Casey Webb walked out of court in Colchester on Tuesday, 23 June 2026, smiled, lit a cigarette and hugged a loved one. Minutes earlier a judge had told her she had come very close to going to prison.
Webb, 45, of Terling in Essex, had claimed more than £120,000 in benefits she was not entitled to. Between November 2011 and March 2025 she received £108,937 in Housing Benefit and £11,238 in Universal Credit, according to the Department for Work and Pensions. Investigators said she handed in fake tenancy agreements and rent receipts to back her claim that she rented a separate annex from her parents’ landlord. They found no sign she ever paid rent, and the landlord confirmed the paperwork was forged.
Braintree District Council, which investigated the case jointly with the DWP, gave a slightly different account of how it began. A file was opened after the benefits team raised concerns about her tenancy. Checks with the landlord showed she had supplied a false tenancy agreement at the start of her claim in 2011. She was in fact living in an annex of a property her parents rented, so she owed no rent at all. Interviewed under caution, she denied the allegations.
A change of plea
She was charged with two counts of fraud by false representation under the Fraud Act 2006. Webb first denied both, then changed her pleas to guilty.
Her barrister, Dingle Clark, stressed that she had no previous convictions. “She has never had anything as serious as a parking ticket or road traffic matter before,” he told the court. He conceded she was not entitled to the money but said it was not a case of “cars or holidays or fine clothes”. It was mainly spent on raising her three children, he said, perhaps with “one too many cinema visits or takeaways”. The court heard she also plays a major role in caring for her mother.
Recorder Edward Renvoize called the offending “serious, sustained and pre-meditated”. He accepted that the money had not paid for a lavish lifestyle but gave her children “a slightly better standard of living than they might otherwise have had”. He rated her at low risk of reoffending. “You may not realise just how close you came to going through that door to prison,” he told her.
The sentence was 32 months in custody, suspended for three years, plus 250 hours of unpaid work and 30 rehabilitation activity days. The council’s record notes she must repay the Housing Benefit overpayment.
Andrew Western, the minister for transformation, said in a statement that anyone who thinks they can steal from taxpayers should know DWP investigators “are wise to every trick in the book”.
Sources
- Benefit fraud prosecutions – Braintree District Council
- Benefits cheat all smiles after narrowly avoiding prison over £120k fraud – Essex Live
