Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what estimate he has made of the amount of money lost to fraud and error by his Department in each of the last three financial years.

The Government is proud of its record in proactively seeking to find and prevent more fraud in the system. As part of wider cross-government counter fraud investment, the government established the Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA). In its first year, the PSFA delivered £311 million in audited counter fraud benefits.

The PSFA produces a Fraud Landscape Report (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cross-government-fraud-landscape-annual-report-2022). This provides data on fraud and error detection, loss and recoveries in central government, outside of the tax and welfare system and includes the Cabinet Office. The 2020/21 Report was published in March 2023. To note it outlines all figures rounded to the nearest £0.1m.

In 2022-23, as published in the department’s Annual Reports and Accounts, the Cabinet Office detected error of £3.48m, of which £3.43m was recovered in year and detected fraud of £60k of which none has been recovered to date. Efforts to recover the detected fraud are continuing at this time. The Cabinet Office does not hold specific data on fraud for previous years.

The Cabinet Office does not recognise a loss arising from error or fraud until efforts to recover the funds have been explored. This means that write-offs of error and fraud usually occur in the years after the original problem arose.

Losses recognised and written off by the Cabinet Office for the last three years are:

2022/23 - £4,800

2021/22 - £327,400

2020/21 - £703,300