Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what additional safeguards the Government's Right to Buy working group has identified to tackle fraud and abuse of that scheme.
This Government takes fraud extremely seriously. The Prevention of Social Housing Fraud Act 2013 increased the deterrent to tenants considering cheating the system, ensuring those who do cheat are detected more easily and punished more severely, and encourages social landlords to take a more proactive approach to tackling tenancy fraud.
We also provided £19 million funding to help councils tackle tenancy fraud as part of over £35 million government funding to tackle fraud across local government.
The findings and recommendations of the Government’s Right to Buy fraud working group will be published in due course.