking stick folded up.

“But when he came through the door, he hobbled in.

“His medical notes said he had been in a car crash, suffered from a bad back, and had PTSD after witnessing Cruise missiles in the first Gulf War in 1991.

“I knew the British did not fire Cruise missiles and asked if he had been with the Americans in the Gulf. He hadn’t.

“In fact, he hadn’t been anywhere near the missiles.

Milking the system

“He had been diagnosed with PTSD because he’d found it ­traumatic to watch TV coverage of Cruise missiles striking Baghdad and he was thinking about all the poor Iraqi civilians.

“My blood was boiling, that was the destroyer.

“I’d been blown up in Belfast, had worse PTSD and was on ­stronger painkillers than him, but I was working and not claiming benefits.

“I told him to get out. I admit I used a few expletives and he said, ‘You can’t speak to me like that’. Funnily enough, he got up ­normally and walked out the room normally.

“I phoned my boss and told her it was time for me to hand in my notice. I’d survived six months but I’d had enough.

“I don’t know of many medical practitioners who have stuck to that job for any length of time.

“I had great sympathy for the genuine cases, but the people milking the system made my blood boil.

“It became personal — why was I working and paying my taxes for these people to sit on their backsides?

“I didn’t vote for Labour but if they can sort out these assessments properly and only award PIP to those members of society who ­genuinely need it, then they deserve a pat on the back.”;

• Jon’s name has been changed.