Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise; to some extent I moved onto what sounded more like a Second Reading speech, but it comes out of the comments that the noble Lord made. Not just central government bodies but other public bodies must use the investigatory powers, where they are already there, and bring in the heavy guns only when needed. So I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Maude, says.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I feel rather inadequate after hearing the last few speeches, which were excellent in their expertise and in making me think about the issues, and after the earlier discussion led by the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on whistleblowers. I feel as though I am going to learn a lot from these debates, so I apologise, as I am raising just a few simplistic issues in this group on the chapter that has been labelled “Key concepts”.

As we start Committee, I draw attention to how the Government have been explicit that the powers in the Bill are designed to target error in addition to fraud. Error does indeed account for substantial losses of public money, so I have no problem with the Bill doing both but, too often, it seems that its powers—many of which are too draconian—are applied equally to fraud and error without distinction.

I am broadly in favour of looking at Amendment 4, which seeks to probe the circumstances in which a public authority would recover an amount paid in error, as we need to make a distinction between error and fraud. In general, many of my concerns, although largely confined to the section of the Bill dealing with the DWP and welfare, are on the dangerous conflation between fraud and error. If we do not keep them distinct, there will be unintended consequences from this Bill, and I am very worried about disproportionality in justice and so on. I would be interested to hear how the Minister responds to Amendment 4.

I am also very sympathetic to Amendment 7, which requires that:

“the Minister is satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that fraud or attempted fraud … has occurred”.

That notion of reasonable grounds is very important for this Bill and, sadly, it is too often absent. I think it can lead, for example, to suspicionless surveillance, which we will be talking about later in Committee.

I want to quote the written evidence given to the Public Bill Committee by the cross-party law and human rights organisation Justice. It emphasised that:

“This requirement for reasonable grounds is a well-known legal requirement in the context of state investigations: it is a safeguard to protect individuals from baseless state interference and fishing expeditions”.


It is very important that the requirement for reasonable grounds is taken very seriously throughout our discussions, so I was glad to see Amendment 7.

Although it is now completely after the effect, and I feel like this is a cliché, I will say congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson. I kind of feel like the moment might have passed, but I have to say that her announcement at the start of the debate cheered me up.