Bed And Breakfast Fraud In Cardiff

EDM number 1667 in 1992-93, proposed by Rhodri Morgan on 23/03/1993.

That this House applauds the work of Cardiff City Council and the South Wales Police Fraud Squad in bringing to a successful conclusion the prosecution of Michael Jeffreys and Peter Arakas, the proprietors of the ill-named and ill-fated Homeless Concerns of Lower Cathedral Road, Cardiff, convicted and sentenced on 18th March to two years' imprisonment on two successive counts for conspiring to defraud the City Council by making fraudulent housing benefit claims for bed and breakfast accommodation, where in fact no breakfast and on occasion no bed was provided; believes that there is at least one equivalent to Messrs Jeffreys and Arakas in every city in Britain making to far undetected fraudulent housing benefit claims; believes also that the incentives to local authorities to set up housing benefit fraud detection units similar to that operated by the Cardiff City Council are quite inadequate and that the Government should give urgent attention to strengthening those incentives by amending the legislation to allow proper refunds to councils for their housing benefit claims expenditure and associated overheads; and supports the initiative taken by Cardiff City Council to set up a licensing and registration system for landlords of multi-occupancy properties as the only way to prevent inner-city bed and breakfast racketeering of this kind.

This motion has been signed by a total of 47 MPs.