It's conference season, so what do you expect? The party faithful huddle together in some soulless exhibition centre, waiting for their red meat.

The hacks chomp at the bit, eager to write tomorrow’s headlines.

And out it comes, a classic piece of populist rhetoric: We’re getting tough on benefits cheats. Fiddle the dole and you’ll be banged up for 10 years.

Classic September stuff.

Strangely though, this tabloid bait didn’t come from the Tories in one of their ‘back to basics’ moments. Nor was it a Labour proposal, thrown to the wolves in one of the party’s “will you like us more if we persecute poor people?” episodes.

In fact this particular slab of red meat was served up raw this week by the Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales, Keir Starmer.

He announced new sentencing guidelines which mean benefits cheats could go to prison for 10 years rather than the former maximum sentence of seven.

Those who fiddle less than £20,000 used to be sent automatically to magistrates’ court where the worst they could get was one year in prison. Not any more, Mr Starmer announced on Monday.

Some pretty small fish could be finding themselves in the very hot frying pan of crown court – with proper judges, lawyers in silly wigs and the potential of a long prison sentence.

“It is a myth that ‘getting one over on the system’ is a victimless crime but the truth is we all pay the price,” Mr Starmer thundered on Monday as he announced the new guidelines.

“It is vital we take a tough stance on this type of fraud and I am determined to see a clampdown on those who flout the system.”

Mr Starmer is quite correct to say that it’s a myth that benefit fraud is a victimless crime – in that it’s something which very few people believe.

Anyone with a basic grasp of logic can see that we’re all victims of benefit fraud since the money stolen by claimants cannot be spent on more worthwhile things like schools, hospitals and MPs’ expenses.

The question is not whether social security crime damages society, but rather how much it damages society.

For a little bit of context, the Department of Work and Pensions estimates that benefit fraud costs £1.2bn a year – that’s just 0.7% of the total welfare bill.

Another £700m is lost each year by official error, in other words, by the Government accidentally giving people too much money.

Yet in the reports on Mr Starmer’s crackdown, these two numbers are mysteriously rolled together to give a grand total “lost to fraud” of £1.9bn. A more honest title would be the Combined Benefit Fraud and Official Incompetence Figure, but that doesn’t sound as snappy.

So if benefit fraud is a relatively small problem, why then is Mr Starmer so concerned about banging people up who fiddle their dole? Is it because so many people are getting away with it?

Not really. Mr Starmer’s Crown Prosecution Service took 8,600 benefit fraud and tax credit cases last year, of which nearly 90% led to a conviction.

Perhaps the high success rate is down to the fact that the kind of people who cheat on their housing benefit are also the kind of people who can’t afford the services of the kind of lawyer who can convince you that Christmas is in July.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that benefit fraud is a relatively minor problem which the authorities are already dealing with in a satisfactory fashion.

Why then is Mr Starmer so keen to crack down on this? Why isn’t the Director of Public Prosecutions issuing thundering denouncements of the real thieves leaching the country dry?

Some estimates put the amount of tax evaded in the UK each year at £70bn – that’s 50 times the amount nicked by people on benefits.

Yet tax cases, unlike benefit crimes, are difficult to prosecute. Instead of simply finding out if someone has filled in a housing benefits form dishonestly You’re talking about entering the Byzantine world of UK tax legislation where nothing is at it seems.

And, in contrast to benefit fraudsters, many tax thieves have the means to defend themselves with expensive lawyers.

Then we move on to the other great weeping sore in the nation’s finances – the bank bailouts.

The amount which you and I will end up shelling out to prop up these failed institutions fluctuates with the economic weather. But the worst-case scenario is that the bailouts will cost £1.2 trillion – that’s with a ‘t’. In other words, for every £1 which the benefits cheats steal from us, the bankers could end up costing us £1,000.

Strangely enough, none of the men responsible for the collapse of the British banking system have found their way into the dock in the five years since the meltdown.

Perhaps, when he’s finished throwing the book at benefits cheats, Mr Starmer can enlighten us as to the reason for this curious lack of prosecutions.