Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the level of potential fraud in Coronavirus loan support schemes; and if he will make an assessment of the adequacy of anti-fraud safeguards that were in place.

The latest estimates of potential fraud and error loss in the Government’s Covid-19 loan schemes can be found in the Department’s Annual Report and Accounts 2021-2022, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/beis-annual-report-and-accounts-2021-to-2022.

For the Bounce Back Loan Scheme (BBLS), from the outset lenders were required to make and maintain appropriate anti-money laundering and know-your-customer checks for all new customer applicants. Following launch, the British Business Bank (BBB) implemented a series of additional processes to support lenders’ fraud prevention efforts. This included the duplicate application check and the implementation of fraud risk assessment procedures and the Government Counter Fraud Function’s fraud analytics programme.

Lenders report that they prevented £2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent applications during the life of the scheme.