Covid-19: Financial Support Schemes

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, we have given the British Business Bank additional resources to tackle the issue in bounce-back loans. As I said in response to an earlier question, part of the role of the new public sector fraud authority is to conduct post-event assurance, which will specifically look at Covid 19 spending and learn lessons. A few of the authority’s other functions will be across government, such as the provision of data analytics capability, and for those government departments that do not already have it, greater expertise in assessing fraud risk up front, learning lessons and enforcement for particular Government spending.

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, following on from the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, would the Minister not agree that the Covid-related government support has been entirely necessary, and I hope very much that the Government would not be dissuaded from rolling out such schemes if required in the future, and at the pace they did, because of concerns about fraud.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I agree with the noble Earl, and I recognise that, particularly with bounce-back loans and the CJRS, the speed at which the Government needed to act was one of the trade-offs with the checks that could be put in place. We will make sure that lessons are learned, to ensure that we got that balance correct, but one of the reasons we introduced the Bounce Back Loan Scheme and reduced the checks on it, was that original government support programmes that had greater levels of checks were not getting the money to people who needed it, and the scheme prevented the loss of businesses and livelihoods in our economy.