Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps the Government is taking to tackle benefit fraud.

Where fraud is committed, the Department takes its responsibility to investigate it very seriously, and takes appropriate action. There are currently nearly 7,000 staff working in DWP’s Counter Fraud & Compliance Department, and many of these are involved in Investigations and Compliance work.

We are currently undertaking an ambitious recruitment programme which will significantly increase staffing levels by the end of 2021/22, further expanding our counter-fraud capacity.

Where fraud occurs, our Investigators are committed to the use of appropriate penalties and to recovering monies from the perpetrators. To facilitate this, we continue to work with other Government departments and law enforcement agencies nationally and across borders to ensure appropriate intelligence and resources are shared, enabling the totality of any criminality to be identified and investigated.

It is at the same time important that the Department actively prevents fraud from happening, and the Department has optimised its digital capability and organisational design to enable this.

The Chancellor announced £45m at the Spring Budget for the development of this prevent approach. This funding will enable us to expand our Integrated Risk and Intelligence Service (IRIS), develop pre-payment ‘risking’ techniques (Transaction Risking) and maintain our new Enhanced Checking Service, a team which intervenes on high risk claims before they get in to payment.

IRIS has developed a series of rules to help flag up potential risky claims, which allows DWP to undertake additional checks ahead of any payment and thereby prevent people from making fraudulent claims.

Where people seek to use monitor social media platforms to promote ways to bypass normal benefit processes, we work with those platforms to ensure such posts are taken down.