- Minister for the Constitution, , announces over £300 million
in savings from clamping down on fraud and error in the public
sector through the National Fraud Initiative
- Minister for the Constitution, said, “We are determined to
build a fairer society and stopping a small group of
unscrupulous people who break the law will help us achieve
this.”
The government’s National Fraud Initiative (NFI) has saved over £300
million in taxpayers’ money over the last two years – the
equivalent of the annual salary for 7,843 full time teachers – by
detecting and preventing fraud and error in the public sector,
Minister for the Constitution has announced today (Friday 31
August 2018).
The government and the organisations that take part have been
able to detect or prevent fraud and error worth hundreds of
millions, ensuring that money is spent where it should be,
including in areas such as:
- £144.8 million in occupational pension fraud and overpayments
- £32.6 million in fraudulent or wrongly received council tax
single-person discount
- £24.9 million of housing benefit fraud and overpayment
- £25.5 million in social housing waiting-list
misrepresentation
- £18 million of blue badge misuse – 31,223 blue badges were
revoked or withdrawn
- £5.5 million from tenancy fraud
Public bodies spend billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money
delivering essential services. Often delivered through complex
and wide-reaching systems, these can be seen as targets for
fraudsters, undermining our fairer society by robbing those with
a genuine entitlement to these services.
When people defraud public institutions, they are diverting
funding from essential public services, denying citizens the help
and support they are entitled to, including access to social
housing or disabled parking spaces in the towns and cities.
Minister for the Constitution, said:
I am delighted that the National Fraud Initiative has been able
to save UK taxpayers over £300 million since April 2016.
In England alone, more than £144 million will be going to
protect vital public services instead of pension fraud and
error.
We are determined to build a fairer society, and stopping a
small group of unscrupulous people who break the law will help
us achieve this.
The NFI compares sets of
data, such as the payroll of a company with benefit records,
allowing fraudulent claims and payments to be identified. Between
April 2016 and March 2018, the NFI worked with over
1,200 public and private sector organisations, preventing and/or
detecting over £300 million fraud and error nationally, of which
£275.3 million has been in England alone.
