Kaur/Emmaus/Cavanagh Saints and Scroungers

What would you do if you had a bad run of luck?

The chances are that you'd end up turning to government agencies for a bit of help.

We're very lucky to have a welfare state

and I think a lot of people don't appreciate it.

My husband is disabled. Without the benefit system, we would've found things difficult.

Here in the UK, millions of us need to ask for help every year

in the form of benefits, legal aid and healthcare,

but there are some people who are out there to cheat the system out of as much as they can.

Benefit cheats are criminals

and they should be treated accordingly.

How are these people managing to get away with this?

But those people who are trying to get rich from the public purse

are now being sniffed out by investigators,

who want to make sure that as much money as possible

is available to those who need it.

This is the world of Saints And Scroungers.

Coming up, the scroungers out to beat the system...

A single mum on benefits with hundreds of thousands of pounds in the bank...

Rashpal had just over £270,000 in her bank.

A lot of the money seemed to be going towards building up a property portfolio,

both here in the UK and abroad.

And we meet someone who rightly deserves a helping hand -

a young man trying to pull his life together

after battling with drink and drugs.

It just felt absolutely unreal.

I felt as if, "How can I possibly carry on? How can I pick this up?"

There was no way I could see...

of getting any help of going anywhere in life.

Now, we all need a roof over our heads,

and while many of us are lucky enough to own our own homes,

there are some people who need help paying the rent.

If it's the council that's providing that help, though,

you've got to be honest with them.

In Sandwell in the West Midlands,

the drive to clamp down on housing benefit cheats comes from the very top.

We have a zero-tolerance approach to fraud.

For many people in Sandwell

who don't claim what they're entitled to,

we help them to get what they are,

but for those people who commit tenancy fraud,

I'm interested in making sure that all of those issues are dealt with.

The council's Fraud Team regularly scrutinises benefit claims in proactive initiatives,

and it was during one of these exercises they came across a very unusual case.

Meet 45-year-old Rashpal Kaur,

a single mother living on income support

and receiving housing and council tax benefit

from Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council.

She appeared to be the kind of person that taxpayers should be giving a helping hand to.

Rashpal had been claiming benefits since 1995.

She was claiming as a single, unemployed mother with one child.

On the forms completed for the council for housing benefit,

Rashpal stated that she wasn't related to the landlords in any way,

and neither were her children.

Between 2003 and 2007,

Rashpal Kaur received nearly £25,000 in housing benefit.

Nothing seemed to be wrong with her claim,

until fraud investigators launched a specific drive

into a type of benefit payment that she was being given.

Ian Scarrett was in charge of the team that looked into her case.

We'd identified a couple of cases

where landlords were related to tenants

and that hadn't been declared.

What we thought we would do would be to carry out a fraud drive

to look at people who...

who may be related to the landlord in some way.

After trawling through housing benefits files

looking for signs of unusual tenancy agreements,

Rashpal pinged up on the investigators' radar.

Rashpal Kaur was interesting to the council

because she'd been at the property for a number of years,

the rent continued to be the same figure

and the landlord had changed in that time

and we hadn't had notification of it.

Rashpal was married but separated from her husband.

As a single parent, she'd been claiming benefits for over a decade.

She'd filled in two applications for housing and council tax benefit

from two addresses in Sandwell,

one for St Christopher Close

and the other in Europa Avenue.

The investigators' initial enquiries focused on finding out

exactly who owned these properties.

We didn't have application forms for Rashpal going back to '95,

so we were only able to get evidence from 2003.

And Ian's team didn't waste any time in doing just that.

Rashpal had received nearly 25 grand in housing benefit

from Sandwell Council since 2003.

The investigators needed to make sure that this claim was legit.

Once we looked at Rashpal Kaur and were suspicious about her claim,

there were several different checks

that we would carry out simultaneously

to enable us to make a decision as to whether there was

further information we'd need -

things like birth certificates,

credit checks, Land Registry checks.

