Evans/Lambert Saints and Scroungers

Billions of pounds of our taxes should be going to the people

that really need it, but the trouble is, people keep stealing it.

Welcome to the world of Saints and Scroungers.

Saints and Scroungers is all about busting benefit thieves

who steal millions every year, and the crack team of investigators

determined to scupper their devious scams.

And we also shine a light on those who genuinely need the money

and the people who help them get it. They are our saints.

The saints get help and the fraudsters get their comeuppance!

Coming up on today's show -

the single mother on benefits with expensive taste in motors.

-What car are we talking about?

-It was an Audi.

-What sort?

-An Audi TT.

But with fraud investigators in the driving seat,

will her claims come crashing down?

She'd actually told the letting agent that she was employed

as a model, earning £25,000 a year.

One family's tragic experience with epilepsy.

I was told that it would not be advisable for her to be left alone

with a child now.

Will a saint be able to supply some much needed support?

Living on your own with kids is going to be tough

at the best of times,

and that's where benefits can really offer you a helping hand.

But if you can afford a fancy convertible like this,

do you really deserve government handouts?

Claire Evans is a 32-year-old mother-of-two from Bristol.

As she doesn't work, she claims Jobseekers Allowance

from the Department for Work and Pensions, and receives housing

and council tax benefit from South Gloucestershire Council.

Which means Claire and her kids shouldn't suffer undue hardship,

but the council have started to suspect that Claire Evans

might have more money than she's letting on.

In fact, they think she may have claimed more than £62,000

in benefits she isn't entitled to.

Every council has a fraud investigations unit

whose job it is to track down benefit cheats.

The crack team at South Gloucestershire Council

is led by Jude Bevan.

Tell me about South Gloucestershire.

South Gloucestershire, we have an area with about 250,000 residents

and about 109,000 properties.

We have both urban and rural areas.

And of those residents, how many of them are on benefits?

We are round about 16,700 individual claimants at the moment.

Every council has a fraud department that tries to reclaim money

that shouldn't be claimed in the first place.

How much did you get last year?

Last year, including other DWP benefits,

it was around about £500,000.

-Half a million pounds?

-Yes.

-Lot of dough!

-It is a lot.

Was that an increase on the year before?

-It increases every year.

-They do a good job, then?

-They do an incredibly good job.

Claire Evans first came to the attention of Jude's fraud team in 2009.

She had been claiming benefits with no questions asked,

but officers from South Gloucestershire Council

decided to pay her an unannounced visit.

All councils do this from time to time.

Why do you do these visits?

We want to ensure that people are claiming the correct amount

of benefits, so we will review X percentage of claims

to ensure that the details we hold are correct.

There's two elements to these visits, isn't there? You're catching people who shouldn't be claiming,

-but there's people who aren't claiming enough.

-Exactly.

It's like a benefit health check to ensure that people

are claiming enough benefits that they're entitled to,

or they may overlook telling us about changed circumstances

and it gives them an opportunity to do that.

The council didn't initially think there was anything suspect about Claire's claim,

but when they paid a visit to the home she was renting

in 2010, someone else answered the door to say she had gone on holiday.

-That triggers another unannounced visit?

-Yes, we would undertake another unannounced visit,

and on the second visit, Miss Evans wasn't there and neither was anybody else.

The officers decide to make another visit,

hoping it might be third time lucky.

But once again, Claire Evans wasn't home.

Now, of course, at this point,

she's registering that she's unemployed and a single mother.

-Mm-hmm.

-So you'd expect her to be at home.

She might have been out shopping, but three times and she's not in?

The beacon must flash at that point.

The visiting officer did have heightened suspicion, yes.

We call it a gut feeling. Every visiting officer has a gut feeling if something isn't quite correct.

And it wasn't just the fact that Claire Evans seems never to be

at home that was heightening suspicion.

The lady herself might not have been around,

but her car was generally parked outside the house.

-What car are we talking about?

-It was an Audi.

-What sort?

-An Audi TT.

-Don't tell me convertible.

-It was, yes.

Now that's new, that would cost someone about £30,000.

Not the sort of car you would expect somebody who's unemployed to own,

but it could've belonged to someone else.

