I commented on this specific point yesterday: not as clearly as I would hope to have done, so let's try again.
My expectation is that the mean number of claims won't be very high at all. While I think that it's accepted that GA ran a particularly poor service in 2019 (which one would expect to generate a lot of DR claims) as
@Wolfie says
the fact (is) that many people don't bother claiming Delay Repay
So on balance, I think that means a typical claimant will have claimed once or twice in a year. To put it formally, both the median and the mode are - I think - likely to be one or two. And I would expect the number of one-or-two claimants to be so high that the mean wouldn't be much larger.
So - if my assumption about the shape of the curve is correct, and of course it might not be - people who have claimed tens or hundreds of times will stand out like sore thumbs.
But do I think that GA has written to everyone who has made a lot of claims? No, I don't. I expect that GA have applied a couple of further checks:
- a computer based analysis, based on the likelihood of someone really having incurred the pattern of delays for which they have claimed, and
- a manual sanity check, to see whether an experienced DR handler would identify the claims pattern as innocent or suspect.
Will a system like this eliminate all false positives? Of course it won't, and surely that's why GA's initial letter is a request for an explanation rather than a direct move into formal prosecution or civil action to recover the debt.
And what have we seen from the (self-selected) sample of cases we have seen here? With only two exceptions (
@robbeech's friend and the lady who we found out about when she went to the Evening Standard) no-one has felt able to fight GA. Either (as has been suggested) commuters in the east of England put a very high value on a quiet life and have paid up to make GA go away, or a lot of people accept that they've been caught with their hand in the biscuit tin.
Some pages back, I tentatively suggested that GA were just on the right side of the line dividing legitimate challenge from fishing. As we fail to see a large number of inappropriate cases emerging, I become firmer in that view.
GA's approach isn't perfect (in particular I worry about my analysis that once cases are in the bureaucracy, they will be processed industrially rather than individually: in my experience this is what happens when a complex exercise is launched and no-one bothers to tell the processing staff what their job is so the staff's assumption is that you're meant to uphold the position most favourable to the employer) but neither is it vindictive or irrational: if DR has been intentionally and wrongly claimed, GA, just like any other person (real or corporate) are entitled to take steps to get their money back.