Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the potential risk of fraud associated with the Youth Guarantee.

The Department for Work and Pensions takes fraud very seriously and we are taking a robust and rigorous approach to protect public money including across the entire Youth Guarantee. This includes on the Youth Jobs Grant where the Department conducts a comprehensive due diligence process to ensure that employers are legitimate and verifies employment through HMRC's RTI (Real Time Information) feed to ensure that a young person has been employed and paid for the required periods.

Similar rigorous checks apply for the Jobs Guarantee, and the vast majority of payments will be made in arrears, against evidence of actual spend, reducing the risk of fraud occurring. We will closely monitor our fraud risk for the entirety of both programmes. For both schemes, wherever we believe that an employer, or delivery partner, has acted in a way that is contrary to the scheme’s aims or is misusing public money, we will take steps to address this, including recovery of payments we believe may have been obtained through fraud or employers acting in bad faith.