, Labour’s Shadow
Attorney General, responding to the Public Accounts
Committee’s new report on Fraud and Corruption against
Government, said:
“While the fraud epidemic has spread across our country in recent
years, the government has stuck in the same pattern of
complacency, indifference and inaction.
“We saw it when wrote off billions in
fraudulent Covid payments, and we are seeing it today, with the
government still unable to say how much the UK is losing each
year to fraud.
“As the party of law and order, Labour would treat this crime
with the seriousness it deserves, and deliver a comprehensive
plan to get a grip of fraud at every level it is affecting our
country, from government departments and major corporations to
small firms and ordinary households.
“Most of all, we would relentlessly track down and punish the
criminals responsible, wherever they are in the world, and do
everything possible to protect our communities, our businesses,
and our public services against their parasitic trade.”
Ends
Notes:
In January 2022, the government’s counter-fraud minister, , resigned in protest at Rishi
Sunak’s decision to write off billions lost to fraudsters during
the Covid pandemic. He said that the Treasury (under Sunak’s
leadership) “appears to have no knowledge of, or little interest
in, the consequences of fraud to our economy or society”, and
that the government as a whole was frozen in its efforts to
tackle the crisis by “a combination of arrogance, indolence and
ignorance.”
In March 2023, a previous PAC report criticised the lack of
coordination, leadership and action to tackle fraud across
various departments, repeating the criticism first made by the
Royal United Services Institute in January 2021, that – under the
current government – fraud is “everyone’s problem but no-one’s
responsibility." https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/194542/pac-uk-risks-being-seen-as-haven-for-fraudsters-where-fraud-is-everyones-problem-but-no-ones-priority/
There is currently no official government estimate of the total
amount being lost to fraud across all sectors of the UK economy.
The most reliable estimate is produced by the independent UK
Fraud Costs Measurement Committee, led by experts from Portsmouth
University. Their latest report, published in June, put the total
cost at £219bn (up 15 per cent from their last £190bn estimate in
2017), including £157.8bn of losses to the private sector,
£50.2bn to the public sector, and £8.3bn to individual
consumers. https://crowe1.co.uk/s/abd437ed45dcd1e8a4ec3685053a0fc3044c2d98
The two biggest categories of private sector fraud losses relate
to procurement (£133.6bn), and payroll (£14.9bn). In a
letter to on 11 May, responding to
publication of the government’s fraud strategy, Emily Thornberry
pointed out that: “In a 22,000-word report presented as ‘a
cross-government strategy that covers fraud where the victims are
members of the public or businesses’, the two biggest offences in
that category – procurement and payroll fraud – are not
mentioned once.” https://twitter.com/EmilyThornberry/status/1656670105391230980