It could've belonged to someone else, yes,

but during the investigation the fraud team went out a number of times

and the car was always there.

Officers had something of a mystery on their hands,

so they decided to pass the case onto the council's senior

fraud investigator, who needs to remain anonymous.

The Benefits Department say to you that one of their claimants

has got this expensive car in the driveway.

How can you be sure that person actually owns that car?

What we will do, and what we did in this case, is to drive by

the address two or three times just to make sure the car

is there all the time, so it's not a visitor's or somebody who has left it temporarily.

-But that's still not concrete proof, is it?

-No, no, not at all.

Having established that we think it's probably there regularly, if not, permanently,

we will then contact the DVLA and find out the registered keeper.

-What came back, then? Show me.

-What we've got here is, as you can see,

-it says "Reply to DVLA Enquiry" at the top.

-Yeah.

And it shows that the car we're interested in,

-the car we've seen at the address, is an Audi TT.

-Yep.

In white, and she only bought it in October 2010.

-That's right.

-Her name, her address, yeah.

No previous keepers. So it was bought from brand new.

So Claire Evans has a taste for very expensive wheels.

Nothing wrong with that, but how does a single mother,

who's living on benefits, afford a jam jar of this calibre?

She shouldn't have been able to afford that

-if her claim had been genuine.

-Correct.

How can you find out how she's paying for it?

We did a credit check.

We have access here, online, to a credit reference agency

and we can carry out a credit check.

Credit reference agencies are commercial companies

which compile information about people's credit history.

They get their information from sources including

the electoral roll, county court judgements,

and financial institutions.

Someone's credit history lists all their credit accounts,

including their credit limit

and whether they have missed any payments.

It also records the name of their current account provider.

Lenders and other agencies can buy this information for a small fee.

What this showed initially was that Claire had at least one large loan

that she was servicing.

Claire Evans had borrowed a large sum of money, presumably,

to pay for her car.

But how does someone surviving on benefits manage to get

such a large amount of credit?

Investigators decided to get a full credit history

going back several years,

to see what else she might have been spending her cash on.

Is that the only car she's bought while on benefits?

We found she'd bought two or three over the past four or five years.

In actual fact, the details of one of them are here.

As you can see, this one was purchased back in October 2005.

It's got her name and address at the top there.

It's an Audi TT Roadster again, erm,

with 3600 miles on the clock at that time.

-So, virtually new.

-Indeed. And she paid £25,500 for it.

Wow!

This unemployed mum has spent over 50 grand on luxury cars

in just five years, and the fraud investigators can smell a rat.

-So what happened next?

-We approached the bank,

we identified five bank accounts that she held

-and we got the details back from the bank, going back several years.

-Yes.

And that showed us that she'd had a large amount of unexplained

deposits to one account in particular, over about four years.

So a four year period, give or take,

and how much has she put in, in total?

Well, in total, these payments,

which exclude benefits payments I should point out, all of these

are credits to her account that we don't know where they came from.

And they total £65,626.

'Investigators now knew something wasn't right.'

Meanwhile, Claire Evans finally broke cover.

She seemed to be avoiding investigators

but, perhaps, she realised that sooner or later she was going

to have to talk to them.

She did contact the office when she didn't want a visit

because she stated there had been a family bereavement,

so the visiting officer then did make an appointment with her

for a couple of weeks later, after the alleged family bereavement.

The council finally got to talk to Claire Evans face-to-face.

What happened when the visiting officer went?

When she went round and undertook the visit,

she did find Miss Evans to be quite nervous

and didn't really want a visiting officer in the property.

With 65 grand and a luxury car on her driveway,

it's not surprising Claire Evans was feeling a bit nervous

about a visit from fraud investigators.

It was already obvious that something dodgy was going on with

Claire Evans' benefits claim, and as we find out later,

officers were even more puzzled about the source

of the payments into her account.

And you will see that a lot of these items are listed as foreign items,

which didn't mean anything to us at the time.

For now, it's farewell to the fraudsters

and hello to the people we call our saints,

those who are in genuine need of help, but are too proud,

or don't know how to claim what is rightfully theirs.

And the people who point them in the right direction.

As newlyweds, it's tempting to start planning your future.

