Andrew Western MP: speeches

Speeches

• 6 Mar 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I welcome the broad support from the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for South West Devon, for the overall intent of the Bill. She asked a number of questions about the usage of the 1992 Act. It sets out the information-gathering options available to the Department where fraud is suspected. When we want to compel information for whatever reason—it may be a referral, or data or evidence may be suggesting that there has been fraudulent activity—there is the ability to request, as part of an ongoing investigation, any information that may be useful. There are two principal reasons why we need changes. The first is modernisation, as I said in my opening comments. I am sure all Members can see how being able to request information via digital means will add speed and simplicity to the process. That is a basic modernisation. There is a more significant change in the shift towards an exclusion list rather than an inclusion list of organisations, which broadens the range of organisations that we can request information from. The hon. Lady asked whether institutions such as schools or utilities companies may be in scope. In essence, anybody is in scope for this power—for a request for information—unless they are withholding exempted information. There is a range of things that would be specifically exempt. Legally privileged material is an obvious example, as is information that could lead to self-incrimination for recipients and their spouses or civil partners. It is worth saying for clarity that organisations that provide no-cost advice and advocacy services will not be compelled to share personal data about their service users. That will maintain trust, which is an important principle of their work, and allow individuals to seek help without fear of their information being disclosed. There is also an exemption from providing excluded or special procedure material as defined under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. That includes personal records, including records relating to physical or mental health, human tissue and confidential journalistic materials. Those are the types of information that would be exempt. With the exception of the organisations providing advice and support, all organisations are essentially in scope if they hold other relevant information to help with an ongoing inquiry. The person in receipt of the notice is the person or organisation we are compelling the information from, rather than the person about whom it is compelled. So the person receiving the notice is the one we are asking for detail from.

• 6 Mar 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am grateful beyond belief to the hon. Gentleman, because he highlights why this provision is so important. More than 50% of the fraud and error that we see in pension credit comes from two principle sources, which the eligibility verification measure specifically seeks to address. One is the issue of capital fraud, where there is a relatively easy indicator—for example, in respect of universal credit, was the individual in receipt of capital in their account of more than £16,000? The provision also has the benefit of helping us to establish when somebody has been out of the country for longer than their benefit entitles them to be. For instance, it would provide a flag on an account when somebody’s bank account suggested they had been making purchases abroad and so on. We would not receive the transactional data or know specifically where the purchases were made—or, indeed, whether it was cheesecake or some other item—but it would give us specifically the date that somebody left the country, and thereby show whether they were in breach of the length of time they are allowed to be away. This is not, then, just a tool to deal with capital fraud, although that is the most straightforward example to articulate and, therefore, the one I use most readily; it will also be useful to identify people who have been abroad for longer than their eligibility suggests they should be allowed to be while continuing to receive benefits. It is important to recognise—I touched on this when I set out the human safeguard that is in place—that a flag would not necessarily mean that someone has done anything wrong, or that they are no longer entitled to benefits. On capital fraud, it might be because someone has received, perfectly legitimately, a Government compensation payment, such as for infected blood, which would be out of scope. That is why a human would check that. The person would therefore not lose benefits or receive an overpayment. On someone being out of the country for longer than they are entitled to be—if they have been taken ill, or if there has been an environmental catastrophe, humanitarian disaster or some such, that means they are unable to leave the country they are in—again, that would be investigated. The person would not face action as a result. I hope I have set out exactly how the eligibility verification measure is useful not only for capital fraud, but for allowing us to notice and receive indications about when someone has been out of the country for longer than they are entitled to be while still receiving benefits. As I said, on amendment 30, the hon. Member for South West Devon touched on many of the comments that I would have made about why pension credit is included. The change would not explicitly exclude pension credit, as with the state pension, because the legislation still enables Ministers to lay regulations for its inclusion at a future date. My intention, however, is to use the power for pension credit payments from the outset, because unfortunately the rising trend in overpayments of pension credits demonstrates that pension-age benefits are not immune from fraud and error. In 2023-24, £520 million in pension credit was overpaid, and pension credit has one of the highest rates of capital fraud and error, with £198 million lost in 2023-24 alone. The rate of fraud in pension credit increased by more than 50% in 2023-24, as against the previous year, so we have a clear problem. The under-declaration of financial assets and claimants staying abroad for a longer period than is allowed remain the two main causes of pension credit overpayments in ’23-24. As I said previously, they accounted for more than 50% of all overpayments. Equally, it is important to ensure that people receive the right payments. The eligibility verification measure is not about removing pension credit payments from anyone; it is about confirming that claimants meet the conditions of entitlement. The measure also enables the Department to help to prevent individuals from unknowingly accruing overpayments, pension credits or any other benefit in scope, which could lead to financial stress if later they need to repay money they were not entitled to. Overall, the measure and the inclusion of pension credit will help the DWP to ensure that public funds are used responsibly while maintaining confidence in the benefit system. On that basis, I will resist amendment 30.

