THOUGH housing benefit fraud is one of the biggest swindles - £1.4million-worth of false claims were uncovered in Blackburn and Darwen alone last year - cheated taxpayers may be aghast to discover they are being doubly robbed...because claimants are paid too much.

For it is disclosed that more than £500,000 was overpaid to the towns' tenants and landlords last year and that councils chiefs are bidding to recover it.

And the fact that they have already written off more than £83,000 in "unrecoverable" overpaid housing benefit suggests that the council's debt collectors will be on a wild goose chase much of the time.

But should it ever have started?

This sum of £500,000 in wrongly given-away public money is, after all, not minuscule.

It is equivalent to every man, woman and child in the borough being robbed of £3.50. It may be that as the council administers this benefit for the Department of Social Security, its complexities, entailing the checking of dozens of qualifying factors, are such that inevitable errors will assist both fraud and overpayment.

But should it be on such a scale?

As well as discussing how to get back these wrongly-allocated payments, councillors ought tonight to be demanding to know what went wrong.

They should call for a thorough review of the system, particularly when it is revealed the level of overpayment to their own council tenants has gone up in the past year rather than down.

It is bad enough that the taxpayers are being robbed on a grand scale by cheating claimants, but even more maddening when it seems they are being swindled of hundreds of thousands of pounds more by official bungling.

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