We should all be delighted to report the benefit cheats

Fortunately for him, however, Billy Bunter never had to pay taxes to subsidise the lifestyles of benefit cheats.

As for the rest of us, we should welcome the new anonymous phone line set up as a joint venture between the Government and the charity Crimestoppers in order to shop benefit cheats.

Some people will wince at the thought of picking up the phone to report on a fellow citizen.

Liberals and privacy campaigners, I don’t doubt, will already be queuing up to condemn it, attempting to liken it to Soviet communists denouncing each other during Stalin’s purges.

But of course that is a grotesque interpretation of what is being proposed.

The idea of observing a schoolboy code of honour seems a lot less attractive when you realise just how much of our hard-earned cash is going to fund the lifestyles of people like Hazel Cunningham, 47, who, before being caught out when she posted her Barbados wedding photos online, was claiming benefits as a single mum.

Or people like Mohamed Bouzalim, a successful asylum seeker turned British citizen who, until filmed dancing vigorously at his wedding, managed to get £388,000 in benefits while claiming to be paralysed from the waist down.

Fraud in Britain has reached epidemic proportions. Benefit fraud is costing us £1.2billion a year and tax credit fraud a further £400million.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Add in other kinds of fraud such as motorists deliberately staging car crashes to win big payouts and, according to an estimate by the National Fraud Authority earlier this year, we are paying £38.4billion a year – £620 for every man, woman and child.

People only commit fraud if they can be pretty sure of getting away with it.

Sadly, for every Hazel Cunningham and Mohamed Bouzalim, who were jailed for 120 days and six years and 11 months respectively, there are many others who have been committing fraud for years without being caught.

It is easy to blame everything on dozy officials. Indeed, there are plenty of them around, all of whom seem incapable of spotting what is going on beneath their noses.

Debbie Williamson, 45, managed to claim nearly £42,000 in income support, housing benefit and council tax benefits from Barnsley Council over five years before officials realised she was living in her own villa in Spain.

John Pickard, 64, of Norfolk, was able to defraud the taxpayer of benefits when in fact he was working in a JobCentre.

How can a council pay housing benefit to a claimant without noticing that she is living more than 1,000 miles away?

As for John Pickard, the whole reason for Labour’s rebranding of JobCentres as Job Centre Plus was to ensure that the places took a pro-active role in finding people work.

His colleagues surely should have been making regular efforts to contact him in order to help him with his job search.

But it is no use just blaming public officials. If we want to catch cheats we should be prepared to help them by passing on information about people who are cheating, however much we dislike the idea of shopping them.

What is so remarkable about the cases which have come to court is just how brazen the fraudulent benefit claimants have been.

They are quite clearly used to treating their little crime as a joke and counting on their friends seeing likewise.

Take Joe Olroy, jailed in 2009 after claiming £63,000 in benefits while supposedly suffering from arthritis and chronic back and wrist pain as well as the digestive disorder Crohn’s disease.

You might think somebody committing fraud on that scale would keep a low profile. Yet Olroy openly followed an extrovert sport, surfing, and proudly displayed photographs on his Facebook page of himself on sun-kissed beaches.

The only shame is that the new initiative is only for reporting benefit claimants. We need a dedicated phone line for reporting corrupt, cheating and inept public officials too.

Sadly, the public sector has a terrible record in its treatment of whistleblowers. Essex dinner lady Carol Hill was sacked after revealing the truth about a playground assault which her school had tried to hush-up.

She was later awarded a derisory £49.99 in compensation.

Radiologist Sharmila Chowdhury was sacked by Ealing Hospital NHS Trust after blowing the whistle on doctors who were being paid by the NHS for hours they were in fact spending treating private patients.

When an employment tribunal ordered the trust to reinstate her on full pay it made her redundant instead. Too many public officials are themselves Billy Bunters who consider it bad form to inform on colleagues who may be cheating the taxpayer.

MPs, of course, are among the worst offenders.

How many came forward to bring attention to false and exaggerated expense claims by their colleagues?

Cheating MPs, corrupt doctors and lying benefit claimants are all part of the same phenomenon: a wave of fraud which costs us all a fortune.

The sooner we are prepared to come forward and identify those doing wrong, the better. Ringing Crimestoppers isn’t Stalinism; it is standing up for fairness and pulling the rug from beneath arrogant cheats who have been allowed to get away with their criminal lifestyles rather too easily.