• 27 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 1, in clause 6, page 4, line 28, in column 1, after “Office” insert “, so far as relating to the Public Sector Fraud Authority”. This amendment limits the designation of the Cabinet Office as a relevant public authority for the purposes of Part 3 of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 so that it is designated only so far as relating to the Public Sector Fraud Authority.

• 27 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am sure that colleagues will agree that the amendment is straightforward. It will limit the designation of the Cabinet Office as a relevant public authority for the purposes of part 3 of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, so that it is designated only in so far as it relates to the Public Sector Fraud Authority. Clause 6 sets out the purposes of the amendment to the 2016 Act and is straightforward in its terms. It will make a small tweak before the entry for the Common Services Agency for the Scottish Health Service to insert “Cabinet Office” and the relevant provision.

• 27 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I thank the shadow Minister for his question. I would not want to second-guess the specifics of what may be required in the sharing of information on a case-by-case basis; clearly that sort of speculation may restrict us unnecessarily. What I would say, however, is that the independent oversight powers laid out for the execution of the PSFA’s work would be in place to ensure that if anybody, up to and including the Minister, were considered to have overstretched their powers, it would be able to comment and investigate as necessary. Question put and agreed to. Clause 5 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill. Clause 6 Amendment of the Investigatory Powers Act 2016

• 27 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Fourth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Lewell-Buck. Clause 5 is an explanation of the principles related to information sharing that pertain to the Public Sector Fraud Authority and the Cabinet Office. It sets out how the disclosure of information would work for the purpose of facilitating the Minister’s exercise of the core functions. It refers to how the Minister may use information disclosed under subsection (1); the specific purposes for which it may be disclosed; and what the Minister may not use information for. Information must not be used for any purpose other than the purpose for which it was disclosed and may not be disclosed to any other person without the consent of the Minister. I commend the clause to the Committee.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Child Maintenance Service · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member will have heard me say that we are looking at all available levers across those four areas. We rule nothing in and nothing out, but I understand his point. We are aware of the challenges that the CMS faces and recognise that there is scope for improvement. The ministerial team as a whole is committed to making those improvements. On what we are doing about those issues, I will turn to the recent direct pay consultation, which the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire referred to, and offer some background to the proposed reforms. My party has long called for reforms to the direct pay service, stating that it does not work for all parents. For that reason, this Government extended the direct pay consultation launched by the previous Government, with the express purpose of gathering as much feedback from stakeholders as possible. We are looking closely at the feedback received and will publish the Government response in due course. I appreciate that the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire would ask for a more specific timeline, but I hope he will appreciate that in what is an incredibly delicate area—dealing with vulnerable children, vulnerable families and strained relationships—we want to take our time and ensure that we get the changes right.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Child Maintenance Service · Hansard source

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  Let me begin by congratulating the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) on securing this debate, which is incredibly important to him and his constituents. I hope that I will assure him in my contribution that it is important to the Government too. Far too many children are growing up in poverty. A key priority for this Labour Government is to reduce that number as soon as possible. That is why child maintenance is incredibly important. It is estimated that child maintenance payments keep around 160,000 children out of poverty each year. That has involved the CMS arranging around £1.4 billion in child maintenance payments in the 12 months to September 2024. Tackling child poverty is an urgent priority for the Government, which is why we have already announced our commitment to triple investment in breakfast clubs to over £30 million, to roll out free breakfast clubs at all primary schools, to create 3,000 additional nurseries and to increase the national living wage to £12.21 an hour from April to boost the pay of 3 million workers, many of them parents. The ministerial child poverty taskforce, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, is working to publish a child poverty strategy later this year, which will deliver lasting change. In developing the strategy, the taskforce is exploring all available levers for reducing child poverty across four key themes: increasing incomes, reducing essential costs, increasing financial resilience and better local support, especially in the early years.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Child Maintenance Service · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He has a long history of working not just on CMS issues but on child poverty more broadly, and his expertise is of great value to the House. I will say a little more about domestic abuse and financial abuse later in my contribution, but I reassure him that the focus we had in the consultation on the proposed abolition of direct pay was intended as a specific response to that issue. I have seen appalling examples in cases that have crossed my desk as a Minister of people who can message their former partner in the form of a comment on a bank transaction. They will transfer a penny—they have a direct payment in place—along with an abusive term or some form of triggering harassment of a former victim of theirs. That shows that while a parent may have moved away from that unsafe and dangerous environment, they are never fully away when direct pay is engaged.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Child Maintenance Service · Hansard source