Investigators were searching for any evidence that might support

their hunch that Rashpal's circumstances were not exactly as set out on her claim form.

It wasn't long before they did.

The credit check that we received

showed that she'd got joint credit with a male.

She hadn't declared a male as living at the property.

We checked the male's details at the address

and he came up as having applied for credit in his own right

and with a partner - Rashpal.

Hold on! A man was claiming to be living at her address

when she was meant to be single!

The name on the credit forms was her estranged husband,

but he was meant to be out of the picture.

Alarm bells started to ring for the investigators

and further checks were needed.

The Land Registry check for the two addresses

showed people that we were then aware of

were either related to Rashpal,

either by being the father of her,

or the brother of her, or married to her.

Over the years, the two properties that Rashpal had been using

to claim benefits from

had changed ownership a number of times.

Her home at St Christopher Close was owned individually and jointly by her father and husband,

and her home at Europa Avenue was owned at different times

by her father and brother and her father and husband.

It was time for investigators to do what they do best -

dig a bit deeper.

We carried out some checks, birth certificate checks, firstly on Rashpal,

and that showed details of her parents.

That was interesting to us

because the father was regularly the landlord

or the owner of the two properties that she was living in.

Further checks showed that a second owner,

or joint owner of the property, was her husband,

and we were able to confirm that

by getting a marriage certificate which showed those details.

So it turns out that Rashpal's landlord is in fact her dad.

No, hold on, it's her brother. No, it's her husband!

I've heard of married couples having set-tos,

but charging your wife rent...

Well, that's harsh!

Rashpal's claims that her husband

was not involved in her life any more now looked ridiculous.

Investigators suspected that she'd given nearly £25,000

of housing benefit money directly to her family.

If true, she could potentially be making a fraudulent claim to the council.

The Fraud Team decided it was time to ask her to come in

for an interview under caution.

We sent her out three interview requests

and she didn't attend any of them.

Once Rashpal didn't attend the interview

it gave us no option, as far as we were concerned,

as to find out where that money was going, whether it was properly being used for rent.

The only way to do that was to check the bank account we were paying the money to,

to see what was happening to it.

Ian's team used their authorised powers

to carry out a detailed examination of Rashpal's bank records.

Normally, we'd expect to see the money coming in from the council

the one day and perhaps a few days later,

that money, the same amount, going out to the landlord.

That would be what we would expect to see.

With Rashpal, we saw the money going into her account

and then it would sit in the account

and be used for general day-to-day expenses.

On the face of the bank statements,

it appeared that there was no rent being paid.

No rent at all? So nearly £25,000 of taxpayers' money

she was getting to keep a roof over her head

was being spent on everything else but.

So, where was it going?

With Rashpal refusing to answer any questions,

investigators kept digging into her financial affairs

and made a shocking discovery.

We were aware of one bank account,

which is where we paid our rent to Rashpal.

When we contacted that bank,

they advised us there was a number of other bank accounts

which we were unaware of.

A single mum on benefits with secret bank accounts?

It looked like investigators

had unearthed a very sophisticated fraud.

But what was going on?

Ian's team started the mammoth task of gathering information

about where the money in Rashpal's accounts was coming from

and what else she was doing.

We found that Rashpal had another eight accounts

which she hadn't declared to us at all,

and these all had money running through them.

Eight bank accounts? Who has eight bank accounts?

Rashpal had been given over £25,000 from the council,

but had any of this money been siphoned off

into the other accounts?

It was a confusing picture of deposits and withdrawals.

We also found that Rashpal's husband's wages

were being paid directly into one of Rashpal's accounts,

which obviously is not what you'd expect

from a supposed ex-husband.

It certainly wasn't.

But the money transfers between the couple were almost insignificant

compared to money circulating in some of Rashpal's other accounts.

As Ian and his team looked more closely at her banking,

the sums of money involved were staggering.

What was she doing with the cash

and where was the £25,000

the council had given to her in housing benefit?

I mean, none of this money was declared.

She claimed not to have anything.

