Episode 13 Saints and Scroungers

One of the things that makes this country great

is that when we find someone in genuine need we help them out.

A much-needed handout when times are tough.

It's a terrible experience, it's like hitting a brick wall.

But whenever there's cash on offer,

you'll always find someone who wants to steal it.

She would not have been entitled to

any benefits or any public service financial help at all.

Those who cheat the system often get what's coming to them.

She went to prison there and then

and when she was sentenced, the judge was very critical of her actions.

This is the world of Saints And Scroungers.

Saints And Scroungers highlights the worthy and the greedy people

who are using and abusing our welfare state system.

On one hand, there are people with legitimate needs

and, on the other, fraudsters, bent on ripping off the taxpayer.

It's a war that's fought every day across the UK.

Fraud investigators bringing the cheats to justice

and saints fighting to make sure

people facing a struggle get what they deserve.

Coming up on today's show...

A mysterious jobseeker

who's been illegally claiming benefits for over a decade.

When she stood up in the dock,

this was the first time that she identified herself.

And we meet an entrepreneur

who finds help to get back to work after a series of personal setbacks.

If the scheme didn't exist, they would rely on

the benefit and welfare system to support themselves.

There are plenty of people here in the chilly UK

who would love to live somewhere nice and warm overseas,

the Caribbean or Spain,

somewhere with sun, sea and sand.

But then there are many people overseas

who'd quite like to live here,

because we've got jobs, a health system, education...

Oh, yeah!

And benefits!

Meet one woman who, when she arrived in the UK,

did more than most to get the very best out of our welfare system.

This person goes by the name of Collette Williams.

She was apparently struggling

to find work and had to rely on the state for help.

According to her records, she was born and bred in southeast London,

but when she moved to the southwest of the city,

what appeared to be a straightforward benefit claim

turned out to be anything but.

I've come to Croydon Council to find out a bit more about her claim.

Fraud investigator Graham Clark was part of the team

that dealt with her case.

Who was Collette Williams?

Tell me a little bit about her, her background, where she came from.

Well, Collette Williams is somebody,

as far as we know, that was born in the UK,

in the Lewisham area of London

and has lived in London all her life.

And she came to find herself in Croydon?

She did, yes. She first came to our notice

when she moved from the Lambeth area,

rented a house in the Thornton Heath district of the borough,

and put in a claim for housing benefit for that address.

She'd also been in receipt of Jobseeker's Allowance,

housing and council tax benefit from, as far back as we can make out, 2002.

And that claim was made on the basis

of her being a single person and unemployed.

So for you to be sure that Collette

was receiving these benefits legitimately,

what would you need from her?

Well, first of all, we would need some form of identity,

and it would be the usual type,

sort of either birth certificate or a passport.

Collette sent us in her birth certificate,

which we had no reason to suspect was dodgy in any way.

We also had a tenancy agreement from her landlord with a request

for the housing benefit to be paid into the landlord's account.

The fraud team at Croydon Council

didn't think there was anything wrong

with Collette's housing benefit claim.

But after their colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions

advised them about their investigation into her claim

for Jobseeker's Allowance, that soon changed.

Mark Simpson was the lead investigator in the case.

We work a lot with other Government departments

and local authorities to uncover the full extent of frauds.

We would normally find if a person is committing a benefit fraud,

they often have committed frauds

against other Government departments or the local authorities.

And the fraud that Mark was investigating

would have a direct impact on the benefits that Croydon

had been giving Collette.

We received an anonymous call on the National Benefit Fraud Hotline

which suggested

that Collette Williams was in fact not Collette Williams,

that the real Collette Williams had been resident

in the United States of America since at least 1992.

Hold on a minute!

If Collette Williams had been living abroad since '92,

who'd been claiming her benefits for the last ten years?

The investigating team was looking at a case that potentially

included frauds against both the Department for Work and Pensions

and Croydon Council.

So it was going to take some fairly joined-up investigating

to work out what had really been going on.

When we receive an allegation, obviously,

we do some basic checks internally.

If that throws up any questions that need to be answered

then we obviously would make further inquiries

with other Government departments.

What we wanted to establish was

what was the identity of Collette Williams.

We had only been presented with a birth certificate

and medical certificate

during the period of her benefit claim,

so our first lines of thoughts were, does she have a UK passport?

Mark carried out checks to establish

if a Collette Williams with the same date of birth

as the Collette Williams claiming benefit in South London

had in fact left the country.

We made inquiries with the Identity and Passport Service

into Collette Williams

to find out whether any passports had been issued to her in the UK.

The Identity and Passport Service said that

there'd been no UK-issued passports,

but when we made inquiries with them again

with regards to passports that had been issued overseas,

a passport had been issued in the name Collette Williams in Washington

in the United States of America,

using a birth certificate which was identical to the birth certificate

that had been supplied to the department

for Collette Williams to claim benefit.