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  I should have known that my hon. Friend would be in his place. He is keen on an Adjournment debate—we all know that. This is where I out myself as an imposter, because I am not the Minister with direct responsibility for the CMS, but I am very happy to put him in touch with the Department’s Minister in the House of Lords, who I am sure would be happy to have a conversation with him. Turning back to the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire and the points he made about calculation reforms, a broad review of the child maintenance calculation is being conducted. It is examining the scope for change and improvements, while maintaining the simplicity of the calculation. It can be very frustrating for paying parents who are waiting to have income reassessed, and for receiving parents when they are aware that a paying parent has received a substantial income increase. The calculation at present generally looks at income from the previous tax year and it is only when somebody’s income has changed with a divergence of more than 25% in either direction that it triggers an in-year evaluation. We are looking at ways we can change that, while recognising that we need to encourage payment compliance and more sustainable arrangements in all that we do. The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that the £20 application fee he referred to was removed in 2024, getting rid of a financial barrier to parents wishing to access the CMS. Proposals to include more types of taxable income held by HMRC within the standard maintenance calculation are being considered, alongside the review of the child maintenance calculation. Turning to enforcement—my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs Russell) also raised this issue—I can understand that for some receiving parents there are frustrations with how quickly the CMS secures payment from non-compliant paying parents. We have seen significant improvements to speed up action when payments first break down and to target enforcement action more effectively. We are changing the process at present to make direct deductions something we can do more swiftly where issues emerge. We have a range of strong enforcement powers that can be used against those who consistently refuse to meet their obligations to provide financial support to their children, and in the past year to September 2024 the CMS has collected £16.8 million from paying parents with civil enforcement actions in process. Collections through civil enforcement have followed a general upwards trajectory in recent years. For comparison, the equivalent figure in 2021 was £10.3 million. I would like to finish by talking about the improvements to customer experience and digital services that the Department has been introducing. Since 2020, as part of the DWP service modernisation programme, the Department has transformed the ways in which customers can interact with the CMS, providing customers with the choice to make contact with digital routes and reducing the time taken to action change of circumstances. We continue to develop our digital offer, evaluating through user research and customer feedback, but we are committed to retaining a non-digital telephony service to ensure that no customer is excluded. As I said earlier, I recognise that the hon. Gentleman is rightly impatient, as are other Members, to see change and to see the details of our reform package following the conclusion of the recent consultation, but getting the right solution will take a little time. It is right that the changes that we make are properly considered and robust so that the CMS can continue to play not just an important role but an ever-more effective and increasingly important role in supporting children and tackling child poverty. Question put and agreed to .

• 26 Feb 2025 · Child Maintenance Service · Hansard source

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  I absolutely understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making. With specific reference to named caseworkers, initially for victims of domestic abuse, I will have something further to say that I think he and all hon. Members will welcome, but I take his more general point. If I may make some progress, turning to direct pay and domestic violence, financial abuse and so on, the proposals also sought views on collection fees and explored how victims and survivors of domestic abuse can be better supported. That is so important given the issues raised by the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire and the case he cited of his constituent. Overall, work is ongoing to establish the steps needed to really improve the service, taking account of the views of parents. Those will be set out in the response to the consultation. I appreciate that he would like that to be as soon as possible; I will take that away. To drill down on the issue of domestic abuse, the scale of violence against women and girls in our country is intolerable, and the Government will treat it as the national emergency that it is. Our manifesto included the mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade—we were right to do so—and I and all Ministers are focused on making that a reality. If I may, I will therefore say a little about the support that should be available. If the hon. Member wants to share specific details of the case that he referenced with me, I will take that away. The support that should be available is extensive and runs contrary to what clearly happened in the case that he outlined. We have overseen progress in providing support, with the continued roll-out of an operational team to deliver targeted support to parents subjected to the most challenging and complex domestic abuse. The team provide a tailored and discrete service to customers, which is incredibly important, giving regular progress updates. They can and do assign a named caseworker to prevent customers having to re-tell their story at each interaction. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) was saying, that can be incredibly stressful for parents using the service. Caseworkers are trained to identify and refer appropriate cases within the collect and pay service to that team. More generally, the CMS consulted on a diverse range of stakeholders to review its domestic abuse training for all frontline CMS staff to ensure that caseworkers understand, recognise and respond appropriately to customers who are experiencing domestic abuse or who are survivors of domestic abuse.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Child Maintenance Service · Hansard source

