Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will set how the Public Sector Fraud Authority is working with local authorities to prevent fraud at the local level.

The Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA) works closely with local authorities to prevent fraud through the National Fraud Initiative (NFI), which is one of the PSFA’s key data and analytics services.

The NFI specialises in data matching, which involves comparing sets of data electronically, such as the council tax records of an authority, against other records held by the same or another authority, to see to what extent they match.

The NFI is vital in tackling fraud in local authority spending. This includes the removal of fraudsters from social housing properties, ensuring they go to those families in genuine need, and cracking down on blue badge fraud - of which 22,000 fraudulent permits were cancelled in the last year alone. It also has a strong record of delivering outcomes for local authorities. To date, the NFI has detected, prevented and recovered over £3bn in fraud and error.

The NFI is collaborating closely with local authorities to tackle fraud in other areas of local spending. For example, the introduction of the Legislative Reform (Disclosure of Adult Social Care Data) Order 2025, will once again ensure that fraud in adult social care spending can be identified and investigated by local authorities.