Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much expenditure by her Department that was identified as fraudulent was repaid to her Department in each of the last three years.

The Department publishes Fraud and Error estimates, as shown in the link, which include data on how much money was potentially lost to Fraud in each of the last 3 years. Fraud and Error in the benefit system is rare, but we know that organised criminals and opportunists sought to exploit the extraordinary circumstances of a global pandemic for gain. We took steps to stop this and estimate that we prevented nearly £3bn of additional fraud and error in 2020/21.

fraud-and-error-stats-release-2020-2021-estimates-tables-xls.xlsx (live.com)

These same statistics also indicate how much money was repaid by way of benefit debt. The totals include debts incurred through Fraud, Claimant Error, and where appropriate, Official Error.

The repayment figures are:

20/21: £0.8bn (£0.5bn Housing Benefit and £0.3bn other DWP benefits)

19/20: £1.0bn (£0.6bn Housing Benefit and £0.4bn other DWP benefits)

18/19: £1.1bn (£0.7bn Housing Benefit and £0.4bn other DWP benefits)

The slight fall in 20/21 was due in part to debt recovery being paused for three months from April 2020, so that Debt Management staff could support processing of the substantial rise in new Universal Credit claims, following the outbreak of coronavirus.

Note that other benefits recovered by DWP, including Tax Credits and Advances, are not included in these totals.