Wrong Numbers

Date : 12 October 2003

To : The Editor, The Business

From : Nagindas Khajuria

Subject : Wasting Public Money

WASTING PUBLIC MONEY

Wrong numbers

Sir - The letter from Nagindas Khajuria last week regarding the waste in the state benefit system, following Bill Jamieson's article, "Boom time in welfare land" on 7/8 September, was replete with common sense. Of course the state benefit system is not real employment. It is a giant job creation scheme. Why otherwise does the UK government employ thousands to take telephone calls to administer the new means tested pension credits?

Personal incomes are no secret to government. Surely the additional benefit could be applied universally with a cut-off point to those on incomes above the poverty level or whatever level it chose.

This telephone work being created in the benefits system is the type of employment that private industry is currently transferring to India at huge cost savings, a fact that seems to have escaped the government's attention. The cost of millions of phone calls will be borne by the most impoverished people in the land - pensioners - simply in their efforts to secure what is supposedly their right. That is a salutary thought when one considers that many of the telephone companies which will receive these new cash streams from these calls are the same ones responsible for squandering countless billions (£30bn on3G licences) in building and creating overcapacity.