As we'll see later, Rashpal was very naughty indeed.

For now, it's farewell to the fraudsters

that are trying to rip off our system,

and hello to those who we call our saints -

people who do everything to make sure that folk

who genuinely require help,

but who are too proud or don't know how to help themselves,

get what they need.

Do you remember being young? I think I do.

It's a little while ago now.

What I remember is that there's a huge pressure to fit in.

Sometimes that pressure can make you do things

which make you a danger to yourself and to those around you.

After problems with drink and drugs,

Shane Blankley found himself homeless and with no hope,

aged just 19.

I felt that, "I don't know where my next meal's coming from,

"I don't know where I'm going to sleep that night."

I felt as if I was going nowhere.

'Shane came from a broken home

'and opted to live with his father and brother after his parents had separated.

'I've come to meet him to find out how someone so young

'could end up in such a terrifying situation.'

Roughly, what sort of age would you pinpoint

where you left the path of acceptable behaviour, if you like?

13, 14. I got into the wrong crowds.

It started off as a bit of drinking, I suppose,

and then a little bit of light drugs come along.

And how were things going at school after that?

I was turning up hungover

or I was getting high in the middle of the day,

so it came to the point where I was being put in isolation at school,

I was being taken out of the lessons.

They didn't want me there. I was being too much of a distraction.

Shane started to experiment with harder drugs.

It wasn't long before his erratic behaviour took its toll on his dad,

with whom he was living at the time.

I was bored at home

and I found my brother's car keys.

Like an idiot, I decided to go out and take his car

and I went for a spin.

I'd been drinking. I, er, I took a little bit of drugs.

It wasn't much for me, you know?

It was what I'd class as an average night.

I enjoyed myself, I suppose. That was the kind of idea,

but it soon turned into a disaster when I crashed it.

When my parents found out that night, my dad just...

That was it. It was the final straw for him.

He threw me out there and then.

Shane's mum took him in,

but it was a struggle for him to keep off the drugs.

-So you're with your mum...

-Yes.

Is she more tolerant of what you're up to?

Is she letting you drink and take drugs?

She pretty much made me go cold turkey.

Er... It came to the point,

the first couple of weeks, I was locked in. I wasn't allowed out.

But as time went on, she gave me a little bit more freedom,

and, in that freedom,

she didn't realise exactly what I was doing in my spare time.

I was getting the bus back to see mates

and I was back to drinking and doing drugs.

OK, so you may be thinking at this point, "Shane is just trouble."

Eventually, his mum decided to kick him out.

Like many in his situation, he ended up living in hostels.

Finally, he managed to get a flat of his own from the council

and was working in a warehouse to try and make ends meet.

It was really good, my job, but I turned to drink

because it was something to relax me after a hard day.

But with me previously having drink problems anyway, you know,

it soon crept up and started to become a problem.

I soon found that I needed something to pick me up.

Living by himself clearly wasn't doing this troubled young fellow

any favours, and, left to his own devices,

his drug use spiralled out of control.

It'd come to the point where I had two weeks inside my flat,

and the first few days

I phoned up work to tell them I can't make it,

and then it felt too much to even phone work.

Shane lost his job.

Without a steady income, his bills started to pile up.

Really down because of everything I'd lost.

And then I get a letter through from my housing association

saying they're putting in for an eviction notice.

That's when things really, really started to drop.

The housing association wanted Shane out,

but they also recognised he was a young man that needed help,

so they arranged for Helen Parkin, a family employment coach,

to help him get out of the desperate situation he was in.

He was facing eviction, he had the court order,

he couldn't face the court case,

he had no criteria with which to fight the court case,

and this pile of debts,

and he really just couldn't see a way out of the situation.

Helen was Shane's only hope.

He'd been evicted, but she pointed him in the direction of a charity

that could potentially help with accommodation and work.

We work with people who are formally homeless

and we provide them with a community home to live in

and a social enterprise to work in.

When people come to us, we will find a skill that they want to work on

or a job that are particularly interested in.

