Tackling Fraud and Preventing Government Waste

Debate between Peter Grant and Simon Fell

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Peter Grant]

The hon. Gentleman seemed to cast doubt on the reliability of some of the reports that Opposition Members have relied on. I know that he has a keen constituency interest in the MOD’s nuclear activities. The Public Accounts Committee published a report on the management of contracts for defence nuclear infrastructure—the nuclear infrastructure part of the MOD—and found a total overspend of £1.35 billion. Does the hon. Gentleman accept the reliability of that report, which was unanimously agreed and backed by a Committee with a Conservative majority?

[Simon Fell]

The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly valid point. I am not throwing the entire report under the bus, but I think we have to be sceptical of some of the claims that were made in it. When I sit down with the managers in the shipyard in Barrow, it is clear that the programme is moving on and that we cannot look at it as a static object that is being built. The requirements are changing, and what will be delivered is also changing. There is a cost attached to that.

We need to question the constant undercutting of our national deterrent. This is a real concern. To make a political point, which I rarely do in this place, the Leader of the Opposition did not come forward and back the AUKUS deal, which will lead to a considerable number of jobs and skills, and will bottom out the supply chain, not just in my constituency but across the country. That is a tremendous opportunity for us, in partnership with Australia, and we need to support such deals. We need to show across the House that we are backing them. I have digressed, but I hope it was worth it.

I praise the Chancellor and his team for their work to cut down on fraud and waste, but much more can and should be done. I return to my point that we need an economic crime Bill; as the hon. Member for Glasgow Central says, it needs to reform Companies House, make it transparent who owns property in the UK, and introduce an offence of failure to prevent economic crime. That would strike the right balance between shining a light and providing a disincentive of peril to stop bad actors going ahead.

My other point is that there needs to be enhanced data sharing across the public and private sectors and an emphasis on fraud, so that when our constituents are hit by fraud—when they get that phone call or that scam email—they can be relieved to know that there is support for them and that we will go after the perpetrators. Fraud so badly affects so many of the people we represent. We need to step up and deal with it.