Ritchie, I said 'most authorities'. By this I meant either accountable public bodies such as the National Audit Office, the Office for National Statistics etc. or reputable peer-reviewed research; not a nutty self appointed right-wing blogger like John Page, who has never responded to a single academic challenge to his figures. He gets most of his information from the right wing press and wikipedia, then conflates it into an illogical case. If you want to argue this case, go away and do some proper research, rather than repeating half baked rumour. To cite the benefitfraud website as 'truth' is simply laughable. There is undoubtedly benefit fraud, and it does cost money. The case I made was that A) it isn't as much as you, Page and the Daily Mail seem to think, and it certainly is nowhere near as much as the amount of tax that is avoided by the wealthy. Rather than tackling benefit fraud, be it £1.1bn or £3.5bn, why not seize the bonuses from the bankers who caused the mess? Not their salaries, just the bonuses. That's £10bn or so towards the deficit right there.