Collette Williams was in America.

How could her birth certificate be used to claim benefits over here?

It's starting to sound a bit dodgy.

The intelligence that had been established

by the Identity and Passport Service

obviously threw up a problem about who the real Collette Williams was.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office

and the consulate people in the United States of America

were able to tell us...

were able to provide us with a copy of the documents actually issued

to Collette Williams, a copy of her passport application

and a copy of the photo that was used for the passport.

With contact details and a picture of the Collette Williams in America,

investigators decided to call her to find out what she knew

about her birth certificate being used to make the benefit claims.

She told us that she had moved from the UK at a very early age

and had lived in America for a number of years.

She couldn't get hold of any details of her birth

or a copy of her birth certificate,

so therefore she had to contact the consulate

in the United States of America

to obtain a copy of her birth certificate.

Her original birth certificate had gone missing.

Well, that explains how it could have fallen into the wrong hands.

The fraud team now believed

the Collette Williams in America was the genuine person

who the Department for Work and Pensions

and officials in Croydon Council

thought they were giving benefits to.

So if the real Collette Williams was thousands of miles away,

who exactly had been claiming benefits every two weeks

in Thornton Heath?

It was time to investigate the impostor

who may have been ripping off the taxpayer for nearly a decade.

We didn't have any photographic evidence

of the Collette Williams who lived in the UK,

so we decided to set up some covert surveillance

in the Job Centre when she signed on,

just purely her signing on at the Job Centre,

and she had a short discussion with the benefit advisor

and then left the office.

During the surveillance, investigators noticed

that the suspect spoke with a heavy Jamaican accent,

which was suspicious

because the details they had about Collette Williams on file

showed that she was a Londoner.

So this woman didn't look like Collette Williams or sound like her.

Mark and his team had seen enough to step up the investigation.

When we got the photographs from the surveillance,

it was felt that we had enough evidence

to have the UK Collette Williams arrested

and interviewed to establish who she actually was.

And it was an arrest that had to be carefully planned.

It was decided to arrest Collette Williams in this country

when she next signed on at the Job Centre

as part of her Jobseeker's Agreement.

We were unable to arrest her at the Job Centre,

but she was seen walking along the street towards her home address

following her visit to the Job Centre,

and she was arrested then by the police.

When she was approached by the police,

she identified herself as Collette Williams.

Well, if she'd been pretending to be someone for the past ten years,

it could be quite hard to break a habit.

But who was this person?

Now she was under arrest, the investigators planned to find out.

During the course of the interview,

she answered, "No comment," to any of the questions.

Following on from the arrest, we did not know who this woman was.

For now, though, it's farewell to the shakers and fakers

and hello to the people we call our saints,

those in society that assist others who are in real need

but who are too proud or often don't know how to claim

what they're entitled to.

When life takes an unexpected turn,

it doesn't just destroy the plans that you have for the future,

but very often all the hard work that you've put in in the past.

That's why, when tragedy strikes,

you can need some help to get back on track.

Richard Offor and his partner Helen

had been living together for over 20 years

and carefully planned their future

to make sure they'd got exactly what they wanted

as they approached middle age.

I realised many years ago when I was a teenager

that people spend their lives chasing money,

but they don't have a quality of life.

I decided to have the lifestyle and the quality of life,

so I effectively semi-retired at 30.

The couple took a big step towards fulfilling their ambitions

when they moved to Wales

and started up a horticultural business.

The change gave them a better quality of life

and allowed Richard more time to indulge in his passion.

Paragliding is something that takes up quite a bit of time.

You can be up all day if the weather conditions allow.

You have total freedom, it's like being a bird.

Richard is a very experienced paraglider,

but when he went flying in the French Alps in June 2009,

he had an accident that would change his life for ever.

Decided I was going to go down, land in the valley.

Suddenly I went and looked for some lift, and I got a lot of lift,

went back up 3,500, 4,000 feet,

went to land and suddenly I lost about 500 feet very quickly.

I actually got ground rush before I hit the ground.

Richard had hit the ground at 40mph

and sustained life-threatening injuries on impact.

All the time, I wasn't really aware what was going on

because I suffered a lot of trauma.

I knew I was in trouble because I couldn't move my legs properly.

I got a phone call, it must have been about 1.45 in the afternoon,

saying he's had a bad accident.

I didn't know exactly what state he was in.

I knew he was alive, but I didn't know the state of his injury.

I was taken to hospital in Annecy for basic assessment, they X-rayed me.

They looked at the X-rays,

which showed my spinal cord had an S shape in it

and my vertebra L1 was shattered.

