Tackling Fraud and Preventing Government Waste

Alex Sobel Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Member’s experience is really useful in this House. I have found, through a case involving one of my constituents, that the perpetrators of fraud are not being pursued and that the victims of fraud are being targeted, particularly by HMRC, for tax liabilities that should rest with the perpetrators. Does he agree that an economic crime Bill is really necessary to protect the victims of fraud, not just from the perpetrators but from tax liabilities?

[Simon Fell]

The hon. Member makes a valid point. Too often, people are subject to fraud and they get almost no response whatsoever. That undermines faith in the system and in policing. In some truly terrible cases, it has a huge emotional and psychological impact on the victims.

As I was saying in answer to the previous intervention, we need to give law enforcement, the public sector and the private sector the tools they need to better share information so that they can drive some of this stuff down and start to turn the ship. Prevention is better than cure and, as great as the taxpayer protection taskforce is, we need to invest early on in spending a fraction of the money on stopping the money walking out the door, rather than trying to recover it after the fact. Data sharing is the key to that.

As the MP for Barrow, the home of the national deterrent, it would be remiss of me not to linger on some of the points that have been made by the Opposition on defence spending, which has been called out as an area of waste. I have read the report that this claim is based on, and I have to say that I am somewhat sceptical about some of its claims. It is of course crucial that the Government improve on the procurement of defence matériel, and on the contracts they sign. Some of the details in that report do raise eyebrows. They relate to accounting adjustments, extensions and overruns, which are not the same as waste, let us be honest. Going into the detail of the report, we see that two of the programmes commissioned by the Opposition account for half the waste being claimed: Nimrod, which accounts for £3.7 billion; and aircraft carriers, which had a £2.7 billion overspend priced in.