One of the things that is often heard in discussions about Personal Budgets, Direct Payments and mental health is the drugs and alcohol gambit, i.e.
People with mental health problems will probably spend the money that’s meant to be for their support on drugs and alcohol.
Really?
The Audit Commission identified some £2.2m of Direct Payments (probably in 2010) that was spent fraudulently. In 2010/11, a total of £960m was spent through Direct Payments.
As such, identified Direct Payments fraud made up the positively DWP-levels (see point 10 here) of 0.2% of all expenditure on Direct Payments.
In the same way people rightly ask for evidence to make the case for this, that or the other, we should also ask people who prefer things as they are what their evidence is against.
arbitrary constant 