Richard's future now lay in the hands of surgeons,

but it was going to take a minor miracle to repair the damage.

They operated on me,

but I still the following day couldn't move my legs, really.

Richard's accident left him paralysed from the waist down.

As he lay recovering in hospital, it was Helen

that had to help him cope with the worst possible prognosis.

When he returned to the UK and was admitted to Oswestry,

he was told that he probably wouldn't walk again...

and he'd be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

As Richard struggled to come to terms with the thought

of spending the rest of his life without being able to walk again,

he also had to endure a very painful recovery.

I'd had rods put in my back to fix it, stabilise it,

and that's over five vertebrae.

I had to be turned every four hours to avoid getting bedsores.

I couldn't get up, I couldn't really clean myself,

I couldn't even sit up, I was lying down all the time.

I had to eat lying down, horizontal.

I had to have six weeks of that, bed rest.

While Richard was in hospital,

Helen was left to take care of their horticultural business on her own,

and, despite her best efforts, it went downhill fast.

We kept roughly around 25,000, 30,000 plants in pots

and containers on site, and typically it took

between four and six hours a day to water all that lot,

because we have to hand-water.

It was decided to sacrifice the stock,

we didn't have the resources or the money

to pay people to come in and water.

We estimate that we lost £30,000,

but at retail it was more like a quarter of a million.

We thought... what are we going to do?

The couple had painstakingly built up their business from scratch

and now it was looking like all that hard work was for nothing.

When Richard did finally leave hospital,

the future was looking bleak in more ways than one.

I was discharged with the prospect

of probably no further recovery at the time.

Faced with the challenge of living with a disability,

Richard had to adapt to what his body could and couldn't do.

Within a few weeks, I was sent to meet my local physiotherapist.

She gave me an exercise regime which I did 25 hours a week,

and I got better, I improved.

And in the new year, he made some startling progress.

I started being able to take a few steps, still holding on to things...

And he said, "Oh, come and have a look at this,"

and he was staggering around, holding on to the work surfaces.

And that's how it's progressed ever since.

Richard was making exceptional progress,

but financially, the couple were in a dire situation.

The business was making huge losses,

and they had to get used to the idea of living on benefits.

When I came out of hospital,

I automatically got Disability Living Allowance.

Disability Living Allowance is there

to help you meet extra costs when you come out,

when you're looking after yourself,

so I qualified for the higher rate of mobility,

and because I could dress myself and wash myself effectively,

I just got the lower rate of care.

And it's not a lot, but it's just helpful.

Richard also received Employment Support Allowance

in addition to Disability Living Allowance,

but he was determined not to live on benefits.

What he wanted was help to get back to work,

so he could get his business back on track.

I was determined to go back to work, cos I'm a worker. I can't sit around.

And it looked like a Government scheme

that assists people with disabilities

to get back into the workplace might be able to offer him support.

Andrew Legg manages a team of advisors

who assess applications from disabled people for help.

Access To Work support

can range from simple solutions,

such as a piece of specialist equipment

or software that would enable a customer to carry on working,

to ongoing support such as help with travel costs to work

if a customer would have difficulty getting to and from work.

The scheme teamed Richard up with an advisor

to assess the kind of help that he would need

to get back into work.

They looked around the nursery, they saw we'd concreted it all,

but it was too rough for a wheelchair.

The first thing we looked at

is how Richard would be able to get round his land.

In order to do that, he'd need to have the surface re-laid.

We provided Richard with a discretionary grant

that enabled him to go ahead and get that work done.

It cost £37,500 to resurface the roads across the nursery,

and this was a massive help for Richard,

but in order for him to achieve his goal

and get back to full-time employment,

he was going to need more assistance from the Government scheme.

When Richard's advisor realised

that he was committed to returning to full-time work,

he recommended a grant

that would help him buy a very special bit of kit.

Before he had his accident,

he was able to manually lift and carry the things into the tunnels,

so what we looked at doing

was providing him with a miniature forklift truck

that could fit into the tunnels

and allow him to still take things in and out of the tunnels.

The small forklift that cost £7,000

made a huge difference to what Richard could do around the nursery.

If I want a bag of compost, I just go and get the pallet.

The help that Richard got from Access To Work

enabled him to turn around his business

and get it to start running productively again.

We were able to actually do the following plant season.

Helen had to do nearly all the work.

I could sit there at a table and put the soil in pots

and pot the plants up.

We did all right.

He wasn't able to use all of his land because of his disability,

but after speaking to his Access To Work advisor,

they came up with a plan.

There's an area of Richard's land

where he grows other items that's rough terrain,

that couldn't be re-laid.

So we looked at providing a grant

for him to be able to purchase an all-terrain utility vehicle

to allow him to get to those areas of his land as well.

It's like a quad bike, but with a cab on it and a bit bigger.

