Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will make an estimate of the cost to the public purse of administrative errors made by his Department in each year since 2010.

The information requested is not held centrally and to obtain it would incur disproportionate costs.

Defra reports losses from error to the Public Sector Fraud Authority. We are unable to provide a breakdown of losses from administrative errors only – errors we report consist of aggregated losses arising from unintentional events, processing errors and official government errors. Data on fraud (including error) has only been published since 2017 and may be found in the Cross Government fraud landscape reports here: Cross-government fraud landscape annual report 2017, Cross-government fraud landscape annual report 2018 , Cross-government fraud landscape annual report 2019, Executive-Summary-Fraud-Landscape-Bulletin 2019-20, Cross-Government Fraud Landscape Report 2021-2022.