Christine Dallas is the leader for the community in Leicestershire

which considered Shane's application.

What we saw was somebody who wanted to change his life,

and that is really important to us.

We can only work with people when they want to succeed.

We could give him responsibility that would give him something in his life.

We could give him his pride back.

Shane finally got the call he'd been waiting for.

I felt as if, all of a sudden, I'd gone from,

"Oh, no, the world is literally coming to an end for me"

to being, "Actually, hold on, they're going to give me a job,

"they're going to put a roof over my head,

"they're going to provide me with money

"and they're going to provide me with the support

"I could really do with."

The charity provided Shane with living accommodation

and gave him a job working in one of its emporiums,

which restores donated furniture and then sells it to the public.

Matthew Taylor's been working with the charity for over a year.

He was given the responsibility of helping Shane to settle in.

I was sort of assigned to Shane,

so I showed him round his new room

and broke the ice with a joke and we had a laugh together.

THEY LAUGH

Matt's helped me quite a lot since I've been here,

even if it's simple things like waking me up in the morning,

banging on my door to check that I'm up for work!

Having heard Shane's story,

I've come to see for myself just how far he's come.

-Everything we're looking at is for sale? This is a working shop?

-Yes.

It is a different proposition, isn't it, to any other shop?

Yes. If you don't talk to the customers,

you're potentially throwing away business.

One day, Shane was on the shop floor and a customer came into the shop

and she was very interested in a piano,

and this beautiful music started coming out of this piano

and it was Shane playing the piano.

The customer was that impressed, she bought the piano there and then.

It's great to see Shane looking genuinely settled.

It does sound like he has a real knack with the customers, as well.

When it comes to playing the piano, I could teach him a thing or two.

THEY PLAY FAST TUNE

Brilliant. Very nice. I'll take it.

Tell me what happens next for you.

Where do you see yourself going, if you can plan six months, a year?

How far ahead are you looking?

I want to go into youth work, all areas, all aspects.

I'd love to go into a bit of probation,

I'd like to go into social.

So, that's work...

What do you want for you?

I want to have a stable roof over my head, you know?

I want something that I can guarantee's going to be there.

I'd like to see a bit of my family more.

I'd like to build some bridges.

Friends, as well. Friends, especially.

I have lost quite a few of them.

So, yeah, it's not just progression in work or any particular...

It's just progression in life.

Shane now has big ambitions,

and it seems like his new family at the charity

have high hopes for him, as well.

Where would you put Shane right now? What position's he in?

We've seen a massive difference in Shane.

As you can see, he interacts brilliantly

with the other companions.

They mentor him, they look after him

and he responds really well to that.

Shane's definitely not at the end of his journey,

but he is on his way.

I look back on me, on how I was,

I was that screwed up and messed up at the time that...

any loss of anything was just...

It just knocked me down straight away.

I look at me now and, you know,

you can knock me down a couple of times

and I'll keep getting back up.

I've got that support network around me, I've got people there for me.

Time now to go back to the devious world of money-grabbing scroungers.

The Fraud Team at Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council

is investigating the case of single mother Rashpal Kaur,

who they suspect is cheating the system

and paying her housing benefit directly to family members.

In the course of their enquiries,

officers discovered that despite being a single mum on benefits,

Rashpal had access to huge amounts of cash

in a number of different bank accounts.

Where you've got, erm, serious cases of deliberate fraud,

clearly benefits are not then paid

when it's been found that they're not entitled to those benefits,

but the case then has to be put together

to bring the prosecution.

Steve took the decision to stop Rashpal's benefits,

but the investigators still had a lot of work to do

to get to the bottom of what was going on.

She'd been given nearly £25,000 in housing benefits

between 2003 and 2007

and the Fraud Team had to find out where this money had gone.

The spreadsheet shows that various accounts that Rashpal had were undeclared to the council.

And, over a six-year period,

we can show that Rashpal had just over £270,000

in these bank accounts.

It seems Rashpal is doing very well for herself.

