CHEATS who claim housing and council tax benefits they are not entitled to may face prosecution in a crackdown on fraud in Burnley.

Officers investigating overpayments and fraud currently recover excess payments but do not take legal action against culprits.

Now Benefits manager Robert Astbury has revealed: "We now have powers to prosecute and we will be looking at that in the next couple of months.''

Council officers were meeting today to start discussions on possibly taking action to prosecute cheats, and a report will be presented to a future meeting of the finance committee.

Councillor Betsy Stringer said: "I don't think we will be averse to prosecuting the right person. We ought to make examples in some cases. But we don't want to prosecute the wrong person when we get the money back anyway.''

Finance chairman Coun Peter Kenyon said the benefits service was to be congratulated on achieving all their targets, as a result of which there would be a benefit to the council balance.

He added: "We will be in something of a bind about which is best, to recover the money or prosecute but we will cross that bridge when we come to it.''

Housing chairman Coun Rafique Malik said it was sometimes the private landlords who lost out.

Tenants made false claims and the money was recovered from the landlords.

"The tenant may have lived there for six to 12 months and he gets away with murder,'' he said.

In the quarter to the end of December, the department recovered £94,957 in overpayments and uncovered £199,464 in fraudulent claims.

Mr Astbury reported that the accumulative total of weekly benefit savings was on target for about £950,000 for the financial year.

That was an increase of £375,000 on last year and equated to additional government subsidy of £89,526.

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