The purchase of the all-terrain vehicle,

which cost just over £11,000,

was the final piece of the jigsaw

that allowed Richard to get back to work full-time.

Without Access To Work,

it would have been, if not impossible, very difficult

for me to have gone back to work.

Richard still faces a struggle to get his business back on track,

but it is reassuring to know that

if you're landed with a disability that affects your work,

you can get help to make sure that you can earn an honest crust.

Great stuff! Now it's scrounger time again!

The fraud team at the Department for Work and Pensions has discovered

that someone's been using UK citizen Collette Williams' name

to claim benefits while she is living

over 3,500 miles away in America.

It's an investigation where the Government fraud team

has to join forces with their local authority partners in Croydon

in order to crack the case.

It was only when we got that phone call from DWP

that we gave them the information that they required.

Once we realised there was an issue

with the housing and council tax benefit claim,

I put a stop to those payments going out.

Mark and his team

had successfully arrested the person posing as Collette Williams,

but they still didn't know her real identity.

And when they took the suspect

back to her address to search her property,

they were faced with another problem.

When the police arrived at the property,

there was another female at the property at the time

who said at the time that she was the niece of Collette Williams,

but when the two ladies were asked

for identity documents with photographs,

they could not provide any documents whatsoever.

Hang on! So now Collette Williams has got a niece.

Where did she come from?

The investigators now had two mysterious women on their hands,

with no ID to prove who they were.

They needed some clues to identify the pair

and they found them in the most unlikely of places.

During the course of the search,

some greeting cards and birthday cards, etc, were found

in the name of Annie or Annette.

We also found a birth certificate

of a child with the surname Harrison hidden underneath the bed.

So not Collette Williams's missing birth certificate,

but one with the surname Harrison. It wasn't much,

but the two new names that had popped up in the search

were enough to give Mark and his team something to follow up.

In this type of investigation against Collette Williams,

it's often like a jigsaw puzzle

that you need several pieces to fit together

to complete the full picture.

Following the arrest of the person reporting to be Collette Williams,

she was taken back to a police station

and interviewed by officers of the Department for Work and Pensions.

During the course of the interview,

she answered, "No comment," to any of the questions,

to all of the questions, she said, "No comment."

Therefore we were unable to establish anything from that interview.

OK. The investigators may not have been successful

in getting an admission of guilt during the interview,

but the background checks into the two names that had surfaced

did get a result.

We decided to make some inquiries

with the UK Border Agency as regards to an Annette Harrison.

UKBA told us that they had an application

from an Annette Harrison in 2002

for settlement in the UK.

And, in fact, she was a Jamaican citizen.

UKBA supplied us with a photograph of the Annette Harrison

and this matched the identity of the lady that we had arrested

and subsequently interviewed.

Annette Harrison was an illegal immigrant,

and the investigators also discovered

that the other young woman

who said she was Collette Williams' niece

was in fact Annette's daughter.

How had they managed to get away with living a lie for so long?

So who was Annette Harrison?

Well, Annette Harrison, it turns out,

was somebody who had come over with her daughter from Jamaica

some time ago, just on a visitor's visa...

which would normally only have been for six months,

but had stayed in the country and had gone under the radar

of the benefits authorities, the UK Border Agency...

and then obviously she had then decided

to assume the identity of Collette.

Annette had no claims, had no entitlement to benefit whatsoever -

because she was a Jamaican national

and only over here on a visitor's visa,

she would not have been entitled to any benefits

or any public service financial help at all.

Mark's fraud team at the Department for Work and Pensions

took the lead in putting the case together against Harrison,

and at the trial, they were pleased when she came clean.

At court, she had been charged with five counts of false representation.

When she stood up in the dock

and she was asked for her identity by the clerk,

this was the first time

that she identified herself as Annette Harrison.

She pleaded guilty to all five charges.

Annette Harrison was sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment.

And at the end of her sentence, the UK Border Agency

will look to have her deported back to Jamaica.

It was a good result for the fraud teams,

but the scam had cost the taxpayers serious money.

During the ten years of her benefit claim,

Annette Harrison had fraudulently claimed over £47,000 of benefits.

The real Collette Williams, who still lives in the US,

had no idea that someone had stolen her identity

to claim benefits,

but thanks to the teamwork in the investigation,

Annette Harrison has been stopped from ripping off

the British taxpayer any further in her name.

Wherever possible we will always look to work with other agencies,

in particular the DWP,

because you can then share the intelligence

that each organisation has got

to get to an end result a lot quicker.

Annette thought she could cheat our benefits system

and get away with it.

The net result is that after she's served her sentence,

she'll be deported.

Unfortunately, none of this really does anything

to mend the reputation of the real Collette Williams,

who is completely innocent.