Who can blame her? She's clearly a shrewd investor!

The only slight fly in the ointment is the fact

that not all of the money is hers.

In fact, there were so many accounts

that the investigators had a real job trying to track it down,

all £270,000 of it.

Investigators had to go through a painstaking process

of tracking and deciphering

what was behind Rashpal's various bank transactions,

but they did begin to notice a pattern.

The money that was in the accounts was being paid out in quite big sums.

Some of the sums were traced to property companies

or solicitors who dealt with property sales,

both in this country and abroad.

Our investigation showed that there was a lot of, erm,

links to the Southampton area,

but also, there was property developers in Dubai

who she was making payments to.

Rashpal was potentially using British taxpayers' money

to buy property by the seaside and in the Middle East.

After the Fraud Team examined bank records that connected Rashpal with three properties in Southampton,

they investigated who was living at these addresses

and uncovered a vital piece of evidence.

There was an address in Southampton, West End Road,

where there was a claim made from somebody

to get help with rent from Southampton Council.

On that claim,

they'd noted that the landlord was Rashpal Kaur.

But that wasn't all.

The phone number that could be used for contact

was the phone number that we held for Rashpal Kaur.

So, in Sandwell, Rashpal was getting benefits for being a single mum.

In Southampton, she was being paid taxpayers' money as a landlord.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Ian's team was about to discover

even more potential abuses of the system.

She made an application for Carer's Allowance for her mother,

stating that she was looking after her mum 35 hours a week.

Rashpal stated on the application form that she wasn't working.

We didn't trust that to be correct, so we did some checking

and we found out that she was working full time at a local call centre.

It was a barefaced lie.

In the course of their investigation,

the Fraud Team also discovered

that Rashpal may have fraudulently completed a housing benefit claim

for a friend and then lied to the authorities about that, as well.

It looks like she's trying to get round the benefits system

and use a different benefit

to get her the payments that she obviously thinks she deserves.

Ian had more offences to add to the list of allegations against Rashpal,

but what he had to prove

was how she'd spent the £25,000 of housing money

the council had given to her between 2003 and 2007.

One of things that we noticed with Rashpal was,

in 2006 she'd taken out some insurance policies

for her and her husband

in which they were both the recipient of the money, should the other die.

Effectively, Rashpal was laundering this money,

taking the money that she'd received criminally

and turning it into cleaner money.

It was the last piece of the jigsaw.

Investigators also found evidence that Rashpal used taxpayers' money

for private school fees, private number plates

and various expenses around the home.

Rashpal was charged with 22 counts, variously benefit fraud,

perverting the course of justice,

another benefit fraud case that had been brought, and money laundering.

She was charged with perverting the course of justice

because investigators believed she'd made a witness retract their statement

which incriminated Rashpal in a fraudulent claim involving her friend.

After investing thousands of man hours into the case,

Ian's team finally put Rashpal in front of a judge and jury

on the 5th of October 2012.

No-one else in her family was charged with any offences.

Rashpal appeared at Wolverhampton Crown Court

and pleaded not guilty to all the offences and charges

that had been put to her.

This meant that we had to have a trial.

That trial lasted 12 days,

which is as long as a trial for benefit fraud has ever taken, in my knowledge.

Rashpal may've put up a long fight,

but the jury simply didn't believe her

and found her guilty of all charges.

At the end of the trial,

the judge said it was the most comprehensive benefit fraud

that he'd seen and she was sentenced to 32 months in prison.

Rashpal Kaur is clearly a calculating criminal.

She had a significant amount of money,

far more money than the vast majority of the residents of Sandwell

could ever hope to have.

She used those benefits to supplement that money,

to invest in property to make more money.

Her motives were pure greed.

It was a great result for the Sandwell Fraud Team,

and taxpayers, who'll be getting their money back

and any money Rashpal made as a result of her fraudulent acts.

So cash-rich Mrs Kaur finally got what was coming to her,

a very lengthy sentence.

She was held to account

for a very complex and dodgy set of accounts.