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  I can see the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) trying to come in. I will beat him to it and give way.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you. I have a final question, which is about an assertion that you made towards the beginning of your contribution. As I understood it, you said that the eligibility verification measure was circular because if a flag was placed on an account, we could then just request the bank account statements. To clarify, do you accept that we are only able to utilise our information-gathering powers where there is a suspicion of fraud and, therefore, that it is not a mass power? It would only be where we had information that suggested that we needed to follow up on that because of a specific concern that had come to light. Jasleen Chaggar: I accept that the Government are purporting that this is a sufficient safeguard, but I propose that it is not, because of that circularity.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I have one further question then, which is about the role that you perceive for banks and financial institutions in tackling fraud in the social security system. Could you ever countenance a scenario in which that would be of value and worth while? Jasleen Chaggar: Absolutely. We believe as much as anyone that fraud and error need to be tackled in this country. Our position is that the best way to do that is through intelligence-led policing, where there is suspicion of fraud and not just of error, that is well resourced. In relation to error, as I have said, we think that making the benefits system easier to navigate in the first place, and the DWP getting its own house in order to avoid its own errors, are far better, more proportionate and privacy-preserving solutions than the ones proposed in the Bill.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Can I just clarify, though? We have heard testimony from HMRC today that it receives bulk data on every interest-bearing account in the country, not only where there is suspicion. How do you perceive the power in the Bill, which you have described as unprecedented, to be distinct from those powers? Jasleen Chaggar: There is another difference between HMRC recovering money and the DWP recovering money. When you think about the types of individuals these powers will be recovering money from, they are among some of the most vulnerable in our society. There are people living on the breadline, disabled people, elderly people and carers, who will all be dragged into this surveillance. The risk of errors caused by the automated system that is proposed will, therefore, have a dispro- portionate effect on those groups of people. There is a difference, if that is the case, between the powers being used by HMRC and the DWP.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Your last point about stop and search and decisions being made purely based on protected characteristics speaks to what you said earlier about the perceived impact on disabled people. Are you suggesting that the eligibility-verification measure would directly discriminate against disabled people, or is it merely that disabled people make up a larger number of the cohort? Ellen Lefley: They make up a larger number of the cohort, so we would analyse a prima facie indirect discrimination potential risk there, which would then need to be justified as being necessary and proportionate. The proportionality assessment of course is for Parliament, but we consider that a significant amount of scrutiny is required not only because of the privacy impacts, but because there is that clear indirect discrimination aspect. I am not alleging direct—

