Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment she has made of the adequacy of (a) prevention and (b) detection measures used to identify fraudulent claims for Universal Credit by foreign nationals.

This government takes all cases of fraud seriously and has introduced the biggest package of measures in recent history to reduce welfare fraud, error and debt, which includes new legislation, the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill. This contains new powers to modernise our defences and is currently progressing through Parliament.

In 2024-25, we saved an estimated £25bn from our up-front controls and detect activity, with the latter delivering £2bn savings and thereby significantly exceeding our Annually Managed Expenditure savings target.

The Department always checks a person’s identity and immigration status before paying them benefits if they are a foreign national. We verify this information with the Home Office, including through automatic system-to-system checks.