To begin with is the Human Rights Act 1998 and the corresponding Regulations of Investigatory Procedures Bill. Currently the bill goes before the House of Lords this week. The Bill must become an act before October because it sets out the circumstances and procedures that regulatory bodies must follow when breaching Human Rights for municipal reasons. I.e. Enforcement of regulations, be they Benefits, trading standard or environmental regulation,  audit conditions or policing of any kind. Anything that is in the public interest to enforce or protect.

There is some confusion over this act. Some "knowing" police officers are suggesting that the section 110 powers are in breach of Human Rights. This isn't really so. While the Human Rights Act is not to be enforced until October 2000 it comes into effect from 1998. The Social Security Administration Act 110 powers came into effect prior to that date and so therefore stand. However any changes to those powers will probably have to be made under section 19 of HRA.

On the difficult areas, as far as RIP and HRA is concerned, is over the level of sign off for investigation. Currently the Local Government Association is in negotiations with the Home Office on how sign-off should be applied to local Government.  If the provisions for sign-off are sorted out then it will give Local Authorities some problems when working in conjunction with other enforcement agencies, such as the police.

Staffing is another issue causing problems at the moment. Local Authorities themselves are reducing the number of investigators and increasing the number of Verification Framework visiting officers. The decrease in fraud officers is a reaction to overall reduction in weekly benefits savings (WBS). Nationally the figure dropped again for the second year and Local Authority Chief Financial Officers, no longer seeing a return for their expenditure, have been making alternative arrangements.

The movement of staff from investigation to visiting is probably necessary given the comments being made about the impacts VF has had on benefit service delivery. Both the Housing Federation and the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux (Nacab) have published reports claiming that Housing Benefit is in crisis. Shelter has also identified that it believes that there are some areas of benefit administration that is so poor that it is failing tenants and leading to evictions rather than preventing them.

NACAB's Liz Phelps said in a recent newspaper article that, "Many private landlords now refuse to let to people on housing benefit altogether, whilst in the social rented sector, possession action has increased significantly." While this may be true, the question is which type of private landlord - obviously not including Housing Associations - are not taking Housing Benefit claimants. The answer must be generally good ones, as those with poorly maintained properties will find it difficult to rent to those people in work or who can afford the higher rents. Of course that is probably true of some areas but not all. Thames Valley and London for example which are seeing a major growth in renting as opposed to buying see many rackman landlords renting out truly appalling dive to large dot com and information technology companies for comfortable rents.

Without a doubt VF has slowed the system down. Wyre Council has been particularly vocal about the level of backlogs that have arisen since they introduced VF. A Shelter spokesman said "Whilst tackling fraud is very important we do not want a system that classifies all claimants as fraudulent until they are proved otherwise." However, this is said at a time when according to Alistair Darling in a newspaper article on 11 June that benefit fraud is running at £2-3bn per annum. In fact DSS figures indicate that the level of fraud and error is running at £7bn.

Liverpool City Council has got into difficulty with interviewing Pensioners under a caution. At one point they were saying that they would be prosecutionsof a number of the pensioners as individual fraud ran into as much as £30,000. There are two points here. The first for the civil liberties bodies is that whilst one might like to be IUCed it is their right to be interviewed and therefore afford the protection of those interviews.  Secondly fraud is fraud, it does not matter the age of the fraudster. It is taking food from the mouths of babies, and denying them their human rights.

Another point is, if it was not for the pensioners who stole money from the system, ( according to the Audit Commission some 60,000 pensioners were caught with their hands in the till by not declaring private pensions), systems like VF would be less necessary. Unfortunately the fraudsters are writing cheques for the rest of us to cash, in more way than one.

Another area of change for investigators is the "Professionalism in National Security Programme being rolled out by the DSS and the Benefit Agency. Those people who have been on the training declare it to be very useful. The DSS still haven't sorted out funding for the scheme as far as Local Authorities are concerned. The Benefit Agency's AD10 funded local Council investigators from it's own allocation last year. Councils were grateful for this arrangement but really need the DSS to do something positive. The scheme did get some flack from the press last year when it was shown that ex-SAS officers were doing some of the training. In reality it was ex-police officers who coincidentally had also served in the SAS. One has a picture of Liverpool City Council Investigators shinning down a rope and lobbing a smoke grenade into a pensioner's drop-in meeting before dragging them down to the office for a bit of integration. (That last bit was not true but written in the style of the Liverpool Evening Post). Alistare Darling (or Ali-D as he being known) made great play of the SAS link in an article in the Independent on Sunday. Wicked- init.

What is quite clear though,is that if you have not been on the training it is well worth it so sign up as soon as you can. I remain at this point sceptical about the next level of PiNS. It is really not offering anything that is not already on offer elsewhere. I would suggest the courses at Liverpool's John Moore's White Collar Crime Unit or at University of Wales (Prifysgol Cymru) in Cardiff as an alternative.

Help in investigation is coming from the National Anti-Fraud Network. None of the NAFN staff are to my knowledge ex-SAS but they are offering a new service. NAFN are holding a national database of cautions, financial penalties and prosecutions. So far they have a couple of hundred sanctions recorded. Like all systems you must send in your data in order to make it really useful. NAFN will take information from councils who are not registered in order to make the database as complete as possible.

Funding for NAFN has not really been resolved and personally I would like to see some central government money injected into the service. It would make some sense to integrate it in to the Audit Commission as part of the National Anti-Fraud Initiative.

NAFN and its London counter-part London Team Against Fraud were mentioned as a force for good in John Scampion's report on Organised Benefit Fraud. Where did that report disappear to? It seemed to support much of what was said in Lord Grabiner's report on the black economy but it seemed to sink without trace. Has it been buried by embarrassed civil servants or did some fraudulent landlord steal it? We may never know. May be it is sitting with a report on the failure of LOFIT on some shelve in Indiana Jones' study.

The Benefit Fraud Inspectorate are moving on to another range of inspections. Rumours are running rife at the moment about the future of the inspectorate. As far as I can see it's business as usual and the next inspections will centre on Benefit Agency Offices and the interface between Benefit Agency and Local Authorities.

The major problem, I guess for the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate is that they have been required to shoulder a share of the cuts that are being imposed on the Benefit Agency. This I feel will require the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate to sharpen their reports. This will result in more inspections and less audits. The term partnership working is starting to wither on the vine, and in many ways is no bad thing. While OFSTED come under a lot of criticism by the schools there is no denying that they are there to inspect against targets and nothing else. The question is will we see the secretary of state use his powers to put some benefit services out to contract.

I hope not, because coming back to the complaints about service delivery, we have not seen a particularly good Benefit Fraud Inspectorate report on a contracted out service and certainly if Private Eye's Rotten Borough's is to believe the private sector may be regretting it foray into Housing Benefit Administration.

Finally the government is planning to enhance the powers of tax and benefit inspectors in order to make it easier to get information from banks, building societies and accountants. The accountancy professional bodies are already calling foul and saying that it is a breech of their client's human rights. Well as Mandy Rice-Davies once said: "Well they would say that, wouldn't they."