THE staggering level of benefit fraud - £5 billion a year, equal to a "robbery" of some £90 from everyone in the country - demands a relentless crackdown, but the new approach the government is planning contains a disturbing drawback.

For while there is nothing wrong in principle with the proposed change of procedure which aims to prevent fraud occurring in the first place, rather than detecting it once it has occurred, it is possible that innocent people may suffer hardship as a result.

This is because the Benefits Agency's current emphasis on getting payments to people in need as quickly as possible will disappear as the new system will require every detail of every application to be checked to make sure no money goes to bogus claimants. The appalling extent of fraud may highlight the fact that scrutiny is currently too lax , but a serious side-effect of the overdue remedying of this will be the inevitable delay in people actually receiving their benefits.

At present, it takes around nine days. Under the new system, it could take weeks.

What do people live on in the meantime? Genuine claimants are, after all, needy people and lots are in urgent need of help.

Public support for this crackdown is not in doubt, but it needs to have safeguards to ensure that no-one should be left destitute while their claims are processed.

Even if has to include the granting of loans that must be repaid from eventual benefits, there must be some emergency fund attached to the new system so that those who need help get it as soon as possible - that, after all, is the basic principle of our welfare system in the first place.

It does not follow that the need to stamp out abuse - vital as it is - should permit abuse of the ideal of ours being a caring society.

Serious damage from going bananas

TO ordinary people, it may seem the world has gone bananas when two of its mightiest trading blocs, the United States and the EU, are locked in a drawn-out and escalating trade row over this very fruit - which neither of them grows.

But ridiculous as it is, this dispute could bring serious damage to jobs and the economy. And that is why it should be sorted out quickly.

The roots lie in EU's preferential treatment for imports of bananas from former colonies whose economies depend heavily on the fruit, but in the ruthless world of business, there is little room for positive discrimination - which, in this case, hurts growers in Central America and the US companies who control them.

Now, the EU is feeling the backlash in the form of stiff tariffs on European imports to the USA. More could follow and orders and jobs in Europe could be lost for the sake of its misplaced assistance and its insistence on it. Time to get back to the negotiating table.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.