Tackling Fraud and Preventing Government Waste

Dan Carden Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell). He made a worthy contribution, and I did not disagree with anything that he put forward, but from listening to him and the Paymaster General, one would not think that Lord Agnew, the anti-fraud Minister, had resigned in the past few days, saying that there was “zippo” detail from Treasury Ministers or officials on how they would deal with covid fraud, and that there was “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” when it came to the Government’s fraud agenda.

A Minister resigning on principle is a rare thing to see in politics these days. I congratulate Lord Agnew on standing up to “smash some crockery”, as he put it, and make a noise about all this. Thousands of companies that were not even trading were able to get access to bounce back loans. According to Lord Agnew, the Government will lose £29 billion a year to fraud.

The schemes that we are talking about had loopholes and openness to fraud built in. I sit on the Public Accounts Committee, and HMRC and others have come before us. Even since becoming aware of the numbers and the scale of the fraud, with £4.3 billion being written off on some schemes, HMRC and Treasury Ministers do not seem to have the appetite to go after it—and that is without even mentioning the billions handed over to Tory friends and donors over PPE contracts or the fast lane that the Government were operating, which was found to be unlawful.

The Chancellor has a very savvy image and the Government’s messaging on keeping the public finances in order is very tight, but the reality is that before the resignation of Lord Agnew, the Government were planning to drop the public register of foreign ownership. They rejected proposals and did not plan to bring them forward in an economic crime Bill. They ignored repeated warnings from the fraud advisory panel on the serious weaknesses in business loan schemes.

This is about more than the figures—the billions and millions that have been handed over to Tory friends and donors and lost through fraud. We have had the Panama papers, the Paradise papers and the Pandora papers. What we have learned from the past few months, whether from the Downing Street parties or from the lenient attitude to public money, is that there is a belief in this place that there is one rule for those at the top—they can party and break the rules, and if they have money it usually means access to more money and that the rules can be bent.

The importance of all this is that it goes to the heart of the kind of country we are. I think the public know that there is a stink. They deserve much better.