Fore...tee...

...thousand. That's what the lady captain of a Cheshire golf club had claimed in disability living allowances. Perhaps she thought 'disability' included not having enough money to suit her lifestyle.

Valerie Lewis received more than £40,000 in Disability Living Allowance, claiming she suffered back pain that meant she could barely walk.

But the mother-of-two played four nine or 18-hole rounds of golf a week and was lady captain of her local club.

The 55-year-old first claimed the disability benefit in 2001, insisting she had difficulty walking more than 7ft, getting dressed and even cutting up food or tying her shoelaces.

Fraud investigators filmed her teeing off at Sutton Hall Golf Club near Runcorn, Cheshire, loading her golf buggy, lifting clubs in and out of her car and walking ‘five or six miles’.

She was filmed at the 6,000-yard course in November 2008 after investigators received a tip-off that she was ‘fitter than stated’.

Lewis was further implicated by her own diary, which revealed she had played in a golf competition on the day of her very first disability assessment and rode a horse the day after.

In January she escaped jail after admitting failing to inform the Department for Work and Pensions about changes to her circumstances.

At Warrington Crown Court, Lewis, from Runcorn, was given a sentence of 24 weeks in prison, suspended for two years, and 200 hours of community service.

(Hat-tip The Welfare State We're In)

At the risk of stating the obvious, the problem is dishonesty. The more people who are dishonest, the more it becomes normalised and the more people accept it as normal. A values survey conducted over many decades showed that increasingly people thought it was OK to apply for benefits they were not legally entitled to.

MSD research includes this insight into inter-generational welfare dependence:

"First, poor children are more likely to grow up to be poor, so the correlation could just result from shared economic circumstances. It could also arise if parents who get welfare have less distaste for welfare (and perhaps more distaste for work) and transmit these attitudes to their children. Finally, it could arise if parents who get welfare transmit information about getting welfare to their children in a way that lowers the transaction costs of the children's participation in welfare programmes. Gottschalk (1992), using NLSY data, finds that among individuals eligible for welfare, adults who grew up in families that received welfare were more likely to receive it themselves than adults who grew up in families that did not receive welfare. This suggests that at least some of the intergenerational transmission of welfare use results either from parents and their children sharing norms and values about welfare receipt, or from parents and children sharing information about welfare receipt."

So the transmission of degraded values happens within families and across broader communities.

The question is, of course, how to arrest and reverse the decline. People cannot suddenly be made more honest, but the opportunity to exploit can be minimised, and the rewards for integrity increased, even if only in a relative sense.