Beat-a-Cheat is not the village bobby

Benefit fraud costs each of us pounds 60 a year, but Sara Maitland won' t be shopping anyone on the new hotline

I felt a real nausea at the announcement of the "beat-a-cheat" hotline, the crafty scheme that encourages us to phone in our "tip-offs" if we think we know anyone is defrauding the social benefits system. I found myself muttering "bet Lilley never had to live on benefits", "talk about blaming the victim," and "fascist police state".

Overnight though, the whole thing grew more complicated. I realised I would be more than nauseated - I would be furious - if a neighbour told me that they had watched someone burgle my house and had done nothing (not even dial the police anonymously) because they didn't want to interfere. I would be truly nauseated by myself if, for example, I failed to turn in even my own child if I thought she was involved in violent crime. But I still know that I would not use this hotline.

Benefit fraud is theft. It is theft from me and my neighbour, not just theft from "Them" or from "The System". If the government figure of pounds 3.6bn fraudulently claimed each year is even approximately correct, that amounts to over pounds 60 per person. Assuming that the money remained within the public sector (say, education, health or enhanced benefits) rather than leading to tax cuts, it is everyone, not just the taxpayer, who is cheated. I'd report a theft of pounds 60.

So where is the difference? Part of the difference is the strong feeling that you would have to be genuinely poor to bother with cheating. Claiming benefit is a nightmare; it is time-consuming, tedious, intrusive and degrading. To put yourself through the process for the meagre rewards available suggests a real need, whether legal or not. Given how much more profitable a little robbery or drug dealing would be, it also suggests that the fraudsters have some basic respect for others. (This does not address large-scale fraud like the stealing or forging of Girocheques, but it is not these criminals whom the hotline will expose.)

There is also a sense of injustice. The rich have developed a whole complicated and expensive system of tax "avoidance" - so totally different, of course, from tax "evasion". In a system where public schools are tax-exempt because they have charitable status, where luxurious lunches are written off as business expenses, where elaborate trusts are set up to avoid death duties, and where MPs can make the laws that regulate whether they declare their own business interests, it is a little hard to see benefit fraud as especially wicked (even though it is illegal).

That sense of injustice has been deepened by the present government, which acts as though it really believed there is no such thing as society, but only the individual and the family; which rejects the social charter; which gives itself a pay rise much larger than it will allow anyone else (except the backbenchers on whom it is dependent); and happily agrees that a "wilful" deception can be free of the "intention to deceive" (see the Scott report). In fact it ought to be surprising that the benefit fraudsters are not being rewarded for enterprise and acumen!

But, I think, the principal cause of my nausea is the anonymity, and therefore the possibility of spiteful, or simply insane, accusations. If claiming benefit is humiliating, investigations by the DSS are far more so. (Did your daughter really give you that TV as a gift? How could she afford it, isn't she on benefit too?) I could be tempted perhaps to wreak my vengeance on someone who had dumped me, had let their kid bully my kid, or who would not turn their music down after 11 pm if I knew I would not have to face them later. Callers to this beat-a-cheat hotline are promised total confidentiality.

Yesterday, an "expert in intelligence-gathering" suggested that "for some people ... it means they can have a quiet word with the village bobby they thought they had lost long ago". It means no such thing. If you speciously reported your neighbour to the village bobby, obliged him to investigate someone who was also his neighbour and thus exploited his time, reputation and goodwill, he'd be back on your doorstep pretty damn soon to tick you off and even to make irritating inquiries about your drains, your MoT certificate, or your children's nocturnal activities.

This is not wildly overimaginative. The hotline received 1,000 calls in its first four hours. I do not believe that 1,000 people had woken up on Monday morning to discover, suddenly, that they had a fraudulent neighbour or that they had developed a profound social conscience as they slept. Benefit fraud was just as criminal last Friday, and they had the same moral and legal obligation to report it. They would not do so openly.

Clearly there are times when a criminal at large is so dangerous that opening anonymous help-lines may be justified; but does benefit fraud fall into this category? William Penn introduced an interesting piece of legislation in his new city, Philadelphia ("the city of brotherly love"): if you accused a neighbour of an offence of which they were proven innocent, the precise penalty they would have received was meted out to you. If such a clause was attached to the new appeals to shop our neighbours and colleagues, at least some of my anxiety would be allayed. Not all.