Of the two decades in this century, Mark Rutte spent a total of seventeen years in the cabinet. Rutte (VVD) served as prime minister for thirteen years, resigning since July, and as such he headed a ministerial committee that intensified the fight against fraud from 2013.
And not only that: Rutte was also State Secretary for Social Affairs in the first two Balkenende cabinets at the beginning of the century. It was in those years that supervision of social assistance fraud was significantly tightened. Moreover, the magic word of that time, ‘risk management’, does not seem to be very far removed from taking into account all kinds of personal characteristics – one source of the derailed fraud hunt of recent years.
It is therefore no surprise that the parliamentary inquiry committee, which is investigating the government’s runaway fraud policy and stalled services, has invited Rutte no fewer than twice. But anyone who heard him speak on Thursday, about his period as State Secretary, heard a politician who saw himself primarily as a cog, not as the spider in the web.
Van Agt and Lubbers
Rutte’s interrogation, conducted under oath, regularly resulted in a history lesson. The committee of inquiry has already looked at a period of thirty years, but Rutte went even further in his analysis. During the cabinets of Van Agt and Lubbers, the realization had already arisen that a well-functioning social safety net was not possible without checks on abuses, he argued.
For example, managing risks, and not just signals, was, in Rutte’s view, “logical, something that we picked up and moved forward.” Kok’s cabinets in the 1990s had provided the reports for this, but he was the first to put them into practice.
“This is all taking place against the background of Buurmeijer and Van der Zwan,” Rutte insisted at another point, referring to two authoritative reports that pointed to fraud risks in employee insurance and social assistance. Since then, Rutte found, it had been established that the anti-fraud policy “paid too much attention to prevention and not enough to repression.”
When he took office as State Secretary in 2002, the fraud problem was “serious” enough to require action, Rutte thought, although the evidence was often “anecdotal”. Member of Parliament Salima Belhaj (D66), the chairman of the inquiry committee, asked him whether the cabinet had not simply aimed at cost savings. After all, Balkenende I’s coalition agreement stated that an additional 120 million euros could be raised through stricter combating fraud.
‘Maintain support’
Rutte denied that. He put forward two reasons for his stricter policy: the cabinet wanted to maintain support for social assistance by preventing abuse, and to offer perspective to people who had been on social assistance for a long time by not considering anyone as ‘lost’. And, he continued to emphasize, he simply followed the path of his predecessors.
Belhaj was struck by that last comment. “You talk about trends, you were also State Secretary, right?” she asked. Rutte nodded: “Yes, I thought it was logical too, I thought it was sensible.”
In 2003, Rutte sent a letter to municipalities in which he warned of the risk of welfare fraud among Somali residents
Later she started talking about it again: “A state secretary is of course free to say: we want to do things differently.” Rutte again replied approvingly: “Certainly. I also take full responsibility for it. I thought it was a logical development.”
Much changed during Rutte’s two years as State Secretary for Social Affairs. Municipalities became responsible for social assistance, while the national government took over the fight against fraud. Inspections also became stricter, thanks to the growing attention for risk-based working. This meant that the government no longer waited for a signal of fraud, but sometimes also searched based on someone’s risk profile.
Perhaps the most famous example from those years is associated with Rutte. In 2003 he sent a letter to municipalities in which he warned of the risk of welfare fraud among Somali residents. They are said to have traveled to the United Kingdom while still receiving benefits. Several Somali Dutch people reported that they subsequently lost their benefits, for example because they did not immediately cooperate with investigators who showed up on their doorstep.
Racial discrimination
Based on that letter, a court in Haarlem, one of the municipalities that applied the policy, later ruled that Rutte had incited racial discrimination. The committee members wanted to know how he looked back on that. According to Rutte, there had been a “pattern of fraud” and it would have been “unthinkable” not to take action.
Rutte did not see including nationality as problematic at the time: other personal characteristics, such as gender and age, were also common in building risk profiles at that time. Yet he would do things differently now, because of that court ruling.
Rutte’s exact views on profiling based on nationality remained unclear even after this interrogation. After the fall of Rutte III due to the Benefits Scandal, Rutte faced Geert Wilders (PVV) in a debate, who insisted on registering nationality in order to better combat fraud. Rutte did not want to do that, but also said that “his private opinion” amounted to the fact that he “actually agreed with him”.
Under Rutte’s premiership, the fight against fraud took on new, even stricter forms. He will be questioned about this again by the committee of inquiry in the coming weeks. The committee is expected to present its conclusions early next year, after the elections.
It is still difficult to say what tone Rutte takes in that interrogation. When he was questioned as prime minister last year by the parliamentary inquiry committee that investigated gas extraction in Groningen, he kept talking about his “coordinating role”. Mostly, he said then, he stood on the sidelines.
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