Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (): Fraud is stealing from
honest taxpayers. It is right we bring the collective weight of
government to bear on this growing challenge and I am determined
to take further decisive action.
Across government, 16,000 people, including counter fraud
experts, are currently working to tackle fraud. The world’s first
Government Counter Fraud Function works to identify new and
emerging fraud risks and to support departments to improve
capability to access and use data and analytics to tackle these
risks.
My Department has worked hard to drive out fraud. Officials
prevented more than £1.9bn of fraud during the first year of the
pandemic through strengthening our checks and disrupting the
operations of Serious and Organised Crime Groups.
However, it is clear that we need to go further, both in terms of
eradicating fraud from our current cases and designing fraud out
of the system.
At Spending Review (SR) 2021, DWP secured £103m for fraud and
error activity to continue funding key fraud and error detection
and prevention work originally agreed in Spring Budget 2021. This
first phase of funding enables DWP to secure the completion of
our current transformation programme which will enhance our
ability to prevent and detect fraud and error.
Today, I can announce additional funding of £510m over the next
three years. This second phase of funding, which will deliver
significant savings over the SR period, will enable us to drive
down the level of Fraud in Universal Credit (UC) and collect more
debt, through:
a. A targeted review of UC claims to allow us to systematically
review stock UC cases to uncover fraud and error and remove it
from the system
b. A Debt Enforcement Function to allow us to target hard to
collect debt.
This funding also includes provision for a Fraud Prevention Fund,
which will allow us to explore and test innovative approaches to
designing out fraud and error. This investment represents a
further important step towards our long-term vision, dramatically
reducing the level of fraud and error in the UC stock and more
effective collection of debt while continuing to provide
effective counter fraud operations on a larger scale.
