Shoplifting, tax evasion... If UK politicians break the rules, why shouldn’t the rest of us? | Martha Gill

What to make of last week’s annual report by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which declares – I summarise – that the inhabitants of this island have lost their integrity, and there is nothing anyone can do about it?

The document starts by reporting a rise in benefit fraud. But then it expands – if not entirely in the manner of a drunken uncle, not quite in the manner of a sober departmental report. The DWP’s efforts to deal with false claims, it says, are running into a “headwind” of rising dishonesty in Britain. Our compatriots are afflicted with a “growing propensity to commit fraud” against organisations – tax evasion and shoplifting have likewise exploded – amid a decadent “softening of attitudes” towards this  ind of thing. As a result of all this, the department is having to basically “assume” a 5% rise in benefit fraud every year.

The DWP cites a number of studies to back up these claims. The British Social Attitudes Survey finds a rise in the number who think it “not wrong” or “only a bit wrong” to cheat the benefits system. A YouGov survey discovers that 27% of 18-24-year-olds would “likely” give false information to an insurance company if struggling financially, up on the previous year. Since 2021 we have even become more relaxed about admitting to fraud, according to figures from the Cifas fraud database. And another study now classes one in five Brits as “low integrity” – compared with one in 14 around a decade ago.

Of course, the DWP was in the news for other reasons last week: Keir Starmer’s decision to keep the two-child benefit cap has proved somewhat controversial. Edward Davies, of the Centre for Social Justice, a thinktank, links these two bits of news. The “pretty bold” report, he has said, may be an attempt by the department “to justify its social contract with the taxpayer”.

But I wonder if another thread connects these two things – on the one hand, 14 years of punitive policies, which include the two-child benefit cap – and on the other, a rebellious upswing of fraud towards institutions in general. Could the long trend of rising corruption in politics, too, be linked to this growing feeling that it is “only a bit wrong” to break some rules yourself? Could it be that the conduct of ordinary Brits has something to do with the behaviour and decisions of their leaders?

When looking at crime figures, governments tend not to connect these ideas – their own behaviour, and the behaviour of their citizens. The focus, when examining why people break the law and how it might be controlled, is usually on raw personal incentive. Is the punishment strong enough? How likely is the crime to be spotted? What levels of need – of social deprivation – might drive people to break the law in the first place?

But there is another sort of motive that also seems to correlate with outbreaks of crime. When writing about food riots of the 18th century, the historian Edward Thompson talked of a “moral economy”. The riots couldn’t only be explained by hunger, he said, or revealed criminality. After all, hunger occurred regularly and riots didn’t. The crowd was expressing moral outrage. Industrialisation had changed the rules on them – protective laws had vanished, and previously illegal activities were everywhere. The upper classes were defying commonly held values and the rioters wanted to reassert them.

This explanation also turns up in accounts of the 2011 London riots. The looting was decried as “senseless” by much of the rightwing press, but those who interviewed looters were instead treated to angry rants about the MPs’ expenses scandal, the bank bailouts, police corruption and the abuse of stop-and-search powers. The riots were, in part, a response to double standards.

The DWP is wrong when it says there is nothing to be done about this loss of integrity: the solution is to lead by example

“This seems to be what is happening now,”, says Tim Newburn, professor of criminology at the London School of Economics. “When people see those in power breaking moral rules with little comeback, their willingness to abide by rules is lessened. There comes a kind of tipping point where things such as low-level tax fraud become easier to do. It is easier to say to oneself ‘this is nothing compared with things I’ve seen those in power do’.” And this time, the breaking point was likely the pandemic. “The pandemic was a very clear illustration of one rule for them and another for everyone else,” says Newburn.

Last week’s report seems to align with this view – it finds that welfare fraud is double that of pre-Covid levels. We tend to think of the pandemic as having “revealed” something about the British character: we were unexpectedly compliant with the rules, unexpectedly kind and generous to one another, unexpectedly willing to sacrifice individual freedom for the common good. But we now face the troubling thought that the pandemic may have changed our character too.

All this tends to suggest that the DWP is wrong when it says there is nothing to be done about this loss of integrity: the solution lies in leading by example. Corruption and unfairness at a high level leaks into the population at large. In battling this, the government seems to have made a start: Rachel Reeves has appointed a corruption tsar to claw back money lost to fraudsters during the pandemic.

Of course, the idea that criminals – low-level ones in this case – may be responding to diffuse concepts such as fairness rather than solid ones, such as a nearby policeman, could be a hard one for officials to get their heads around. The criminal who through his crime strikes a blow for true justice is a notion explored in novels but rarely by government departments. Yet it might be worth giving it a go.

Will the decision keeping the two-child benefit cap – seen by many as unfair – have a knock-on effect on benefit fraud down the line? It is not inconceivable.

• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist

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