It is proposed to take Questions Nos. 264, 265 and 266 together.
The day-to-day management of new claims for payments and their subsequent review incorporates a developed structure of measures designed to prevent and to detect cases of abuse and fraud. These procedures and practices consist of general checking of applications and claims in payment, and targeted inspections of certain high-risk categories and groups of claimants. Such practices would not suggest the levels of abuse referred to by the Deputy.
In 1996, a total of 27,200 new claims from deserted wives, lone parents and widow(er)s were received out of which 164 were rejected on grounds of co-habitation following investigation. A further 6,500 claims in these categories were reviewed during 1996, where there were grounds for suspicion. Just over 1,000 of these claims were terminated due to cohabitation equivalent to 16 per cent. The scale of cohabitation identified in these reviews is not considered to be indicative for the lone parent client group as a whole because the reviews were targeted at cases where there were grounds for doing so.