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  All the powers pertaining to the DWP—the five principal areas in the DWP’s proposals—so information gathering, debt recovery, penalties reform, powers of search and seizure, and EVM. Joshua Reddaway: Okay. To step back, we have been looking at a general trend of rising levels of benefit fraud for a few years. Actually, it has come down a little since covid, because there was a blip then, but if we take covid out, the levels were rising anyway. Currently, it is more than £10 billion, if you include the bit of benefits that HMRC pays—obviously, that is coming down with universal credit. I do not think that what is in the Bill will solve that; what is in the Bill will support tackling it. This is about adding a few tools to the DWP toolkit. The key thing is that prevention is better than recovery. DWP is really good—one of the best in the world, as far as we can see—at knowing how much fraud is occurring; I am afraid it is not very good at saying why it occurs. In particular, DWP is not great at saying what it is about the way in which it administers benefits that enables fraud to occur or error to happen. For some time, we have been advocating for DWP to get a much more granular view of its control environment. I think that, given how I interpret the capital rules here—it is an EVM exercise—it is doing that. This is one of the places where DWP said, “Actually, our control over capital at the moment is, frankly, to ask people how much capital they have,” which left it fairly exposed to the risk that people did not tell them the truth. Several times, the Public Accounts Committee asked DWP if it had the powers it needed, and several times has said, “The one area we need to explore is capital.” The challenge for this Committee is to work out whether that proposal is reasonable and includes enough oversight, given the privacy issues. In terms of there being a real problem behind it, however, I can confirm that there is a control-level issue that DWP is trying to resolve. The other issues that the Bill tries to deal with on enforcement are similar. If we look at the impact assessment, the EVM was £500 million a year when fully rolled out and operational—that is a significant dent, but only a dent, in the £10 billion. I want to be clear: yes, I do think that there will be an impact. Is it sufficient? No. Is it meant to be sufficient? I doubt it. I think that DWP knows that, and that it has a very hard slog ahead of it. I will try to hold it to account—I am afraid it is your Department—on that hard slog of understanding where fraud is coming in and where error is happening, and put in controls step by step to improve it. There are no shortcuts in that. Richard Las: My reflection is that fraud is inherently difficult to identify and potentially more difficult to investigate at times. How do you identify fraud? If I think about HMRC, you need information and to be able to triangulate information to understand the risks in front of you so that you can identify the highest risk. Sometimes you will not know what that risk is, or whether it is fraud or error, but it will point you in a direction. I feel that as an agency, if you have fraud, you need a good bedrock of information to understand the environment and to identify risk. A lot of that information can be information you gather from your customer—in our case, a taxpayer—or third party information. It is information that we can use to triangulate and verify. We do that regularly with lots of different information sets. Once you come to investigate and deal with fraud, it is obvious to everybody, but people do not always co-operate, so you need powers that allow you to compel people to co-operate or powers that allow you to secure information and evidence in a way that you otherwise would not be able to do, because people would not do that. On the general framework, we are always looking to improve our basis for powers and our ability to use them. Certainly I feel that much of what is included in the Bill is powers that HMRC already has in many respects. We use those powers, we would argue, in a proportionate and necessary way, and there are controls and safeguards about how we do that. It is a difficult business with fraud. If you do not have some of those tools at your disposal, you are working with one arm behind your back.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Following on from one of my colleagues’ earlier questions, can I come back to the Bill’s ability to clamp down on and look at error? Would it be your view that in addition to identifying instances of capital fraud or of people living abroad or being abroad for longer than they should be, there is also the potential for the eligibility verification measure to capture overpayments? It would therefore ultimately have the benefit of reducing the level of debt that somebody might find themselves in were that to go undetected for a longer period of time. Joshua Reddaway: I think that is a fair comment, given that I said it does not really deal with error. I was really referring to the enforcement powers under PSFA. I think PSFA do other stuff that is in the error space, but the enforcement stuff is not. The enforcement stuff for DWP also will not really be in the error space. However, you are quite right that any data matching is an opportunity to detect error, and DWP are used to that. For example, when they are doing targeted case reviews, that will be detecting error as well as fraud. What we know from the statistics is that DWP believes there is more fraud than error in that space, but I entirely accept the premise of your question, and I should have made that part clear.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q What I am saying is that there would not be suspicion, because we would have absolutely no way of knowing. Is it your position that we should not attempt to address that issue, because there can never be a suspicion of what somebody has in their bank account without looking? Jasleen Chaggar: I think that there are ways to address this. We are a civil liberties organisation, and our job is to be a watchdog and to ensure that privacy rights are preserved. I do not have a solution for how the police should find out whether someone is suspicious, but we should not sacrifice the privacy rights of us all just to find out whether we should be suspicious of someone when no suspicion exists. As I said, it is a disproportionate power.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q That was since the pandemic. The overall figure is £35 billion, and last year it was £9.7 billion. Ellen Lefley: I am grateful. It is a difficult one. For example, we could have almost zero crime in this country if everyone’s house had 24/7 surveillance installed. There will always be a way of decreasing privacy to increase state surveillance and therefore reduce unwanted behaviour, but the balance needs to be struck. Justice’s view is that when the state is getting new powers to investigate people’s private affairs, the balance is struck by having that reasonable suspicion threshold, which requires reasonable grounds for believing that a crime has been committed. That ensures that the powers given to the state in any primary legislation are not open to abuse or arbitrariness. Of course, the laws in the statute book must be written narrowly so that they protect rights on the face of it, rather than being written broadly and relying on the self-restraint of future Administrations to exercise them proportionately.