Trouble is, you can't always tell what's just around the corner.

Imagine experiencing the very best day of your life,

and then, the very worst day,

all in the space of just two weeks.

That's just what happened to Wayne and Michelle Lambert from Suffolk.

Like most first-time parents, they were over the moon

when they had their baby boy, Jake.

But just 11 days later,

Michelle suffered a life-threatening epileptic seizure.

I came home,

and I opened the front door,

and I could tell straight away she was in a fit.

So, went into the front room, and saw Michelle on the sofa,

in a full-blown fit, with Jake actually resting on her chest.

He was sound asleep.

I then picked him up, and put Jake into his car seat...

and called for the ambulance, and got hold of Michelle's mum and dad,

got hold of my mum.

I raced up to the flat to be able to look after Jake.

But...

it was so quick, and so frightening.

A few minutes later, the paramedics turned up, and that was it.

We were straight off, up to the hospital.

Michelle recovered, but suffering the epileptic seizure was a double blow.

She sustained some minor damage to her brain,

but being in hospital for ten days meant she had to be separated from her newborn baby.

It affected her memory a little bit.

But it knocked her confidence with looking after Jake quite a bit.

We then started getting that back,

and she was then a lot more happy with Jake,

and the bond was coming back properly as well.

It soon became obvious that life would have to change fundamentally

when Michelle's doctors delivered some harsh news to Wayne.

I was told that...

..it would not be advisable for her to be left alone with a child now.

So I then took that as a decision to stop work,

to look after the pair of them.

It was a huge decision for Wayne to have to take.

He had worked since leaving school and had never claimed benefits,

Now, he had to face not only looking after his wife and new baby,

but also living on much less money.

Financially was fairly hard.

All we were getting, basically, was Disability Living Allowance for Michelle...

and Carer's Allowance for myself,

and Michelle's maternity pay,

as she was technically still on maternity leave.

And that was basically all we were getting,

so from going from nearly £2,000 a month...

down to about £840 a month

was not very good at all.

As the months passed, things started to look up for the Lambert family.

After a very stressful time,

Wayne was hoping that Michelle would be able to make a full recovery

and he would be able to go back to work.

The future was looking pretty good.

I was actually considering looking for...

OK, not a full-time job,

but perhaps going back part-time.

OK, I was still the main carer for Michelle at the time...

but I was then thinking,

"Well, perhaps after Christmas, I'd start looking for a part-time job".

But Wayne's optimism was short-lived.

In October that year, when Jake was just six months old,

Michelle suffered another epileptic seizure.

Wayne found her after she and Jake had turned in for an early night.

I could hear a funny noise in the bedroom.

So I poked my head in,

and she was actually in a full-blown, major seizure.

Jake was just sitting up in his cot as if to say,

"Well, what's happening?"

Michelle pulled through but nothing was going to be the same again.

Michelle had epilepsy since the age of 14

but this was the biggest seizure she'd ever experienced.

Her memory had been damaged beyond repair.

We'd go into the Co-op, she'd see some people who she knew

and she'd realise who they were but as soon as she walked out the shop,

by the time she's walked out the shop,

she wouldn't even remember seeing anybody in there.

She wouldn't even remember being in the shop.

Wayne was forced to give up his well-paid job

in order to stay at home and look after Michelle

and their baby son Jake.

If I had the chance to go back to some work I would do, even now,

but I know, at the moment, it's not possible

because Michelle and Jake need me to be at home.

On top of learning how to adapt to Michelle's increased care needs,

Wayne was also struggling financially.

No longer able to go out to work,

the whole family was surviving on just £800 a month

of Disability Living Allowance and Carer's Allowance.

But, fortunately,

the Lamberts had been put in touch with local charity Home Start.

Home Start is a family support charity.

There's approximately 300 schemes across the UK.

And schemes support families for lots of different reasons.

Our volunteers visit families once a week.

They support them for about two to three hours, providing what the family need.

So, it may be some help going out to a group,

maybe a parent and toddler group.

It may be doing some shopping.

It may be sitting down and having a cup of tea and a chat.

Whatever's needed.

Since Michelle's second seizure, Home Start had matched

the Lambert family with a new volunteer called Lynette.

