The families and friends of elderly people in Bradford currently fighting cost-cutting closure plans for three Council-run care homes will no doubt feel inclined to redouble their efforts after learning that the authority has been giving money away in error.

The £4 million paid last year in benefits to people who were not entitled to them could have been put to good use in so many other areas of Council activity. At a time when the authority says it is desperately strapped for cash (when was it ever not?) and there are threats of a Council-tax increase of more than nine per cent, it is scandalous that so much money should be paid out due to a variety of mistakes.

The Council's director of customer services, Wallace Sampson, says that £2 million of the loss was down to errors by claimants, while £1 million was claimed fraudulently. That leaves £600,000 which was wrongly paid out because of errors by Council staff.

When he says there "will always be that type of error in a system that processes £100 million of benefits a year", Mr Sampson seems to showing alarming complacency. A loss of public money of that magnitude is unacceptable. He and the staff responsible for paying benefits should clearly be doing more to eliminate their own mistakes and increasing safeguards to avoid errors and fraud by claimants.

But it is not all their fault: the Council must speed up the introduction of a new computer system to replace the current one which, at 15 years old, is clearly no longer up to the job. After all, it'll probably cost less than all those errors.