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q I have a very general question to open with. You will be more aware than I am of the changing nature of fraud and the increasing sophistication that we see from perpetrators. Do you agree, in general, that the DWP’s powers would need to be modernised in order to cope with that shift? Also, what are your views on the general provisions within the Bill, where it pertains to the DWP, to detect and prevent fraud? John Smart: At the risk of echoing what has been said before, I think it is critical that we modernise the approach to fraud, and the Bill is a good step towards that modernisation. The critical part of a lot of investigations now—and of identifying, preventing and detecting fraud—is the use of data. Getting that data and information quickly and effectively is critical. I think the Bill will go a long way towards speeding up and broadening the available information that can be used to prevent, detect and prosecute fraud. That is a really valuable thing that we should be pushing for, because relying on pieces of paper to seek information from organisations is crazy in this day and age, when you can do it electronically and get an answer relatively quickly. If you are turning up with a piece of paper, it can take weeks or months.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q What is your view on its proportionality as a direct response to what has been a £35 billion challenge for the Department since covid? Given the increase in prevalence of both fraud and error—particularly fraud, which is estimate to have cost upwards of £7 billion—do you think that is a material consideration when assessing proportionality? Ellen Lefley: When I speak about proportionality, the degree of loss is relevant, but there is no question but that the economic wellbeing of the country is a legitimate aim. On whether measures are proportionate to achieving that aim, we must consider not only whether there is any reasonable suspicion, but the degree of external oversight. The Bill includes that consideration, and there are various ways in which some of the powers are subject to independent review. We have some suggestions as to how those independent review mechanisms can be a stronger safeguard and therefore make the measures more proportionate. For example, the independent review mechanisms seem to have the ability to access information but no power to demand it. That raises a query as to transparency and the full ability of the independent reviewer in different circumstances to meet their objectives. Also, when an independent reviewer lays their report before Parliament with recommendations and those recommendations are not going to be adopted, it might be helpful for there to be an obligation on the Department to provide reasons why not. That would be a more transparent way of ensuring that the oversight measure is as effective as intended.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Would that be the case in any preventive measure that we took in pursuit of tackling benefit fraud that did not come about as a direct result of suspicion of fraud? With anything that we try to do with the entire cohort, would we be open to that accusation? Ellen Lefley: Raising the risk of indirect discrimination when you have cohorts of the population that are disproportionately reflected in any subcommunity of the population that will be exposed to any power is a relevant consideration, so yes in that respect. When it comes to the eligibility-verification measures, the proportionality analysis is, in our view, strained because there is not that threshold of reasonable suspicion. The mere fact that benefits recipients are in receipt of public funds makes them subject to this power. Of course, that could go further; all the public servants and MPs in this room are in receipt of public funds. If that is the threshold that we as a society are happy with, some real scrutiny of its proportionality is required, because it is a power that can require private financial information.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you. I am hopeful that, through the informal conversations and the formal consultation that we are required to have on the code of practice, we will be able to set this up in such a way that everything interplays in an acceptable way. You briefly mentioned direct deduction orders. I know you have some concerns about the debt recovery power, and this is an opportunity for you to set them out. Is there anything you want to elaborate on beyond what you have just said about that element of the powers we are proposing? Eric Leenders: There are two or three key areas for us. First is the affordability assessment. I think you have heard previously that the use of the standard financial statement would be helpful in outlining essential monthly expenditure. I will come back to that point. Secondly, I believe the caps differ between the PSFA and the DWP. We think that they should be aligned, with the PFSA’s 40/20 split also applied to the DWP. It is also quite important that there is some form of de minimis, so that individuals do not find themselves without any funds whatsoever. Our thinking is something aligned to the £1,000 threshold that there is in Scotland. HMRC has a threshold of about £5,000, or £2,000 for partners paying child maintenance. We think there should be a floor, but more essential is consideration of one month’s essential expenditure. That would allow the individual to readjust their expenditure in the period when they need to consider making the payments under the deduction order, or indeed the period in which the balances are withdrawn.

• 25 Feb 2025 · Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Could I come back on the last point you made, Rick, and the suggestion that this treats disabled people as a distinct part of the population under different rules and measures. The Bill targets the three benefits that have the highest levels of fraud and error at present: universal credit, pension credit and employment and support allowance. I would accept that there is a higher prevalence of people who are disabled in those cohorts, but this is not restricted exclusively to disabled people. Can you elaborate a little on how you feel that disabled people, in isolation, would be treated as a separate entity? Rick Burgess: Because we are over-represented in those classes. If you choose to target it at those cohorts, you are accepting an additional level of targeting towards disabled people, which is discriminatory.