Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to tackle fraudulent activity by people seeking to exploit the benefits system.

The Department takes fraud against the benefits system very seriously and has taken huge steps to reduce and minimise fraud and error during the last 18 months, at a time when the Department processed an additional 3 million new Universal Credit claims as part of our response to the pandemic.

This has seen us:

• Expand our Integrated Risk and Intelligence Service, which coordinates the detection of, and response to, fraud risk from organised crime groups seeking to exploit the benefit system.

• Invest £44m into the Integrated Risk and Intelligence Service to expand the pre-payment ‘risking’ techniques and maintain the new Enhanced Checking Service for high risk claims.

• Revisit over 900,000 high risk claims paid during the early period of Covid-19, generating approximately £400m in savings.

• We secured an additional £613m, which will enable a targeted review of Universal Credit claims and lead to even greater investment in advanced analytics and our Serious and Organised Crime team.