And she was determined to give them as much help as she could.

Initially, I came and I supported Wayne just by being a listening ear.

Someone for him to talk to,

helping him, really, deal with things day to day.

Deal with some of those initial stresses.

Look at how he was managing family life.

And, perhaps, give him a little bit of a break as well, sit and play

and interact with Jake.

And help him out where I could.

-Rabbit kicks.

-Kicks, kicks.

-Turns.

-Turns, yeah.

For Wayne, who was struggling with depression

and desperately trying to come to terms with his new situation,

this time to himself was crucial.

There were times I used to just go out for a nice walk

and just to get some fresh air or if there was something

which I needed to do on the car I'd then go out and do that.

It meant I could actually stay a lot calmer

and I weren't getting quite so stressed.

And I was able just, basically, to relax

and do the things which I like doing.

Wayne's financial worries were also really adding to his depression.

Fortunately, Home Start also have a programme which they call Maximising Income

which is intended to help people find out

exactly what benefits they are entitled to.

Lynette realised that the Lamberts were struggling for cash.

So, she carried out a benefits check for them.

I could see quite quickly that Wayne was entitled to Income Support

and that was something that Wayne wasn't aware of.

And it also identified the fact

that he was entitled to Child Tax Credits as well.

So, that was quite a difference per month to this family.

It was great news for Wayne that his family would be able

to get some more financial support.

I was quite surprised that, cos I was actually entitled

not only to Income Support but to Child Tax Credits, Child Benefit and,

I think, we managed to get Michelle's DLA up as well to high rate care.

It's actually really helped us out with all that.

It's boosted our finances up from about £800

to, I think, it's nearly £1300-£1400 a month.

It means all the bills are paid,

I can also feed the family with no problems whatsoever.

Basically, I don't have to worry too much about money now.

Thanks to Home Start helping him find out what benefits

he was entitled to, Wayne now feels that he can stay at home

with his family for as long as they need him.

And another Home Start initiative,

the weekly family group has also proven invaluable

in helping Michelle and Jake to strengthen their relationship.

-You go off and play, darling. There's a good boy. See you later.

-OK.

Michelle and Jake are able to spend some time together,

playing, having some fun.

At home Jake has Dad and likes to play with Dad

but here it's, Michelle can have some bonding time with him.

Wayne has also noticed that attending the group

is really helping Jake and Michelle rebuild their relationship.

The bond is now starting to come back nice and strong.

Jake is actually going to Michelle a lot more.

He realises, now, that is his mum.

Michelle's now getting to grips with the fact

that, yeah, she is his mum as well. And able to help out.

OK, it's still with a lot of prompting but it is starting

to get there and she is starting to enjoy being a mother again.

Michelle will probably never recover from the brain injury she suffered

during her last epileptic seizure.

But thanks to Home Start and Lynette, in particular,

the Lambert family are now getting the financial

and emotional support they need.

Where we're at now is we're nice and comfortable,

we're financially stable.

Health wise, my health has benefited from it.

I'm not quite so stressed

and I'm able to do a lot more with Jake as well as Michelle.

And with Home Start not being there, I don't know where I'd be.

Without them I really don't know how I'd cope, basically.

Back now to the scroungers.

And investigators are looking into the benefit claims

of mum of two Clare Evans.

She's been receiving Jobseekers Allowance, Income Support

and Housing and Council Tax Benefits since 2004.

But investigators have discovered that Clare Evans has actually

managed to get credit worth tens of thousands of pounds in recent years

and a massive £65,000 has been deposited

in her current account in a period of just four years.

Crikey. I mean, that's an awful lot of money for somebody

who, supposedly, hasn't got a job.

But you want to find out where it's all come from.

Yeah, you'll see that a lot of these items are listed as foreign items

which didn't mean anything to us at the time.

Investigators don't know where the money's coming from

but they've got a good idea where it's going.

Clare Evans has bought numerous luxury cars in recent years.

But how does someone who's been on benefits for so long get so much credit?

The first piece of the jigsaw dropped into place

when they decided to pay a call to her letting agent.

We went to see this particular person, the agent, and he provided us

with a copy of the application she'd made when she rented the property.

Along with that and the fact that she was getting credit

on these cars, she must've been telling people she had a job.

