Parents who forced healthy children to use wheelchairs in £100k benefits con
A COUPLE forced their two healthy children to live as disabled wheelchair users for years so they could fleece the benefits system of up to £100,000.
The fraudsters claimed the boy and girl suffered from lifethreatening allergies, epilepsy and asthma, and were unable to live without constant care.
Under the noses of social workers, they deliberately injured the children and made them take medication they did not need while claiming benefits worth more than £20,000 a year and holidays including a trip to Disney World.
But the cruel five-year charade ended when the boy, now aged nine, told teachers there was nothing wrong with him, that his mother made him lie about injuries and had deliberately hurt his knee and dislocated his wrist.
The boy had previously alleged that his mother had shut his finger in a door, stuffed his mouth with potatoes to try to give him breathing difficulties and fed him pineapple in a bid to trigger an allergic reaction. But the claims provoked no official response.
While the mother insisted the
children had to be cared for round the clock, their allergic and asthmatic attacks – and the epileptic attacks said to be suffered by the girl – occurred only at night, at weekends or during school holidays. No one but the parents ever saw them happen.
Details were revealed at the conclusion of a 15-month family court case that led to a judge ordering that the boy and his eight-year-old sister should be taken into care by Barnet Council in North London and that long-term foster parents should be found. Judge Vera Mayer condemned the ‘alarming ineptitude’ of an unnamed Barnet social worker who for six years did nothing to help the children, ignoring the concerns of teachers and health workers.
Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have brought no criminal charges against the parents for harming their children and the family court ruling makes no mention of any prosecution for the benefit fraud. As a result, the parents have not been named under court secrecy rules.
The couple met in 2000 and married in 2001. That year the mother miscarried but registered a baby and claimed child benefit for three years. The father also claimed benefits for two children who were living in Africa. They falsely claimed to be living apart so the mother could claim higher benefits.
From 2012 the boy was made to use a wheelchair in public. The girl was in a wheelchair from 2014. Faking emergencies, the parents made 20 calls to 999 and dragged the children on unnecessary all-hours visits to A&e departments at six different hospitals.
The children were taken to Disney World for two weeks in 2014 but were in wheelchairs most of the time.
‘This cannot have been much of a fun holiday,’ Judge Mayer said. Later that year the children went in their wheelchairs to a summer playscheme.
As soon as the mother left ‘they enthusiastically abandoned their wheelchairs and were keen to participate in the activities with the other children,’ the judge said.
The parents’ fraud continued until April 2015, when the boy told his teacher that although he was wearing a cast on his knee there was nothing wrong with him.
The 40-year- old mother had mental health difficulties, the court was told – a psychiatrist had suggested that she may suffer from a disorder leading her to invent illnesses. The 53-year- old father colluded in ‘untrue and exaggerated’ benefit claims, Judge Mayer said. The judge found that the mother had inflicted psychological and physical harm on the children – who, although they loved their parents, must no longer live with them.