Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he has made an assessment of the potential impact of the closure of the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce on trends in the level of uncollected tax.

At Budget 2021, the government announced an investment of over £100 million in the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce to combat error and fraud in the COVID-19 financial support schemes administered by HMRC. This investment enabled HMRC to deploy compliance staff to the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce for the lifetime of the taskforce, and to backfill for those staff to prevent an opportunity cost to the collection of tax revenues.

As planned, HMRC began to transition the activity and the staff working on the taskforce into business-as-usual tax compliance activity from March 2023.

Our compliance activity on the COVID-19 support schemes up to end September 2023 has protected over £1.6 billion worth of grants. This is made up of £430 million prevented from being paid out and over £1.2 billion recovered from overpayments.

We remain committed to tackling error and fraud in the COVID-19 support schemes where this is the most cost-effective use of resources.