Well, this is what we found out.

She'd actually told the letting agent that she was employed as a model.

-Earning £25,000 a year.

-OK.

Had been for about four years

and identified the studio for which she was working.

Which is all the damning evidence you need

cos, no doubt, that had her signature on it.

Indeed.

Ah-ha. Supposedly unemployed Clare Evans, actually,

had a very lucrative career as a model.

And it only took a few clicks on a search engine

to find some of the images of herself she was selling.

We subsequently identified at least two sites

-that she was using to model on.

-What are we talking about?

Catalogue modelling or something a little bit shadier.

Yes, glamour modelling, glamour modelling.

One of the sites that she used,

she advertised her services for fees of up to £75 per hour.

-OK, so we're talking about adult sites?

-Yes.

-OK.

Clare Evans might be a glamour model but she's no ditzy blonde.

She's been getting away with claiming benefits on the basis

that she is an unemployed mum of two in need of help to pay her rent.

All the while earning tens of thousands of pounds a year as a model.

And that's not all she's been sneaky about.

The letting agent's paperwork also revealed

that Clare Evans was using more than one address.

In the application that she made to rent the property,

she quoted her previous address as an address in Bristol.

As far as we at the council were concerned, we had no record of that address.

But records showed that she'd used that Bristol address to record all her credit at.

That meant that the letting agent, when they do their checks

to find out if she's going to be a good tenant,

it shows that she would have lived there for a long time,

she's got credit at the address.

So, she was actually being dishonest with the credit companies, with the banks, with her letting agents.

-Obviously, the council, everybody.

-She was.

She had this one address which was getting her a good credit rating.

So, Clare Evans had managed to keep claiming benefits

by presenting herself as an unemployed mother of two

who can't afford her rent.

But at the same time, she's living the high life

bankrolled by her secret career as a glamour model.

In effect, what she's done is she's got, sort of, a split personality, here, hasn't she?

One which is really good and good enough to get credit for expensive cars.

And another one which is good enough to give her benefits cos she's unemployed.

That's precisely right, yes. She's split her identity down the middle, I think.

And what's worse is that Clare Evans has pulled a stunt like this before.

We prosecuted her for benefit fraud only back in 2008.

At that time, she had falsified a tenancy

to enable her to get benefits she wasn't entitled to then.

And we thought it was sufficiently serious that we prosecuted her.

-She obviously didn't learn her lesson, did she?

-Far from it.

This time, investigators were determined

that Clare Evans realised the seriousness of her crime.

We called her in for interview under caution, which is a formal interview.

And we asked her about her work.

Sensing her number was up, she admitted

that she did, indeed, have a source of income that she hadn't declared.

She told us that she was earning between £200 and £800 a month

-from her activities as a glamour model.

-Wow.

-Nice little income on top of your benefits, isn't it?

-Very nice.

In just four years, Clare Evans had amassed a fortune

of £65,000 in royalties for work she had done on adult modelling sites

and in online adult entertainment videos.

But she had some very interesting logic as to why she felt

she didn't have to declare her income.

She felt that it was such a small amount of work

she'd actually undertaken that it wasn't worth reporting.

-What 65 grand in four years?

-Well, she seemed to think that,

as I say, the hours that she put in to make the videos,

that we subsequently found out she was making,

didn't require her reporting them.

It's not the amount she's earned, it's that she did the videos quite quickly.

Well, that's what she thought.

But she'd have to do better than that to convince the courts to go easy on her.

In July 2011, Clare Evans appeared at Bristol Crown Court

where she was charged with ten offences

relating to her claims to benefits.

She pleaded guilty.

She'd defrauded the benefit system out of £62,000

she wasn't entitled to.

Although she was pregnant at the time of her court appearance,

the judge showed no leniency towards this repeat offender

and sentenced her to ten months imprisonment.

And, on her release,

she will have to repay all the money she stole from the benefit system.

Some people think they can have their cake and eat it.

Get a job that pays good money and claim benefits at the same time.

But, scroungers, beware,

if you're going to live life in the fast lane

at the taxpayer's expense, you better keep an eye on your mirror.

Because you never know when fraud investigators might be hot on your tail.

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